History Fanaticos - Prepare for the future, learn from the past

By the early 1990s, Rwanda, a small country with an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, had one of the highest population densities in Africa. About 85 percent of its population is Hutu; the rest is Tutsi, along with a small number of Twa, a Pygmy group who were the original inhabitants of Rwanda. Part of German East Africa from 1894 to 1918, Rwanda came under the League of Nations mandate of Belgium after WWI, along with neighboring Burundi. Rwanda’s colonial period, during which the ruling Belgians favored the minority Tutsis over the Hutus, exacerbated the tendency of the few to oppress the many, creating a legacy of tension that exploded into violence even before Rwanda gained its independence. A Hutu revolution in 1959 forced as many as 300,000 Tutsis to flee the country, making them an even smaller minority. By early 1961, victorious Hutus had forced Rwanda’s Tutsi monarch into exile and declared the country a republic. After a U.N. referendum that same year, Belgium officia...

        Ukraine, a country divided between East and West, had numerous difficult historical episodes. It is located in Eastern Europe, bordered to the north and east by Russia and Belarus, to the west by Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova, and to the south by the Black Sea and Sea of Azov. The modern Ukraine is divided in two parts by the Dnieper (Dnipro) River, which flows from north to south and into the Black Sea. This division is very important because Dnipro River constituted a border between Russian and Polish-Lithuanian controlled areas of Ukraine, and it still encounters references to Left Bank (eastern) and Right Bank (western) Ukraine. Ukrainian cossacks             Ukraine’s rich history dates far into the pre-historical period, but in terms of the first kind of state which arose on the Ukrainian territory it is important to mention Kievan Rus, from the 9 th century AD. Later on, from 1240 to 1660s, mo...

The story of the Congo is one of the most fascinating stories about European greed and lust for the vast African resources in the era of the expanding European colonial empires. It was an inspiration for the famous novel "Heart of Darkness", written by Joseph Conrad, which was later on an inspiration for the 1979 movie hit "Apocalypse Now", starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen (just in case you did not know). Since the 16 th century, the Congo River estuary had been a slave port, and most of the country was colonized by the late 1800s.  However, the rule of Belgian King Leopold II would be the most oppressive and terrorizing rule that Congolese people had ever seen. In the early years of his reign, he displayed an interest in African territories, which would eventually result in calling a conference in 1876, when he summoned famous humanitarians and travellers to come to Brussels. The conference had to show Leopold’s alleged philanthropic intentions, w...