At the centre rather than the summit of this system, the person of the King and then, later, of the President of the Republic, was supposed to transcend rivalries and divisions. Thus, the 1959 Revolution did not fundamentally change practices or the division of offices, and the architecture of power remained the same. Lemarchand characterizes the young Rwandan Republic as a ‘presidential mwamiship ‘ (Lemarchand, 1970: 269), underlining the continuity in the functioning of power, its codes and its rituals. The struggles between clans, factions, and then regions combined with the gulf that separates the hierarchical structure from the submerged relations between actors indicate continuity in the way that power is exercised in Rwanda. This study will briefly attempt to present their distinctive characteristics. The internal dynamics of power relationships in Rwanda, the fierceness of political competition, the appearance and extension of social classes linked to successive political regimes, and the relationships of these classes with the rural milieu (95 percent of the population are peasants) have largely determined the shape, and especially the extent of violent practices. Yet the way power functions on a daily basis cannot be dissociated from the way it provokes crises or reacts to them. The repetitive nature of crises and situations (wars, movements of displaced persons, economic crises, the transition to a multi-party system) appears to define the way events unfold. The second, which is not as well known, is that of violence among peasants the sequence of events involved is understandable, though the significance of the relationships spanning these events is more difficult to comprehend.
The first is a period characterized by court violence during the two Rwandan Republics. During the long twentieth century, defined here as beginning when the last precolonial mwami (King plural: bami ) rose to power, the development of political violence in Rwanda emerged from two parallel but occasionally overlapping dynamics.
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