Grégoire Kayibanda

Grégoire Kayibanda was born at Tare in central Rwanda, trained as a teacher at the Catholic seminary system that provided almost the only secondary education available to Rwandans, and worked as a schoolmaster before becoming a journalist. He edited Kinyamateka, the Catholic newspaper, which under him became the principal forum in which Rwandans argued about their own society — and the only mass-circulation publication not controlled by the Belgian administration or the court.

Rwanda under Belgian rule was governed indirectly through the Tutsi monarchy, and the administration had hardened a social distinction into a rigid caste system complete with identity cards. Access to schooling, to office and to land ran through it. In 1957 Kayibanda was the principal author of the Bahutu Manifesto, which set out the case that the majority of Rwandans were excluded from their own country, and he founded the party that became PARMEHUTU.

The revolution of 1959 and the referendum of 1961 ended the monarchy, and Belgium withdrew in July 1962 with Kayibanda as the first president of the Republic of Rwanda. He governed austerely and without personal enrichment, by all accounts, living plainly and rarely leaving the country; he built the administrative apparatus of a republic where there had been a court.

He was overthrown in 1973 by his army chief of staff Juvénal Habyarimana, sentenced to death, had the sentence commuted, and died under house arrest in 1976 in circumstances that have never been established.