Postmodern theory emphasizes the relationality of contemporary forms of cultural and political identity, and the eclectic nature of their construction and reconstruction. In Rwanda such identities became more rigidly defined and less complex with modernity; the boundaries of ethnic and ‘racial’ iden- tity started to harden with German colonial rule, and this tendency was given force through colonial administrative practices introduced by Belgium. Drawing on 19th-century ideas of race, reforms initiated by the colonizers, commercialization and conversion to Catholicism all under- mined the flexibility of the social identities of Rwandans. Clientship was redirected to serve purely colonial purposes (Prunier, 1995: 35), and by the 1930s, the social cement of Rwandan society had started to come apart. As massive economic and social changes promoted a new stratum of educated Hutu, Banyarwanda identity gradually started to break into two polarized