ABSTRACT
In colonial Rwanda, the issues of identification and census-taking were closely linked. The first identity booklets were widely issued in the second half of 1930 even as the colonial administration was conducting the first systematic population census. After an interruption due to the Second World War, the second major wave of booklet distribution began in 1948, using a new model designed in 1944. As in the previous booklet, administration officials indicated whether the holder was ‘Hutu,’ ‘Tutsi,’ or ‘Twa.’ Yet demographers in the first half of the 1950s still did not consider the census to be reliable and, until the end of the colonial period, Rwandans managed to circumvent this ethnic-racial labelling.
