How a colonial legacy continues to shape conflict and identity. People hold candles during a vigil for victims of the 1994 genocide at Amahoro Stadium in Kigali, Rwanda [Dai Kurokawa/EFE/EPA] For more than a century, Hutu and Tutsi in Africa’s Great Lakes region have been described as two distinct ethnic groups, and sometimes even as separate races. But the history is more complicated. The identities existed before European colonial rule, but they did not always carry the rig