9 Introduction Rwanda and Burundi to eastern Congo to form a source of labour for commercial agricultural plantations. Then, at the moment of independence, eastern Congo also took in huge numbers of refugees fleeing violence in Rwanda and Burundi (sadly, a pattern to be repeated). The status of the Banyarwanda was thus already of key importance in the jockeying for position among different ethnic groups during the lead-up to independence. In 1964, the first constitution adopted by the new state declared that to qualify as a Congolese citizen a person had to have an ancestor who was ‘a member of a tribe or part of a tribe established in the Congo before 18 October 1908’ – thus excluding those who had come under the Belgian population transfers. During the 1970s, the law was changed to provide more recent dates; but in 1981 a new code of nationality included only those who could show that their ancestors were established in the country when its borders were first set in 1885. With the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, resentment of this influx and of the Rwandan army interventions that followed built to the point where the national parliament adopted a resolution declaring all Banyarwanda to be foreigners who had acquired citizenship fraudulently. Two successive rebellions plunged the country into a decade of war, in which half a dozen of Congo’s neighbours also became involved. The terms agreed in a peace deal in 2004 form the basis of the new constitution and citizenship law, which recognize as a Congolese citizen by birth ‘every person belonging to the ethnic groups and nationalities of which the individuals and territory formed what became Congo at independence’. Yet active hostilities still continue in the east, and the status of the different Banyarwanda as indigenes or non-indigenes remains central to that conflict. Despite the date change to 1960, the law still founds the basis of Congolese nationality on ethnicity, rather than on birth, residence or other objective criteria; meaning that the argument still centres on claims to ancestral origin and bloodline. Hate speech and exclusion flourish in this legal environment.