Was the Hutu Power influenced in any way by Black Power?

by Mamothamon

I have found that name of the movement is always listed as "Hutu Power" regarless or the language, in spanish and french for example the word Power is left untranslated, i dont know this was also the case in Rwanda, but it make me wonder if, like with "White Power", the name was an apropiation of the Black Power movement

Commustar

Yes, it seems so.

In When Victims Become Killers Mahmood Mamdani states:

A fringe preoccupation among Rwandan Hutu by the late eighties, Hutu power became a mainstream ideology in the early nineties. The birth of “Hutu Power”—really, Hutu Powa, rather than Hutu Power, which would be an English-language slogan in a francophone milieu—as a formal organized tendency signified a sea change. Its context was the civil war. “Hutu Nation” had been the rallying cry of the 1959 Revolution and the foundation claim of the First Republic of Kayibanda. In contrast, the Second Republic promised “reconciliation” between Hutu and Tutsi. Branded an alien minority under the First Republic, the Tutsi were redefined, even rehabilitated, as a Rwandese minority under the Second Republic. The more the possibility of Tutsi power receded into a dim history, the less Hutu power had to offer as an organizing ideology, and the bleaker seemed its future.

The 1990 RPF invasion changed this context dramatically. For the first time since the inyenzi raids of the early 1960s, the 1990 invasion raised the specter of Tutsi Power inside Rwanda. This, unsurprisingly, is how the Rwandan government portrayed the invasion to the population inside and the world outside. In an address to the foreign diplomatic corps in Kigali, Foreign Minister Casimir Bizimungu accused the invaders of seeking “a reversal of history” which could only mean a return to “forced labour and feudal servitude.”

Doing a quick search for "Hutu Powa" I came across the work of Christopher C Taylor. In the article "Kings and Chaos in Rwanda: on the origins of disorder" from the journal Anthropos vol 98 (2003), Taylor offers the following footnote:

The "Mouvement Révolutionnaire pour le Développement" or MRND changed its name in 1990 to "Mouvement Révolutionnaire pour le Développement et la Démocratie" after multiparty democracy was authorized in Rwanda. It retained the acronym, MRND. Other important political parties at the time included: the MDR (Mouvement Démocrate Républicain), the PL (Parti Libéral), the PSD (Parti Social Démocrate), and the CDR (Coalition pour la Défense de la République). In 1993, both the MDR and the PL split into two factions. In each case the faction opposed to RPF participation in the government called itself "Hutu powa" after the English term, power. The "MDR powa," "PL powa," MRND, and CDR parties all counted many among their numbers who later became active in the genocide against Tutsi.

So, Taylor and Mamdani suggest that Hutu actors were using the term "Hutu Powa" after 1990 as a conscious adaptation of Anglophone movements like Black Power, Red Power (for Native Americans), Workers Power (a Trotskyist political party) of the 60s, 70s and 80s.