Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom

Abstract

This brilliant book transforms our understanding of Rwanda and the genocide of 1994. It rests chiefly on oral research conducted by Professor Vansina in Rwanda between 1957 and 1962. In an initial account of his findings, published in French in 1962, he demonstrated that Rwanda was not the centuries-old, autocratic, unchanging kingdom that its court historians had depicted in conjunction with missionary scholars whose minds were coloured by analogies with the history of France. Rather, Rwanda's nucleus had been founded only in the seventeenth century and had then expanded to absorb many older agricultural chiefdoms, mainly through the advantages of mobility and military organisation enjoyed by the pastoral Tutsi people who ruled the new kingdom. Following the genocide of 1994, however, Vansina was disappointed to find that the older view still dominated understandings of Rwanda and was now compounded by the notion that antagonism between Tutsi and the Hutu agriculturalists who had been their subjects had been a product purely of the colonial period when, so it was widely said, Belgian rulers had imposed rigid European racial notions on what had been a fluid indigenous order. This view, endlessly repeated since 1994, prevented any serious understanding of the genocide. As Vansina is reported to have told an interviewer, ‘It is as though you would now write about the Holocaust and say that the cause is to be found in 1934, without looking a few centuries back’. His new book, therefore, uses his oral evidence and a meticulous study of early written accounts of Rwanda—none exists before 1894—to destroy three myths. One is the myth of the ancient and unchanging kingdom. The second is the belief that Hutu and Tutsi identities, and the antagonism between them, were mainly products of colonial rule. Vansina argues instead that Tutsi identity probably arose in the seventeenth century among the political elite and then extended to the trained warrior class who dominated the military system that was Rwanda's most distinctive institution. To these warriors, the peasants who worked the land and undertook menial tasks within the army were rustics and servants, Hutu, although the latter did not apply the term to themselves until the twentieth century, previously asserting regional identities. The distinction between Tutsi and Hutu hardened during the later nineteenth century when the peasants of the central kingdom were enserfed through obligatory labour (uburetwa) for their Tutsi chiefs. Vansina's account of uburetwa demolishes a third myth, for the institution had hitherto been attributed to King Kigeri Rwabugiri (1867–97), whose autocratic power had supposedly dominated Rwanda on the eve of colonial invasion. Instead, Vansina sees uburetwa as a consequence, on the one hand, of land pressure due to agricultural innovation and population growth, and, on the other hand, of the collective power and numerical increase of the great Tutsi families who, rather than Rwabugiri, held sway in the late nineteenth-century kingdom. To Vansina, Rwabugiri's reign was not a model of pre-colonial order but a nightmare of factional conflict and violence whose cruelty makes it much easier to understand the cruelty of the genocide. The book is not only a magnificent historical reconstruction but a major contribution to understanding of the contemporary world. It may well be the culmination of the career of Africa's finest historian.

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