Antecedents to modern Rwanda

University of Wisconsin Press

2004

xiii, 354 p.

Africa and the diaspora

9780299201203

The oral sources --1. Central Rwanda on the eve of the emergence of the kingdom --The country and its inhabitants --Fields and herds: subsistence activities --Kinship and society --Polities --2. The Rwanda of Ndori --The foundation of the kingdom --Subsequent military campaigns: conquest or raids? --Government: the ritual institutions --Instruments of government: the corporations --The realm --3. Toward the centralization of power --The seizure of the herds and the land --The armies --At the hub: court, king, and elites --The recasting of royal ideology during Rejugira's reign --The weight of the state --4. Government in the eighteenth century --Government from Gisanura to Rwaka --Government under Rujugira and Ndabarasa --Foreign relations under Gisanura and Mazimpaka --Foreign relations under Rujugira and Ndabarasa --5. Social transformations in the nineteenth century --The transformations of society --Hutu and Tutsi --6. The triumph of the great families and its consequences --Civil war and the supremacy of the elites --Struggles for power at Gahindiro's and Rwogera's courts --Expansion of the kingdom eastward and international trade --A spontaneous expansion toward Lake Kivu and the land of the volcanoes? --7. Nightmares: the age of Rwabugiri (1867-1897) --Political crisis and wars from 1867-1889 --Isolation breached and the hatching of a coup d'Etat --The nightmare of violence used as a political tool --A balance sheet --History and the present

To understand the genocide and other dramatic events of Rwanda’s recent past, one must understand the history of the earlier realm. Jan Vansina provides a critique of the history recorded by early missionaries and court historians and provides a bottom-up view, drawing on hundreds of grassroots narratives. He describes the genesis of the Hutu and Tutsi identities, their growing social and political differences, their bitter feuds, revolts, and massacres, and the relevance of this dramatic history to the post-genocide Rwanda of today.

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