The Kingdom, the Colony and the Republics: Ethnicity in Perspective

Abstract

Rwanda differs from most other African countries as a state whose origins do not lie on the drawing boards of colonial cartographers, but in an indigenous kingdom that pre-dates colonialism. Its exact origins, however, are shrouded in mythology, or at least unverifiable oral history. The historian Jan Vansina marks the origin with the emergence of the Nyiginya kingdom under Ruganzu Ndori sometime in the 1600s, though he adds that the process of state formation with a centralised administration began much later, in the eighteenth century, with the expansion of the Nyiginya court.¹ By the time of the arrival of Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century, Rwanda had grown from a small polity into a cohesive state. The outward growth from the central Nduga region was uneven. In the periphery, small kingdoms under hierarchical lineages became differentiated by their proximity to the central power.² Wealth creation centred upon the ownership of cattle and later upon control over land. Social relations revolved to a significant extent around cattle-keeping and ownership.³