The Kings of Rwanda

 

Fathers of a Nation by Stewart Addington Saint-David a publication of The Royal Rwandan Association of Knighthood and Nobility

PART I

The Eye of God: Rwandan Kings of the Pre-Colonial Age (ca. 1200-1895 AD)

In an era of ten-second sound bytes and mass media, it is sometimes rather difficult to imagine a society founded on the notion of the political, administrative and religious centrality of a hereditary monarch. The various institutions of the Western world, largely the inheritance of the Enlightenment, have fixed firmly in the public mind a model of democratic government that has been cut to fit a wide range of national situations, often with very mixed results. Informed democracy, while certainly a major step forward in man’s uneven progress toward self-realization, has not been the universal panacea promised by so many of the hopeful and far-thinking political philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Many are the failed experiments in democratic government, frequently imposed or inspired by foreign powers, that have littered the African continent in particular since the middle decades of the 20th century.

Long before the notion of democracy ever appeared on the shores of Africa, however, there existed the small southeastern kingdom of Rwanda, originally confined to the open savanna between Lake Victoria and Lake Kivu, and whose modern roots as a sovereign and independent nation date back to the 13th century. Rwanda constituted a triple exception in Africa, for she was a true nation-state.

Comprised of three different and yet interrelated groups- the Twa, the Hutu and the

 

Tutsi- the Kingdom of Rwanda was not the random patchwork creation of some European colonial power which had simply imposed its will on a collection of tribes and/or regions, but rather a true nation in every sense of the word. In addition, and despite the artificial distinctions later introduced by colonial imperialists determined to divide and conquer her, the three groups that comprised her population together constituted one unique and identical ethnicity, that of the Banyarwanda, or “people of Rwanda.”

The first signs of a human presence in the area now known as Rwanda date from about 1000 BC, and archaeologists have there discovered the remains of a civilization that had mastered both the production of iron and of pottery. The area was originally populated by Pygmy tribes, ancestors of the Twa, and it was early in the first millennium AD that the Tutsi (originally from the areas north of Rwanda) and the Hutu (originally from the areas south of Rwanda) initially migrated to this beautiful and fertile land of rolling hills, open plains and large, crystalline lakes.

While little is known about the many individuals who reigned over the people of Rwanda as king, or mwami (plural abami), during the ages that preceded the arrival of European explorers in the mid-19th century, a considerable amount of information is available about the rôle of the mwami in Rwandan society. Thanks to the collection of rituals and protocols known as the Gakondo, first passed on by means of oral tradition, and later committed to writing after the coming of the Europeans, it is possible to acquire a strong appreciation of the nature and primacy of the king in the Rwandan state, and to gain important insights into the absolutely pivotal rôle occupied by the monarch in the life of the nation and of the people.

 

Map of Modern Rwanda

Like many other African sovereigns of the period, the mwami of Rwanda was the undisputed master of the entirety of his kingdom, and his word was quite literally law. His decisions, although often taken in consultation with his counselors, or abiru, were not subject to appeal, and failure to comply with his will was punishable in the most rigorous way possible. The scholar Donat Murego of the University of Louvain, who has devoted much of his work to the study of the idea of “sacred royalty” in pre-colonial Africa, states unequivocally that with the conquest of the Hutu and Twa chiefs by the Tutsi kings in the 13th century, “Tutsi power was established, the Hutu and their former chiefs had been defeated and reduced to servitude. After having sought to take in hand every decision and to control the entirety of the administration, the Tutsi monarch finished by placing his supreme authority beyond question. It is he who distributes the privileges; he is judged by no one, controlled by no one. No independent or autonomous structure, having its own powers exists in his sphere, and therefore cannot limit him. From the king flows all power, all authority, all decisions.”

Intare Warriors

 The life of the mwami was not one of undiluted comfort and boundless pleasures, however, for his real work as cornerstone of the nation frequently demanded great sacrifices of the man solely responsible for the continued welfare and happiness of his people. “Father of the people,” writes modern Rwandan historian Benjamin Sehene, “the mwami played the rôle of savior of the nation, particularly in times of crisis: wars, political rivalries or internal conflicts. It was frequently that he sacrificed himself by going to the forefront of danger; during battles, for example, but also by committing suicide or by letting himself be ‘assassinated’ and replaced by another if the abiru, ritualists of the Court, decided that this was necessary for the safety of the kingdom.” Thus the position of mwami was one that often placed great demands on its titularies, despite the myriad and far-ranging powers associated with the exercise of his sacred office.

The Palace of the Mwami at Nyanza

Over the course of the centuries, and under the strong central rule of the abami, the three different groups of the population lived side-by-side and gradually melded into one, the nation of the Banyarwanda. The people of the nation-state eventually came to speak a common language, Kinyarwanda, to share a common native animistic religion and to partake in the same social and cultural rituals and activities. In addition, as intermarriage and social interaction between the groups became increasingly common at this time, thus were born both the modern kingdom of Rwanda and the nation of the Banyarwanda.

Below the monarch, who wielded supreme power over his dominion, were the various members of his family, his wives and children, and the chiefs and sub-chiefs who executed his will on the local level and who were directly responsible to him for the payment of taxes and for the general administration of the kingdom. Because of its relatively small size, however, it was possible for the mwami to rule the country quasi-personally for much of its history, particularly as the Rwandan royal court was a peripatetic one until the early part of the 20th century. According to the    historian Alexis Kagame, at this juncture in her history the mwami was quite  literally considered to be “the eye of God, by which He contemplate[d] Rwanda.” In fact, the king was sole possessor of all property of any kind within the borders of his kingdom, and he carried the additional title of Sebantu or “owner of men.”

According to Alexandre Pages, “the king inspired in his entourage a very humble respect, mixed with a constant uncertainty. The uncertainty that his dignified yet somewhat haughty attitude instilled in them never ceased to torture these ambitious seekers of fortune. Also, they spied with some apprehension the various movements of his august countenance which, while remaining most frequently closed,  sometimes betrayed his most intimate feelings and his most spontaneous inclinations. A rapid flash of anger in his eyes foretold disgrace and perhaps death; a sunny smile on his severe visage made for the unfolding of radiant hopes. These brusque and capricious changes- which could determine the future and even decide between life and death- kept these souls perpetually in suspense between a fear that could induce shivers and a peacefulness as pleasant as a fresh breeze.” Thus, at the apogee of the pre-colonial era of the kingdom of Rwanda, the monarch was both all- powerful and, in the eyes of his many subjects, all-knowing, the veritable incarnation of a god.

The Mwami Cyirima (r. 1482-1506) of the Nyiginya Dynasty expanded the domains of Rwanda to include several new areas, conquering the neighboring chiefdoms of Bumbogo, Buriza and Rukoma. This state, however, was somewhat subservient to its larger neighbors, and was later overcome by the Bunyoro of present-day Uganda. Nevertheless, few truly significant details emerge, as the paucity of written accounts from this period of Rwandan history has forced modern scholars to rely heavily on oral traditions of the age to fill in the many gaps present in the historical record.

After their defeat at the hands of the Bunyoro, the remnants of the Rwandan kingdom relocated west to the Nduga highlands, where they soon came to flourish again as a nation. In the early 17th century, under the inspired rule of Ruganzu II Ndori (r. 1600-1624 AD), the nation expanded in all directions, and Buganza was retaken. Later rulers of Rwanda continued this drive toward expansion, and by the mid-18th century, the Rwandan state had become far more powerful and centralized, thus manifesting more of a historical presence than ever it had before. The expansion of the 18th century eventually reached the shores of Lake Kivu, and had as its primary goal not military conquest, but the migration of the Rwandan population into other fertile areas, thereby spreading its agricultural techniques, its social and political structures, and effectively extending the power base of its abami. Outposts of warriors were established along the borders of the kingdom, with the aim of protecting vulnerable frontier areas from unwanted incursions. It was only against other advanced states, such as Gisaka, Bugesera and Burundi that expansion was undertaken using primarily military means.

Lake Kivu

The three groups of Rwanda’s population, despite the long-term effects of intermarriage and a common culture, settled into distinctive rôles which, when considered in their totality, were each of great and lasting benefit to the development of the society as a whole. The Twa maintained themselves largely through hunting wild animals, the Hutu through agriculture and the Tutsi through the raising of livestock. Thus each group played its part in the ongoing growth and prosperity of a nation where different avenues of social mobility were open to all through marriage, service to the state and economic achievement.

The main holdings of the mwami were comprised of a collection of over one hundred estates spread throughout the various regions of the kingdom. These estates were composed mainly of fields of banana trees and thousands of head of cattle. They formed the real foundation of the ruler’s wealth, and it was between these many different estates that the mwami would travel with his entourage of chiefly courtiers while on periodic progress throughout the kingdom. The greatest and most luxurious of these estates would also be home to one of the monarch’s many wives, with some abami having as many as twenty at a time.

Tribute was to be paid to the mwami by all Rwandans, Twa, Hutu and Tutsi, and was generally collected by Tutsi members of the administration. The mwami was also assisted in his governance by a ministerial council of great chiefs, known as the batware b’intebe. Below this council of chiefs there was a lesser group of Tutsi leaders who were charged with governing the country in districts, each of which had a cattle chief and a land chief. It was the cattle chief who collected tribute in cattle, with the land chief collecting the requisite tribute in produce. Further down the ladder were the hill chiefs, charged with the oversight of a particular area within a district, and the neighborhood chiefs, who kept watch over the smallest of the localities.