First Contact

The most important thing Europe brought to Rwanda was not the rifle, the flag or the crucifix. It was a theory, and the theory arrived first, fully formed, before the territory had been seen.

That is the argument of this chapter, and it has a precise chronology. Speke published his racial account of the Great Lakes in 1863. The Berlin Conference assigned Rwanda to Germany in 1885. Gustav Adolf von Götzen became the first European to cross into the kingdom on 4 May 1894. So for thirty-one years there existed a European explanation of Rwandan society, in print, awaiting a country to be applied to.

Chapter 22 described what was actually there: a centralised monarchy with an army, a tax system, a ritual code and social categories that were hierarchical, regionally variable and partly permeable. This chapter describes what happened when that state met an administration carrying a race theory and a shortage of personnel.

The theory in the luggage

The Hamitic hypothesis is the doctrine that whatever is impressive in Africa must have been introduced by a lighter-skinned people from outside: from Ethiopia, from Egypt, from Asia. Its name comes from the biblical genealogy of Noah's sons, and its function was to make African achievement compatible with European racial ranking.

John Hanning Speke gave it its influential Great Lakes form in his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863). Confronted with the organised kingdom of Buganda, he explained it as the residue of a conquering pastoral race of Ethiopian origin ruling over a Bantu peasantry. Every element of the later Rwandan tragedy is present in embryo: two peoples where there was one; conquest as the origin of hierarchy; and rulers who are, racially, half-European.¹

And the theory did not sit still while it waited. In the decades between Speke and the residency, geographers and missionary ethnographers supplied the conquerors with ever more precise itineraries: they were Galla from the Horn, heirs of pharaonic Egypt, dispersed Semites, or lost Christians awaiting reconversion. The physical descriptions grew correspondingly flattering, always in the same direction: the "Hamite" was tall, fine-featured, intelligent, a born ruler. None of this rested on a single excavation, inscription or text. It was genealogy by aesthetic preference, and by 1900 it was orthodoxy.²

The critical demolition came a century later and is not seriously contested: Edith Sanders showed the hypothesis's history as a shifting European fiction; Mahmood Mamdani traced its political work in Rwanda specifically.³ But by then it had been taught in Rwandan classrooms for fifty years.

Partitioned on paper

Rwanda was assigned to the German sphere at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and confirmed by the Anglo-German agreement of 1890. No European had been there. Nobody consulted the mwami, whose kingdom at that moment was at the height of its power under Kigeli IV Rwabugiri.

The paper lines were not even stable. The three empires that met at Lake Kivu spent two decades disputing where their unseen boundaries lay, and when the matter was settled at Brussels in 1910, territories the court regarded as tributary, including Bufumbira in the north and islands in Lake Kivu, were signed over to Uganda and the Congo without anyone in Nyanza being asked. The borders within which everything in the rest of this chronicle happens were drawn by people who had never crossed them.

The king, the machine gun and the coup

It matters what kind of state the theory was about to be applied to. Kigeli IV Rwabugiri had reigned since the 1860s as the most aggressive centraliser in the kingdom's history: near-continuous campaigns from Lake Edward to the far shore of Kivu, standing armies quartered on the hills, hereditary notables purged and replaced with men who owed him everything. It was under Rwabugiri, as chapter 22 noted, that the burdens on cultivators were tightening and the Hutu/Tutsi distinction was acquiring harder edges: an indigenous process, driven by an indigenous state, before any European had seen the country.⁴

Von Götzen entered in 1894, marched across the kingdom with a small armed column, met Rwabugiri at his camp at Kageyo, and went on to Lake Kivu. The court took the measure of the visitor and let him pass. Rwabugiri died on campaign in 1895, and two events then landed on the succession in quick sequence.

First came a lesson in firepower. In 1896, soldiers of Leopold's Congo Free State established a post at Shangi, on the Rwandan shore of Lake Kivu. The court sent an army against it in the old style, and the old style met modern rifles: the attacking formations were shot down before they closed. The conclusion drawn at court was exact: Europeans could not at present be beaten in the field, so they would have to be managed.

Second came the coup. Rwabugiri's designated heir, Mibambwe IV Rutarindwa, had ruled jointly with his father since 1889, but the ritual code required a queen mother, and the woman appointed to the office, Kanjogera of the Bega clan, was not his mother. In December 1896, weeks after Shangi, Kanjogera and her brothers Kabare and Ruhinankiko struck at the royal residence at Rucunshu. Rutarindwa and his defenders died in the burning compound, and the months that followed saw a purge of the dead king's Nyiginya loyalists. Kanjogera's own son, a boy of about thirteen, was installed as Yuhi V Musinga, with real power held by his mother and uncles.⁵

Hold the two events together and the shape of the next twenty years is visible. The faction now ruling Rwanda had taken power in violation of the dynastic code, faced enemies within and unsubdued regions at its edges, and had just learned that the foreigners on the border were militarily irresistible. A court in that position does not need to be conquered. It needs a protector. When a German officer, Captain Ramsay, reached the court in March 1897 and offered protection in exchange for recognition of German overlordship, the usurpers accepted. The colonisation of Rwanda began not with a battle but with a bargain, and the price was paid by everyone outside it.

Rule by almost nobody

The German presence in Rwanda was tiny. For its first decade the "administration" consisted of occasional military patrols; a permanent civil residency was established only in 1907, under the physician-explorer Richard Kandt, who had first come to the region in 1898 hunting the ultimate source of the Nile and had written up the journey in Caput Nili. Kandt built his residency near the geographical centre of the country, at the foot of Mount Kigali: the founding act of the city of Kigali, which began its existence as a house, a few offices and a strip of traders' plots. On the eve of the First World War the entire German establishment amounted to a few dozen Europeans and a modest force of askari.⁶ Germany could not administer Rwanda directly and did not try. It practised indirect rule: govern through the existing monarchy, and lend it enough force to be worth cooperating with.

Science travelled with the flag, and chapter 24's callipers did not come from nowhere. In 1907–08 the expedition of Duke Adolf Friedrich zu Mecklenburg crossed the country, and its anthropologist, Jan Czekanowski, conducted the first systematic anthropometric survey of the region: thousands of individuals measured, tabulated and sorted into the racial strata the expedition had brought with it, "Hamitic" Tutsi, "Bantu" Hutu, "pygmoid" Twa. The survey did not test the Hamitic hypothesis; it presupposed it, and published its presuppositions as findings, complete with averages to the millimetre. The measuring of Rwandans began here, under Germany, as science; Belgium would repeat it as administration.⁷

The consequences of the German protectorate were not neutral, and this is the part usually missed by the claim that German colonialism in Rwanda was a light touch.

• It froze a faction in power. The Rucunshu winners became the permanent government, insulated from the internal contest that had previously constrained any court.
• It completed the conquest of the north, in the episode the next section describes.
• It hardened the categories. A court told by its protectors that its authority rested on racial superiority had every reason to agree.

The northern wound

The northwestern highlands (Mulera, Bushiru, Bukonya, the Rukiga hills) had never been fully incorporated into the kingdom. Land there was held by lineages under their own patrons, the abakonde; Rwabugiri had raided the region but not administered it; its people paid the court little and thought of its chiefs as foreigners. After 1900 the court, now with German backing and a mission station at Rwaza in the middle of the region, began pushing southern chiefs and southern obligations onto the northern hills, and the north pushed back.

In 1910 Father Paulin Loupias, superior of the Rwaza mission, was killed in a confrontation with the northern lineage head Rukara, an affray that grew out of exactly this contest over cattle, land and who might command whom. Punitive expeditions followed. Then, in 1911–12, the resistance found a banner: Ndungutse, a pretender claiming descent from the murdered Rutarindwa, that is, claiming to be the legitimate line against the usurpers of Rucunshu. Around him gathered the aggrieved of the north: Rukara and his kin, Hutu lineages defending abakonde land rights, and the Twa war leader Basebya and his band. For some months in early 1912 the movement controlled much of the north.

The German response settled the matter. A column under Lieutenant Gudovius, with court auxiliaries, marched north in April 1912: Ndungutse was killed at his camp, Basebya was lured in and shot, Rukara was captured and hanged. The rising was over in weeks. Its meaning: the monarchy's authority over the northwest was established, within living memory of people who saw 1959, by German rifles acting for a southern court that northerners regarded as foreign. The region never forgot it: the fiercest violence of 1959–60 came in the north, aimed at chiefs remembered as recent impositions, and the Second Republic of chapter 24, Habyarimana's republic, was above all a northwestern revenge on the south. The north-south fracture that runs under modern Rwandan politics was not created in 1912, but 1912 is where it was armed.⁸

The White Fathers

The Society of the Missionaries of Africa (the White Fathers, founded by Cardinal Lavigerie) reached Rwanda in February 1900 under Bishop Hirth and opened the first mission at Save. They arrived with the Germans' blessing and quickly became the most consequential European institution in the country, for the reasons chapter 10 set out: they were numerous, they stayed, they learned Kinyarwanda, they ran the schools, and they were everywhere.

The geography of the first stations tells its own story. Save rose near Nyanza, within the court's orbit; Zaza followed in Gisaka, a recently annexed east that bore the court no love; Nyundo in 1901 and Rwaza in 1903 planted the mission in the unsubdued northwest. The court, unable to refuse its protectors' priests, granted stations preferentially where its own grip was weakest. Each station promptly became a rival centre of power on its hill, settling disputes, sheltering clients and commanding labour like a chief, and Musinga's court concluded, reasonably, that Christianity was sedition wearing a cassock.

Their strategy has a documented arc, and the arc matters.

Phase one: the religion of the poor. The court was hostile, so early converts came disproportionately from the marginal: the poor, the displaced, people at odds with their chiefs. Missionaries were sometimes seen, and sometimes saw themselves, as an alternative source of protection against the chiefs. Ian Linden's history documents the resulting friction between missionaries and the court, friction that at Rwaza, as we have seen, ended in a priest's death.⁹

Phase two: convert the top. That approach produced converts but not power, and Lavigerie's doctrine had always favoured working through existing elites. From the 1910s and decisively in the 1920s and 30s, the mission reoriented towards the court and the chiefly class. Baptism became a career requirement. The elite school system that followed was, in effect, the seminary of the colonial state.

And the theory was written into their ethnography. Missionary writing on Rwanda adopted the Hamitic frame and elaborated it: Tutsi described as natural aristocrats, of finer features and superior intelligence, of Ethiopian or Semitic origin, born to command. Father (later Bishop) Léon Classe, the dominant church figure of the interwar period, argued in official correspondence that the Tutsi chiefly class was the indispensable instrument of administration and warned against replacing them with commoners. The colonial administration listened, because Classe knew the country and they did not.¹⁰

What contact actually did

It is worth being exact about the causal claim, because both crude versions are wrong.

Wrong version one: "Hutu and Tutsi were invented by Europeans." They were not. The categories existed, they carried real material consequences, and uburetwa (the labour obligation imposed on Hutu cultivators) was already intensifying under Rwabugiri before any European arrived.

Wrong version two: "The categories were ancient racial groups that Europe merely recorded." Also false, as chapter 22 set out at length: the categories were social, regionally variable, and permeable in both directions.

What actually happened is more specific and more damning. Europe took a fluid, contested, locally variable social hierarchy and gave it four things it had never had: a racial explanation (Hamitic origin), a scientific vocabulary (Czekanowski's callipers), an administrative existence (written records, and eventually the identity card of chapter 24), and a monopoly (an alliance with one faction, backed by the rifles demonstrated at Shangi and used in 1912). It converted a gradient into a border.

The war, the famine and the handover

The First World War reached Rwanda in 1914 as a frontier war of patrols and shelling across Lake Kivu, and in the spring of 1916 as invasion: Belgian colonial brigades crossed the border, and Kigali fell on 6 May 1916. The German garrison withdrew east into the long retreat of Lettow-Vorbeck's East African campaign, whose celebrated strategy of tying down Allied armies was paid for, on both sides, in requisitioned food and conscripted carriers.

Rwanda paid its share. Armies on both sides lived off the hills; men were taken as porters by the thousand; seed and cattle went into the supply trains. The result, in 1916–18, was the Rumanura famine, which killed on the order of tens of thousands, concentrated in the northwest, the same region broken in 1912. It is the first of the two great famines of the colonial period (chapter 24 records the second, Ruzagayura, in 1943–44), and like the second it was not a natural event: it was the arithmetic of extraction performed on a population with no reserves left.¹¹

In 1922 the League of Nations confirmed Belgian administration of Ruanda-Urundi under the Article 22 mandate system, the "sacred trust of civilisation" whose ancestry chapter 14 traced.

Belgium inherited a kingdom whose court had been made dependent on European backing, whose northern regions had just been conquered with European help and then starved, whose elite was being converted, and whose social structure had been explained to everybody, in print and in classrooms, as a matter of race.

What Belgium then did with that inheritance is chapter 24, and it began with a printing press.

Footnotes

1. John Hanning Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1863), esp. the chapter on the history of Uganda. ↩
2. Jean-Pierre Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History, trans. Scott Straus (New York: Zone, 2003), on the elaboration of the Hamitic frame by explorers and missionaries; Edith R. Sanders, "The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective," Journal of African History 10:4 (1969), pp. 521–532, traces the doctrine's successive mutations. ↩
3. Sanders, "The Hamitic Hypothesis"; Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), ch. 2. ↩
4. Jan Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), on Rwabugiri's reign and the late hardening of the categories; Alison Des Forges, Defeat is the Only Bad News: Rwanda under Musinga, 1896–1931 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), ch. 1. ↩
5. Des Forges, Defeat is the Only Bad News, chs. 1–3, on Shangi, Rucunshu and the purges that followed. ↩
6. Richard Kandt, Caput Nili: eine empfindsame Reise zu den Quellen des Nils (Berlin: Reimer, 1904); Des Forges, Defeat is the Only Bad News, on the residency period. ↩
7. Adolf Friedrich, Duke of Mecklenburg, In the Heart of Africa (London: Cassell, 1910); Jan Czekanowski, Forschungen im Nil-Kongo-Zwischengebiet, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1917). On the politics of the measuring, Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, pp. 282–297. ↩
8. Des Forges, Defeat is the Only Bad News, on the Loupias killing and the Ndungutse rising; Ian Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), on Rwaza and the northern missions; Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, on the Bakiga and the north-south divide. ↩
9. Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, chs. 2–4. ↩
10. Ibid., pp. 158–170; also Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, pp. 282–297, on missionary ethnography and its political effects. ↩
11. Des Forges, Defeat is the Only Bad News, on the war years and the Rumanura famine; Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, on the East African campaign's burden on the region. ↩