General Introduction to the History of Precolonial Rwanda

Lessons

Senior 4 · History (Languages)

General Introduction to the History of Precolonial Rwanda

4 lessons

Lesson 1 of 4

Why Study History, and How We Know Precolonial Rwanda

25 min

A kingdom older than its first written page

On 2 May 1894 a German officer, Count Gustav Adolf von Götzen, reached Rusumo Falls on the Kagera river and crossed into the Kingdom of Rwanda. He travelled right across it, met Mwami Kigeli IV Rwabugiri at his residence at Kageyo, and reached Lake Kivu. In 1895 he published an account of the journey, Durch Afrika von Ost nach West ("Across Africa from East to West"). Only one European, Oscar Baumann, had entered Rwanda before him, briefly, in 1892.

Yet by 1894 the Rwandan kingdom already had a long line of kings, an army, chiefs on every hill and a rich court literature. None of it had been written down. So how do historians know anything about Rwanda before 1894, and why should an S4 student in the Languages pathway care? This lesson answers both questions. It is the toolkit for the whole unit.

Definition

History: the study of the human past, built from evidence and explained in an argued account. Historiography: the study of how history has been written, and by whom; for Rwanda it asks, for example, how colonial writers shaped the story.

Historical source: anything that carries information about the past. A primary source comes from the time studied (a pot made by Iron Age smiths, a poem composed at the royal court). A secondary source is a later interpretation built on primary sources (a history book written in 2004).

Oral tradition: a message about the past passed on by word of mouth over more than one generation. Archaeology: the study of the past through material remains dug from the ground. Corroboration: checking one source against another, independent one.

Why we study history

History is not a list of dates to memorise. At A-level it is a way of thinking. The table gives six reasons, each with a Rwandan case you will meet in this course.

Reason	What it means	A Rwandan case
Identity and heritage	Knowing where a community comes from, and what it has made, gives its members a shared identity.	The royal sites, the dynastic poetry and the harvest festival umuganura are part of what makes Rwandans one people.
Understanding the present	Most present-day problems have roots in the past.	Divisions among Rwandans were hardened by colonial policies (Unit 5); you cannot explain them without that history.
Learning from the past	Knowing how disasters happened helps a society to prevent them.	"Never Again": understanding how the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi was prepared is the first step to preventing genocide (Unit 6).
Critical thinking	Historians test every claim against evidence and ask who made it and why.	Colonial writers invented false theories about Rwanda's past (Unit 5); only careful use of sources exposes them.
Responsible citizenship	Citizens who know their history can judge leaders, laws and propaganda.	Hate propaganda before 1994 rewrote history; a citizen who knows the evidence can resist it.
Skills and careers	Research, argument and clear writing are used in many jobs.	Museums and heritage sites, archives, tourism, journalism, law, teaching and diplomacy.

The five kinds of evidence for precolonial Rwanda

Because the kingdom did not write, historians combine five kinds of evidence. Each one "speaks" for different centuries and answers different questions.

Kind of source	Rwandan examples	What it is good for
Oral traditions	The four royal traditions: ubucurabwenge (royal genealogies), ibisigo (dynastic poems), ubwiru (the secret code of royal rituals) and ibitekerezo (court histories recited in song or prose). Popular traditions too: ibyivugo (warriors' self-praise), proverbs, songs and tales.	Kings, wars, rituals, values; how the court saw itself
Archaeology	Early Iron Age sites of the Urewe culture, with dimple-based pottery and clay iron-smelting furnaces; excavations in Rwanda and Burundi by Marie-Claude Van Grunderbeek, Emile Roche and Hugues Doutrelepont (1978 to 1987)	Settlement, farming, iron-working and the environment, long before any king
Language evidence	Kinyarwanda is a Bantu language; the word ubutare ("iron") survives in many place names	Very old movements of people and ideas, and where activities took place
Written records	Baumann (1892) and Götzen (1894); Richard Kandt's Caput Nili (1904); diaries of the Catholic White Fathers, who built their first church in Rwanda at Save in 1900	Exact dates and eyewitness detail, but only from the 1890s
Material culture and museums	Objects kept in the Ethnographic Museum at Huye and the King's Palace Museum at Nyanza: tools, baskets, milk pots, drums, royal regalia	Crafts, daily life, trade and the symbols of power

Weighing the evidence

Every kind of source has strengths and weaknesses. An A-level answer names both and explains how one source can check another.

Oral traditions were kept by specialists at court, the abiru and the court poets, and young men training as intore had to learn the poems. This gave them unusual accuracy. But they were made to serve the dynasty: they praise victories and stay silent about defeats. They count reigns and generations, not calendar years, so turning them into dates needs an assumed length for each generation. The earliest reigns, such as that of the founder-hero Gihanga, belong to legend; even the founder of the strong kingdom is debated, and the historian Jan Vansina saw Ruganzu II Ndori, in the 17th century, as its true founder.
Archaeology gives dates that do not depend on anyone's memory. Charcoal from Urewe furnaces gives reliable radiocarbon dates because the smiths burned freshly cut wood. Sites such as Kabuye hill near Butare show that people farmed, smelted iron and caused serious soil erosion there over about 500 years. But a pot cannot tell you a king's name or why a war was fought.
Written records carry exact dates, but their authors were outsiders. They spoke little or no Kinyarwanda, depended on interpreters, and came with the prejudices and ambitions of colonial Europe. Götzen was soon to become governor of German East Africa; the missionaries wanted converts.
Language and material evidence reach far back in time, but they are hard to date precisely and need specialists to read them.

The strongest conclusions come from corroboration. When an oral tradition places a royal residence on a hill, and archaeologists then find furnaces or pottery there, two independent sources agree.

A photograph printed in Richard Kandt's book <em>Caput Nili</em> (1904), captioned in German "Häuptling Kaware auf Reisen" ("Chief Kaware on his travels"). Attendants holding long staffs or spears stand around a large woven litter used to carry the chief. A photograph is a source too: ask who chose this scene, for which readers, and what the short caption leaves out. Photo: from Richard Kandt, <em>Caput Nili</em>, volume 2, page 97, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Inteko y'Umuco (Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy): "The Ethnographic Museum-Rwanda", about 7 minutes, from the official channel of the institution that runs Rwanda's museums. As you watch, pick two objects and say what each could tell a historian that an oral poem could not.

Warning

Three common mistakes. (1) "No writing means no history": wrong; oral, archaeological, language and material evidence reach back far beyond 1894. (2) Treating European travellers and missionaries as neutral eyewitnesses: they were outsiders with their own aims, and several of their false theories later did great harm (Unit 5). (3) Treating legend as dated fact: Gihanga is a founder-hero of tradition, not a king with known dates.

Tip

Test every source with PACT. Purpose: why was it made? Author: who made it, and what did they know? Context: when and where, and under what pressures? Truth-check: what other, independent source agrees or disagrees?

Important

Discuss. A dynastic poem praising a king and a German officer's travel diary both describe the court of Rwabugiri. Which would you trust more for the size of his army, and which for how Rwandans saw their king? Can a biased source still be useful?

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Practice

Give three reasons for studying history, each with a Rwandan example.
Name the four royal oral traditions of the Kingdom of Rwanda and say what each preserved.
Classify each source as primary or secondary, and name its kind: (a) a dimple-based Urewe pot; (b) Götzen's book of 1895; (c) a history of the Rwandan kingdom published in 2004; (d) a dynastic poem recorded from a court poet.
Explain why charcoal from an Urewe furnace can be dated more reliably than a reign remembered in the royal genealogies.
Look at the photograph from Caput Nili. Give two things it shows a historian and two limits of it as a source.
"Without written records, the history of precolonial Rwanda cannot be known." Assess this statement.

Show answersHide answers

Any three, for example: identity and heritage (royal sites, dynastic poetry, umuganura); understanding the present (colonial roots of division); learning from the past (preventing genocide after 1994); critical thinking (exposing false colonial theories); citizenship (resisting propaganda); skills and careers (museums, tourism, law, journalism).
Ubucurabwenge: the genealogies of kings and queen mothers. Ibisigo: dynastic poems in praise of kings. Ubwiru: the secret code of royal rituals. Ibitekerezo: court histories of reigns, wars and heroes, recited in song or prose.
(a) Primary, archaeological (material) evidence. (b) Primary, written (a traveller's eyewitness account). (c) Secondary, written (a later interpretation). (d) Primary, oral tradition (its recording is later, but the poem is the court's own composition).
Radiocarbon dating measures the age of the charcoal itself, and the smiths burned freshly cut wood, so the date belongs to the furnace. The genealogies count reigns, not years; turning them into dates needs an assumed length for each generation, so different historians reach different dates.
Shows: how a chief travelled, carried in a woven litter; that he moved with many attendants carrying long staffs, a sign of rank; the clothing of the period. Limits: one moment chosen by a European author for European readers; the caption names only the chief and explains nothing; we do not know if the scene was posed; a photograph cannot show what Rwandans thought of it.
Partly true for exact dates and for events before the 1890s, which only oral tradition records, often without calendar years. But largely false: archaeology dates settlement and iron-working from the Early Iron Age; language evidence traces very old movements of people and ideas; oral traditions, kept by court specialists, preserve the order of reigns, wars and rituals; museum objects show crafts and daily life. Used together and checked against one another, they let historians write a reliable history, with written records adding detail only for the last years of the kingdom.

Quick check

Which source would tell you most about how people in Rwanda smelted iron about 1,800 years ago?

Key points

History is an argued account built from evidence; studying it builds identity, explains the present, helps prevent disasters such as genocide, and trains critical citizens.
Precolonial Rwanda is known from five kinds of evidence: oral traditions (above all ubucurabwenge, ibisigo, ubwiru and ibitekerezo), archaeology (the Urewe Early Iron Age), language, written records (only from 1892) and material culture.
Each source has strengths and weaknesses: oral traditions served the dynasty and count generations; archaeology dates reliably but names no one; European writers were biased outsiders.
Strong conclusions come from corroboration: independent sources that agree. Test every source with PACT.

Sources and credits

Facts checked against Wikipedia contributors, Gustav Adolf von Götzen, Oscar Baumann, Richard Kandt, Save, Rwanda, Urewe and Ibitekerezo, Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0; dates and facts only, adapted by Ganzaa.
Map: Urewe Culture Map, Yaldi5, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Photo: Chifu Kaware safarini (Kandt 1904 II, 97), from Richard Kandt, Caput Nili (Berlin, 1904), via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Video: "The Ethnographic Museum-Rwanda", Inteko y'Umuco (Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy), embedded from YouTube.

Written by Ganzaa: the reasons table, the source tables, the timeline diagram, PACT and the exercises. This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.

1A kingdom older than its first written page

2Why we study history

3The five kinds of evidence for precolonial Rwanda

4Weighing the evidence

A kingdom older than its first written page

Why we study history

The five kinds of evidence for precolonial Rwanda

Weighing the evidence