Defeat Is the Only Bad News: Rwanda under Musinga, 1896–1931

8. Divide and Rule, 1922-1925: Emerging Factions at the Court

184 8 Divide and Rule, 1922– 1925 Emerging Factions at the Court Ubuhake bubi bujya kukwica bukaguca iwaariyu. [When a bad master wants to destroy you, he isolates you from your kin.] Through 1922 Musinga and Kanjogera continued to rule effectively and to hold the loyalty of most of the Court notables. But the concessions they had made to the Europeans and the defection of the Inshongore had unmistakably altered life at Court. The Belgians, the Court, and the Inshongore In 1922 the German missionary E. von der Heyden returned to Nyanza for the first time since the war. He found the royal residence virtually unchanged, dozens of neat grass buildings surrounded by a maze of interconnecting enclosures and passages. Still clustered around the royal residence were the homes of the ten thousand or so notables and servants who were in attendance on the Court. He remembered the royal enclosure as being full of notables who had vied for the privilege of entering there, where they might observe the mwami and perhaps be noticed by him. Now von der Heyden found it strangely empty. Since the administrator Louis Lenaerts was at the residence so frequently during the day, the notables had begun saving their visits for the evenings when they would not have to see him. Lenaerts, who had succeeded Defawe as the administrator at Nyanza, was named Bwanakweri, “Mr. Truth,” by the Rwandans because that was what he was always demanding in his dealings with the notables. Trained as a teacher, Lenaerts had been recruited to direct the school at Nyanza and then was later brought into service as an administrator. Good-natured and well-intentioned but blind to the complexities of the matters he handled, Lenaerts from the start had made himself at home in the royal enclosure. On the occasion of von der Heyden’s visit, the missionary sat down properly to chat with the mwami outside his residence , but Lenaerts casually darted in and out of the house, neglectful of the strict sense of privacy that even ordinary Rwandans felt about their homes. Eager to show the German missionary the progress that the Court had made under Belgian rule, Lenaerts was soon calling von der Heyden away, interrupting his courtesy visit to the mwami and leading him through narrow passages to another enclosure. There, Musinga’s oldest children were waiting all in a row, attired in ill-fitting European clothes; Lenaerts doubtless appreciated the visitor’s gasp of surprise and delight. After taking von der Heyden to talk with Kanjogera—an experience that would not have been open to him in 1914—Lenaerts concluded his tour of the royal quarters and allowed the missionary to take his leave. Von der Heyden was properly impressed but carried away the feeling that although “civilization is certainly something very good, yet it seemed to me that something valuable had also been taken away.”1 Musinga seemed to him much older and greatly disturbed by the loss of that “something valuable,” which the missionary could not identify more precisely; yet the mwami also seemed “valiant” in his determination to continue trying to rule as he had before.2 Musinga’s distress resulted not just from such trivial but humiliating daily compromises he had to make with the ever-present Belgians, but also from the growing influence of the Inshongore. The mwami treated the administrator with cordial courtesy, but Lenaerts, like Defawe, responded more readily to the attentions of the Inshongore. Worried by the success of his enemies with Lenaerts, Musinga was susceptible to suggestions that the Inshongore had won supporters even among his own wives. At any one time Musinga had seven or eight wives in addition to several concubines. The majority of the wives, including the two who competed for the place of favorite, Nyirakabuga and Kanyange, were Bega. Nyirakabuga, the mother of two sons and two daughters by Musinga, was a niece of Kanjogera. Handsome, witty, bold, and ambitious , she was an excellent example of what people thought of Bega women—at least in the eyes of those who equated political power with personal presentation. Kanyange, of less distinguished antecedents, was Divide and Rule, 1922–1925 185 apparently more gentle and retiring. She had given Musinga two sons and a daughter. The rivalry between the wives naturally focused on the question of whose son would succeed Musinga. At the end of the war, Kanyange had been...