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M  M M 11 TRICK CYCLISTS? Recontextualizing Rwandan Dynastic Chronology  The ideology of kingship asserted that kingship was legitimated by its antiquity : the dynasty was at the heart of Rwandan culture, so the founding of the dynasty must (logically) correspond to the origin of the culture. By one official source, that meant that kingship in Rwanda was formed in  and followed invariable father-to-son succession to . Court sources claimed to substantiate that chronology by drawing on tie-ins linking the Rwandan genealogy to the chronologies of royal lines in neighboring states. But internal evidence casts doubt both on the depth of such a proposed chronology and even on the sovereign status of some of those individuals named in the official Rwandan king list. Analysis of the dynastic histories of four neighboring states only confirms such skepticism; both internal and external evidence suggest quite a different (and much shorter) royal chronology for Rwanda than that presented in the official sources. Based on detailed analysis of the comparative data, this chapter proposes a reassessment of both the chronology and the content of the “official” king list of Rwanda, showing again how historical analysis can apply even to fundamental elements of society—in this case the chronology of kingship. The Conundrum of Chronology C    an object of great interest among African historians because it was seen as essential to history, it provided exactitude where so much else was interpretive, and it was such a challenging feature to determine from oral accounts. More recently, historical analysis has been concerned more with processes and periods than with defined events and dates.₁ Although deemed to be useful when available, precise chronology is now seen as less essential to historical reconstruction; it is accepted that chronologies are subject to interpretation and debate, and that these debates themselves illuminate the way in which local communities reconstruct—and historians understand— history. This chapter addresses such issues of debate, contestation, and negotiation —that is, it explores the nature of intellectual hegemony—but it does so across cultural boundaries. It thus illustrates a fundamental contradiction in the manner by which historians have treated cultural units defined as distinct: while as independent polities they have been assumed to be culturally autonomous, yet source material from one is often drawn on to fill in the gaps of others. This procedure was especially common where there were powerful kingdoms whose political boundaries were assumed to be rigid and inviolate. The states of the western Interlacustrine area, each believed to be ruled by an established dynastic line whose origins reached far back into antiquity, provide an exemplary illustration of this process. By the early twentieth century, at the time of European conquest, Rwanda was one of the most powerful of these states, having either conquered and absorbed , or at least dominated, many of the distinct kingdoms with which it formerly competed. The political ascendancy of Rwanda was also reflected in its historical luster, for the power that ensured its regional political hegemony also legitimated its historical claims, at least in the eyes of many. Rwandan power also attracted the interest of Europeans; it is not surprising that many of the first written works on the dynastic history of the region focused on Rwandan court traditions. Over time these early attempts were elaborated, consolidated, and standardized, a process culminating in the massive corpus produced from the s by Alexis Kagame, a Rwandan priest. Others studying in this region often came to refer to this work as the validating text,the central historical core to which other histories were compared; among neighboring dynastic histories, each M  M Trick Cyclists? individual chronicle taken in isolation was proven correct only if it conformed to—and thus implicitly confirmed—the official Rwandan texts. However, a new pattern emerges when these different dynastic histories are viewed not in isolation, each in its own terms relative to Rwanda, but in regional perspective. Within this framework, certain patterns emerge: in every case we know of, the dynastic genealogies of states outside Rwanda are shorter than the official Rwandan chronology and by approximately the same amount. Furthermore , where these are known to have been revised, in every case they were lengthened—with the Rwandan dynastic history as the validating factor for its extension . In other words, when looked at within a regional perspective, the Rwandan line becomes itself an exception to the general pattern, rather than its exemplar . To explore...

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