Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom

4. Government in the Eighteenth Century

99 4 Government in the Eighteenth Century Having offered a general presentation of the progress of centralization in the Nyiginya kingdom during the eighteenth century, we now come to a discussion of government in action in which we will focus on the doings of the historical actors. These actors formed a community at court that included the leaders of the elites as well as the kings. It is important to emphasize the role of the leaders of the elites, for the personal role of the kings has been quite exaggerated in the historiography, depicting the situation as if it all depended only on the whims of the kings. In fact, political action seems rather to have been the result of the partly contradictory goals pursued by a variety of actors. The data allow us to examine two different facets of this activity: the internal struggle for power and the attempts made to extend that power over new lands, either directly by the use of force or indirectly by diplomatic means. Government from Gisanura to Rwaka As the source material stemming from the court portrays political history as a succession of autocratic actions by the sovereigns who were accountable to no one, such a history is therefore mainly determined by the character of each individual king in succession and its natural unit is the individual reign. A few, vague remembrances about Gisanura the Just are followed by the lurid portrait of a demented Mazimpaka. Better not even to mention his son Rwaka. Rujugira towers over all others in this century as a result of his ritual and military reforms, his wars and his conquests, and even his long life, but his personality comes across as that of a rather dim administrator. Then comes a martial Ndabarasa, long in the shadow of his father whose footsteps he followed without introducing any further innovations. But this official history obscures the play of politics and the struggle among individuals, families, and elite groups for the ear of the king, as well as the attempts of the king to obtain support and obedience by manipulating the rivalries among persons and among groups. Yet, nevertheless, the existence of such struggles and rivalries have left fairly many traces in the memories of the past. Such rivalries were particularly pronounced during the succession crises. On the occasion of each succession, even the most straightforward one, the kingdom entered in a state of crisis. Nearly always, several candidates were eligible and the political elites had to choose whom to back and to evaluate what advantage they could derive from doing so. If the lineages of the queen mothers and the groups allied to a candidate by marriage, or again by a direct ubuhake contract, backed their son, husband , or patron, the other important families, especially those of the ritualists or the descendants of earlier monarchs, found themselves faced by a sometimes difficult choice on which hung their future. Support at the right time for a winning candidate could yield a fortune, while a miscalculation could lead to disgrace and sometimes to persecution or exile. Thus a time of succession always provoked a high fever at court and in the country. Even following the succession crisis and its aftermath, the struggle for influence among the leaders of the great families did not completely abate. Everyone tried to exercise as much personal power as possible in the name of the king and to ruin their enemies. The internal political history of the country is the tale of these unceasing rivalries among the great leaders as well as between them and the king. After an unknown period of time since Ndori’s reign, the curtain rises on the dramatic scene of the refusal by the lords living south of the Nyabarongo to recognize Gisanura as the new king, a scene that underscores the point that the king did not rule alone.1 We think that this occurred during a struggle for the succession. In explaining that they all ended up recognizing him but that every single one of them remained in control of his own territory, the tradition, in effect, documents, even though camouflaging it, a whole struggle for power. Gisanura was certainly supported by the Ha lineage of the queen mother-to-be and by those of his wives among whom one counts a Kono lineage that was probably related to the lineage of the Kono abiru kings. He was certainly backed by his Imitari company and...