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

Editor's Introduction

xxiii E’ I Situating the Rwandan Court at the Time of Musinga’s Accession to Power A soft rain was falling at Rucunshu late in the afternoon on a day near the end of November 1896. But the desultory weather belied the political intensity of the moment as several armies gathered at this hill near central Rwanda; this engagement was the culmination of an intense confrontation between two well-armed factions following the death of Kigeri Rwabugiri, one of Rwanda’s most renowned warrior kings. In the heat of the battle to follow, an eminent member of the royal Court of Rwanda hoisted a young teenage boy to his shoulder and declared him king. Yuhi Musinga had acceded to power in Rwanda. Musinga, however, had not been the designated heir to Rwabugiri. Six years earlier Rwabugiri had named another son, Rutarindwa, as his co-ruler. But each ruler needed a queen mother to exercise power, and with the earlier death of Rutarindwa’s mother, Rwabugiri had appointed his favorite wife to serve as Rutarindwa’s adoptive mother. Her name was Kanjogera, and as a member of the Bakagara lineage of the Bega clan she was destined to be a powerful figure at the Court for many years. Kanjogera, however, already had a son of her own. It was he, Musinga, who would accede to power at Rucunshu following fifteen months of strategic maneuvering on the part of Kanjogera supported by her two brothers, Kabare and Ruhinankiko, and their allies, in a rapidly shifting political field of constant negotiation and competing loyalties that characterized the Court of the day. Rwandan royal traditions portray an ancient, stable kingdom in this area near the center of Africa. But in the violent aftermath of this coup d’état the ruling lineage of the Nyiginya dynasty was nearly annihilated. Far from the official image of a long series of carefully ordered royal successions, Musinga’s accession was the seventh of the last eight reigns in which royal succession had diverged from the ideological norms of the kingdom. Such intense competition revealed the violence at the heart of the Court and shattered the image of a peaceful society unified by custom and law and united in a powerful social coherence that transcended distinctions of ethnicity, race, and class. The coup of Rucunshu did more than define a royal successor, however . It also reasserted the power of an important aristocratic lineage, one of several whose positions had been eroded under Rwabugiri’s reign. And it did so at the time of another momentous change for the kingdom: the first official German representative was to arrive at the Court four months after the coup of Rucunshu. Closely coinciding with the establishment of European power in the region, the cataclysm—or the triumph—at Rucunshu was to initiate a period of great uncertainty at the Court that was to last for a decade. The political struggles to flow from those events form the focus of this book. Over a reign of almost thirty years Musinga’s father, Kigeri Rwabugiri , had initiated intense military activity abroad. His campaigns were directed to the south, the southwest, the west, the northwest, the north, and the southeast. Many locales within Rwanda itself also felt the effects of Rwabugiri’s almost continual mobilization for war. Associated with these campaigns, the expanding demands for food, livestock, construction materials, and personnel (notably as porters for armies incessantly on the move) had extended Court power into many regions hitherto spared such intrusive presence. Along with Court personnel and military occupation came the introduction of a political hierarchy and cultural stratification that affected local relations in these areas. However, such conquests often did not last beyond Rwabugiri’s lifetime; many areas occupied by Rwabugiri’s armies rejected the rule of the Rwandan Court immediately after Rwabugiri’s death. At the time of the coup of Rucunshu , therefore, the Court was preoccupied with its attempt to retain (or regain) control over such regions. This is the immediate background to the events at the Court so vividly portrayed in Des Forges’s work. In addition to his external campaigns, Rwabugiri had also instituted significant internal transformations, most notably in his attempts to diminish the entrenched power of the aristocratic lineages of the royal Court. The coup that replaced Rwabugiri’s designated successor with xxiv Editor’s Introduction the young Musinga was part of the process by which one...