The Mwami of Rwanda: a brief history

For these ten weeks of Peace Corps training, I am living in the town of Nyanza. It is the capital of Rwanda's Southern Province, yet it's considered rural (which I find funny since there are 230,000 residents and several internet cafés). We're about an hour and a half from the national capital, Kigali.

The coolest thing about Nyanza is that for hundreds of years, it was home to the King of Rwanda and thus was the heart of the kingdom. I've now had the opportunity to visit the museum and palaces here in Nyanza, as well as the national museum in Butare, so I'll share some of the interesting historical stuff I've learned. (Apologies for any inaccuracies; I am far from an expert. Most of the facts here were taken from Rwanda: The Bradt Travel Guide, Philip Briggs and Janice Booth, 2001.)

Because of its geographical location deep in central Africa, Rwanda was very isolated until as late as the 1890s. Unlike neighboring Tanzania and Kenya, here there is no evidence of visits from Arab or Asian merchants. In Rwanda there was very little foreign trade and no known monetary system. Also, notably, Rwanda is one of a few African countries never to have sold its people (or enemies) into slavery.

Written language is only a recent phenomenon in Rwanda, and thus most of its history is known only through oral tradition. It is generally accepted that the Kingdom of Rwanda was founded in the 10th-11th century. In the language Kinyarwanda, the king was called a mwami. As a rule, he was of Tutsi ethnicity and was considered the principal authority of the land. The well-being of the country was inseparable from the health of the mwami; if he fell ill, people worried that trouble was in store.

The royal palace was located in Nyanza. The original ancient palace has been destroyed, but a replica was reconstructed close to its original site. Now, when I hear the word palace, I typically think of towering ramparts and moats with drawbridges. In Rwanda it was a little different: namely a large compound of circular straw huts. The mwami's personal hut was by far the tallest, with a huge bed ("California king size" does not begin to describe it) made of animal skin stretched tightly across a wooden frame. Outside his hut was a sort of foyer for receiving his subjects, as the mwami served as supreme judge in all disputes. Many smaller huts housed all the mwami's retinue: cooks, hunters, guards, runners, hangmen, and palanquin bearers (to transport the mwami on his covered litter); those in charge of weapons, those in charge of wardrobe, and those in charge of furniture; historians, dancers, musicians, mimes, soothsayers, magicians, and artisans.

In contrast to most of Africa, Rwanda and Burundi were not given artificial borders by European colonizers. They had both been established kingdoms for centuries when, in the Berlin Conference of 1885, they were assigned (as "Ruanda-Urundi") to Germany as part of German East Africa. Interestingly, hitherto no white man had ever set foot there.

The first official European visit to Rwanda was by a German count in 1894. He visited Nyanza and met the mwami, Rwabugiri. The foreigner caused an uproar among the aristocrats when he dared to shake the mwami's hand. Surely disaster would follow, they reasoned! (Perhaps they were right -- the beginning of the end, of life as they knew it...) It's worth noting that at this point the mwami had no idea that his kingdom had been "officially" under German sovereignty for the past nine years. The Germans in fact were rather surprised to find Rwanda so highly organized, with tight hierarchies and administrative divisions.

But Germany didn't stay in Rwanda very long. Belgians invaded in World War I, and a succeeding League of Nations mandate in 1919 officially transferred the territory to them. At this time the mwami was Musinga, but he resented colonization so much that Belgium eventually forced him to abdicate the throne in 1931. His more westernized son, Mutara III Charles Rudahigwa, became the new mwami. To match his new attitude, Mutara was given a new home, built by the Belgians. The traditional straw hut was abandoned in favor of a "modern palace," a Western mansion of polished marble floors. It still stands in Nyanza, although personally I found it far less appealing to walk through than the original home. While the mwami's hut was fragrant, dark, cozy, and peaceful, the Belgian palace is cold, uninviting, vast, and austere.


Mutara generally accepted the colonists and even paid a visit to Belgium himself. In the palace museum there is a particularly striking photo of the mwami, in his traditional robes and headdress, face-to-face with a giraffe in a zoo.

The Belgians later built another, more imposing palace for Mutara. It still sits high atop one of Nyanza's many hills, making it visible from a great distance. Unfortunately, Mutara passed away in 1959 just before it was finished, but today the palace houses a really splendid art museum (with an awe-inspiring panoramic view).


The people of Rwanda started itching for independence in the 1950s, as did much of Africa. In 1961, Rwanda's elected local administrators assembled at a large public meeting with 25,000 supporters. Together, they declared Rwanda a republic, and the United Nations had little choice but to accept this self-determination. Independence was confirmed in 1962.

I believe the museum guide said that the last surviving Queen Mother was killed in Butare during the genocide. But Kigeli V, the last mwami, went into exile after Rwanda's independence. He fled to Tanzania, then Kenya and Uganda, and he is currently living in Washington, DC. This is crazy to me. I wonder what his house is like? Does he insist to his neighbors, "I was a KING in Africa!" -- ?? And they say, "Sure, sure, crazy old man..."

Slowly by slowly

Imagine you're in high school, and you're taking some pretty tough classes. At first you were failing, and you almost wanted to drop out entirely, but you've worked really hard and paid attention and you're finally managing to do well. It feels good; you've earned these successes.

Then suddenly, by no fault of your own, you are informed that effective immediately you are going to have to repeat kindergarten.

This is kind of how I feel right now.

I am still really excited to be in Rwanda, but I guess the newness of it has worn off a bit and I'm realizing that it's not so fun to be a trainee all over again. In Mauritania, I had worked so hard -- to know how to travel from point A to point B, to negotiate the market, and especially to learn to speak Pulaar. I really prided myself on being able to shock locals by being perhaps the first white person they'd ever heard speaking their language. Now I'm back to square one. I go into a little corner store and greet the shopkeeper in Kinyarwanda, but when he lights up and replies with further questions, I can only stammer that I don't understand. I hate that.

This pre-service training (PST) is really different from my last experience. (I feel like a broken record comparing the two all the time, but it's impossible not to.) Just one week after I got to Mauritania, I was dropped off in a dusty village of 50 people with only three other trainees. We had no electricity or running water. I was given a room with a host family who spoke only Pulaar. (At the time I arrived to their home, all I could say was "How are you?" -- and smile. A lot of smiling.) For the 10 weeks of training and my following year of service, I slept on the ground on a foam pad. From day 1 I was "eating with my right" -- hand, that is, sitting on the floor around a communal bowl -- and "wiping with my left," in an open-air latrine. I had language class for eight hours a day, sitting outside on the sand in the shade of a grass hut. And it was all wildly exotic, sure, but it wasn't so difficult. Being with a family really forced me to learn intimately all about the culture and language.

But Peace Corps Rwanda is only 10 months old, and Rwandans are evidently more private than Mauritanians, so we were not able to live with host families for this training. Instead, all the trainees and Rwandan facilitators are split between four houses in the same community. We have electricity and tiled floors and Western toilets and toilet paper and brand new bunk beds. Someone comes to clean our house and do our laundry. We eat our meals together, all the trainees and staff, and we have tables and chairs and silverware and individual place settings (such foreign ideas, I know!). All our classes take place in a central location, so essentially I am just with 34 other Americans all day every day. It feels like I live in a college dorm. Clearly, this is not very conducive to foreign language immersion.

So, to borrow a phrase from Rwandan English, "slowly by slowly" I am learning some Kinyarwanda, frustrating as it may be. I am very eager to get my final site placement, but I probably will not find out about that for several more weeks. Since we are the first group of TEFL PCVs, our future sites are new posts, and they have not all been selected yet. This Wednesday through Friday I will be visiting a PCV currently serving in the Health sector, to experience a sampling of life there. It's pretty likely that I won't get to see my own site until the moment I'm dropped off there permanently. So it goes serving in a new Peace Corps country, I guess.

Apologies for the complaining! I am having some good times, I promise. For one thing, the fruit here is absolutely amazing. It's safe to say tree tomatoes are a new obsession, and I'm also enjoying passionfruit and the best bananas and pineapple I've ever tasted.

And in other news, this weekend we had a great Halloween party that I helped to plan. It was the first such celebration for most of our Rwandan staff members, so it was amusing to try to explain to them all the little Halloween traditions we have in America. "You dress in clothing to look like someone different. And you go to houses of people you don't know and ask for candy, and they have to give it to you. And you buy pumpkins and cut them into faces or shapes, and you light candles inside of them" -- how bizarre, honestly.

Somewhat for the occasion of Halloween, but really just for kicks: fellow PCV Megan and I had shaved our heads together last year, so we went the opposite route this time and got long extensions braided into our hair. Synthetic hair is really cheap in the markets here (like just over a dollar a pack) and comes in every color and texture you could dream of. I opted for mid-length brown with magenta tips. The braiding took about four hours and cost me 3000 Rwandan francs, about 6 bucks. Pretty great, I think. It's fun to have long hair again, for a time!

My subsequent "costume" wasn't too terribly original, but the Rwandans enjoyed it... ;)