In this second exclusive interview with African Facts, historian Jean-Pierre Chrétien discusses the political and social organisation of the Great Lakes region’s kingdoms prior to colonisation.
He had not given an interview in ten years. Jean-Pierre Chrétien, 88, is a leading historian of the Great Lakes region and an honorary research director at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). He is one of the foremost experts on pre-colonial and contemporary Burundi and Rwanda. He agreed to give a series of exclusive interviews to African Facts.
Having told us about the initial spark of interest that led him to research Burundi in the 1960s, Jean-Pierre Chrétien sheds light on the political and social organisation of the pre-colonial kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi. This is a welcome reminder from the author of reference works such as The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History ( Zone Books, 2003), at a time when some people are still attempting to falsify history.
African Facts: What were the main features and characteristics of societies in the Great Lakes region before colonisation, in your opinion?
Jean-Pierre Chrétien: Ouch, ouch, ouch (laughs).
There were about fifteen kingdoms. Rwanda and Burundi were two large ones, but there was also Buganda, which gave its name to the British protectorate of Uganda. There were also other kingdoms in the north-west of what is now Tanzania and small ones to the east of the Congo Basin. These political systems combined religion and power, making the ruler a kind of intermediary between natural and supernatural forces.
In Burundi, for example, the annual Muganuro festival, which marks the sowing of sorghum at the end of the year in December, is a key moment for reaffirming royal power. During this festival, the king receives delegations from all regions of the country who come with gifts and renew the loyalty of all subjects. This religious and festive occasion demonstrates that the sovereign was considered the holder of moral and religious authority. The same was true in Rwanda.
So that’s the political side of things.
— What about the social level?
Despite their almost complete cultural and linguistic homogeneity, Burundian and Rwandan societies were characterised by a cleavage between a group that could be summarised as agricultural and peasant, the Bahutu, and another group known as pastoral, the Batutsi. There is also a third, smaller group: the Batwa, who are distinguished by their hunting and gathering skills, and the women’s pottery-making skills.
However, beyond this kind of Bahutu’s vocation with agriculture and the Batutsi’s with cows, the reality is different. Many Bahutu have cows. Among Tutsi families, there is certainly a small minority of aristocrats who do little and have subjects who cultivate the land for them, but otherwise, they also practise agriculture. However, in the collective imagination — as developed by Cornelius Castoriadis — some are considered to have a green thumb, while others are considered to be gifted at looking after cows.
Note from African Facts Editor: Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) was a French-Greek philosopher and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group and journal (1949–1965). Human imagination lies at the heart of his thinking and runs through his work. He conceived the collective imagination as a set of meaningful ideas, imagined, instituted and shared by members of the same society, which give meaning to the world, structure reality and make communal life possible through language and institutions.
This social imagination plays a concrete role. Because in this country where there is no currency, virtually no trade, and where exchanges consist of bartering, there is still a process of exchange, both social and economic, centred around the cow: contracts called ubuhake in Rwanda, ubugabire in Burundi. When someone gives you a cow, you are obliged to them. You are not a serf, but you are bound to them. And so society is permeated by all these relationships of inequality. It is not egalitarian at all.
Otherwise, this social imagination mainly revolves around royal and princely courts. The sovereign moves between at least fifty residences. At the king’s court, there is a certain staging. The Hutu provide cooks and clean or rebuild enclosures, while the Tutsi send their children to look after cattle, particularly milking and herding them. It is a staging.
– Do you mean that these Hutu and Tutsi divisions were, in fact, symbolic?
– Yes.
– You say that there were profound inequalities before colonisation…
– Some people say, “Ah, it was wonderful before. It was paradise!” No, that’s not true. Rwanda and Burundi are human societies. So there is violence; there are contradictions; and so on. It’s not democratic. Unequal exchange exists. But that doesn’t mean there were two completely antagonistic, homogeneous blocs: the Tutsi on one side and the Hutu on the other. It’s more complicated than that.
— Lastly, regarding social categories. What was the structuring factor at the time? Was it these symbolic designations — Hutu and Tutsi — or rather kinship ties, clans and lineages?
— The second answer, of course.
As I said, at the king’s court, there was a staging of this fracture between Hutu and Tutsi, who had different vocations and so on. But in the countryside, it was lineages that mattered: the imiryango in Burundi and the amoko in Rwanda. Lineage experience was fundamental. Moreover, the lineage experience was not stable. I mean that there were migrations, displacements due to political upheavals. There were fragmentations, and so on.
— Was there a noticeable difference in the organisation between Rwanda and Burundi?
— Although Rwanda and Burundi speak almost the same language and are neighbours, the structure I am talking about was completely different in the two countries.
In Burundi, there is a separate category: the Baganwa, who are princes of royal blood. They are neither Hutu nor Tutsi. This complicates matters helpfully (laughs). In Burundi, there were between 140 and 150 imiryango, also known as clans or extended lineages — groups of people who were supposed to have a common ancestor.
In Rwanda, there were around thirty amoko, which referred to clans in ancient Rwanda, but were very large structures. Each ubwoko [singular of amoko, Ed] included Hutu, Tutsi and Twa.
— Were there any particular tensions within these societies at the time?
— In the 19th century, the situation worsened somewhat on a social level, even before the great cattle plague of 1890, which strained relations between herders and farmers. Since the end of the 18th century, the introduction of plants of American origin into the region indirectly had a significant impact. These included maize, sweet potatoes and beans — which became staple foods in those mountains. These plants had not always been present there. We know that they gradually spread throughout the region. The result is an agricultural landscape with several harvests per year, particularly of the bean-maize combination. This led to greater pressure on the land at that time, creating tension between pastoralism and agriculture.
— We were talking about “kings” and “kingdoms”. This could create the impression that we are modelling this on European feudalism and the Middle Ages. Many people do this. However, it is actually something completely different, isn’t it?
– Yes, absolutely. The vocabulary is indeed misleading.
– What are the consequences, other than semantic ones?
– Missionaries were keen on medieval history and comparisons of this kind, particularly in Rwanda. This was especially true of Father Pagès [Albert, 1883–1951, a French priest who spent most of his life in Rwanda as a member of the Missionaries of Africa (nicknamed the ‘White Fathers’), a fervent supporter and promoter of a racialised interpretation of Rwandan society, Ed.], and Canon de Lacger [Louis, 1871–1961, a French priest and historian, author in 1939 of a widely distributed pamphlet popularising the racist ideas of Pagès, Ed.]. The key idea was that if the king and the aristocrats were converted, then the rest of society would follow, a little like Charlemagne [king and then emperor of the Franks at the end of the 8th and beginning of the 9th century, Ed.] with the Saxons [a Germanic people of the early Middle Ages who were then pagans, Ed.].
As early as the end of the German era and the beginning of the Belgian era, Monsignor Léon Classe, the apostolic vicar of Rwanda, had structured this vision: the “lords” must be converted as a priority. To achieve this, they were given advantages, particularly in terms of education at seminaries and, above all, at the Astrida school group — now known as Huye — where the sons of chiefs were educated. But it didn’t stop there. In Rwanda in particular, there was an obvious “Tutsi privilege”. And this instilled in the minds of these generations of modern Rwandan students the idea of inequality, endorsed by the Europeans. The Tutsi felt they were truly wonderful people, while the Hutu felt frustrated.
Note from African Facts Editor: At the seminary and the Astrida school group, children were educated as boarders. This cut them off from the family and societal transmission modes that had prevailed until then, and they were acculturated by the Belgian colonisers.
– Let’s rewind one last time, to before colonisation. Did borders exist at that time in the contemporary sense of the word?
– My immediate response would be to say yes (laughs).
Obviously, there were no maps. But we know that this territory belonged to the Mwami [title given to monarchs and traditional chiefs, Ed.] of Burundi and that territory belonged to the Mwami of Rwanda. The distinction between the two is clear. There are some minor uncertainties in the Rusizi Plain [an area bordering the river of the same name that connects Lakes Kivu and Tanganyika, on the border between Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo, Ed.]. This is because, in the first half of the 19th century, the Kingdom of Burundi annexed several regions belonging to smaller kingdoms known as Buha. However, the borders are marked by the terrain. We know it is where this particular rivers or sacred forests are located.
When the Germans arrived in Rwanda, the situation was very clear. The Rwandans sent the message: “Leopold II wants to go right into our mountains. No way! Our borders are on the Rusizi River and Lake Kivu”. The Germans were fine with that, of course. It was a little more complicated for the Burundians, however, because King Mwezi refused contact.
– And what about North Kivu?
– Basically, the current border corresponds to the old one, but with a few hesitations. For example, the regions of Goma and Bwisha [chiefdom of the Rutshuru territory, north of Goma, on the border with Uganda, Ed.] very clearly belonged to the Mwami of Rwanda. Another point that needs to be clarified is that there were people who spoke Kinyarwanda but were not from the kingdom — they were outsiders. It’s similar to how there are French speakers in Belgium or Switzerland. This was particularly the case throughout North Kivu. So it was a cultural area, but not a political one.
