Rwanda’s inhabitants have been agricultural and
pastoral. They have been tied to the
land in the landlocked nation which allowed a centralized state to
develop. Those close ties have affected
Rwanda’s economy and artistic expression.
Cattle and land has provided agricultural and hierarchal foundations
throughout Rwanda’s history.
The Urewe culture settled in the Great Lakes region,
which includes Rwanda, in the first millennium BC. There was still Urewe culture in Rwanda until
1200-1600 AD. The culture was known for
its pottery and Iron smelting. Origin
myths speak of Gihanga, an early Rwandan king who brought pottery and the skill
of making spears and tools to the country.[1] At the beginning of the Late Iron Age
(600-900 AD) the Urewe were making roulette-decorated pottery.[2] Today, Batwa (Twa) in Rwanda still produce
this kind of pottery. The Pottery
Project is a British funded program that helps the Batwa market their pottery
and improve their techniques in an effort to bolster Rwanda’s economy.[3]
 | |||
| Batwa women with traditional pottery. Roulette decoration on the pots. image by Doublearc, "Batwa Women in Burundi," Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Batwa_women_in_Burundi.jpg. |
One of the traditional Rwandan art forms is Imigongo,
which is artwork made from cow dung. The
colors are paints that are made directly from nature. Yellows and reds can be made out of clay from
Rwanda’s soil, and black can be created from ash from banana peels.[4] Imigongo was used as household décor
traditionally. Imigongo is an art form
that is directly connected to the land and cattle and is an example of how the
Rwandans used the land around them not only for food but for cultural
expression.
 |
| Imigongo Traditional Pattern, photo by Ji Elle (own work), accessed at Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Imigongo#/media/File:Imigongo_traditional_patterns_(2).jpg |
Social and economic distinctions can be seen in
Rwandan use of music and dance. Rwandan
society is made up of three groups: Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa. Tutsi were the cattle owners, members of
society with the most wealth. The Hutu
were the farmers and the largest number of the population, while the Twa were
the hunter/ gatherers. The differences
between the Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa are more about where they stand in the social
order than the ethnic distinctions that have been prominent since colonial
times.[5] The Hutu have songs about harvesting, Tutsi lyrics
focus on conquest and cattle, and Twa songs celebrate hunting.[6]
HUHS Travel Study, "Rwandan Traditional Dance," March 5, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc-_8QI2nPs.
Cattle have played a large part in Rwanda’s
history. Cattle has determined position
and power in Rwanda. The Nyiginya
Kingdom was a centralized state in Rwanda that was ruled by cattle families. They became the elite over the farmers and
formed armies from members of lower class families who paid tribute to the
elite. Ndori was a pastoralist ruler who
established the Nyiginya Kingdom which covered the area of modern day Rwanda in
addition to part of southern Uganda by the end of the eighteenth century.[7] The Tutsi king Mwami Kigeri IV established
the borders of Rwanda more closely resembling modern ones in the nineteenth
century and were the existing borders when the Germans arrived in Rwanda in
1894.[8] The official national borders were
established in 1910 by Colonial agreement.
There have been few changes to the borders in the years since.
 |
| Map of the Provinces of Rwanda since 2006 image by Actnx, "Provinces Since 1 January 2006," Wikimedia Commons, htpps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Maps_of_Rwanda#/media/File:Rwanda_Provinces_2006.png |
Rwanda became a Belgian territory after World War I
when it was granted to them by the League of Nations.[9] Up to that point Rwanda’s land had been used
for sustenance farming. Belgium
introduced coffee and tea as cash crops.
Coffee production began in Rwanda in 1925 when the Belgians started a
coffee program by obligating chiefs to dedicate time and land to grow the crop.[10] Today, exports have increased but due to high
population density sustenance farming is still a primary focus of
agriculture.
The land is good for farming and benefits from being
enriched by the volcanoes present in the country. The fertile land has a beauty that modern
Rwanda is using to attract tourism to the country. Rwanda’s has one of the highest population
densities in Africa. It is difficult to
keep the land from being overused by farming.
National Parks have provided protected land for some of Rwanda’s diverse
ecosystems. There are several notable
areas of protected land that lie on Rwanda’s borders. Lake Kivu is one of the Great African Lakes
and is located on the border that Rwanda shares with the Democratic Republic of
Congo. North of there, bordering Congo
and Uganda is Volcanoes National Park.
Akagera National Park is located in both Rwanda and neighboring
Tanzania. It has multiple habitats from
mountains to savanna to swamp and contains over 300 different species of birds. The Nyungwe Rainforest lies along Rwanda’s
southern border with Burundi. It is a
protected rainforest and over 12 species of chimpanzees reside there.[11]
Due to being landlocked, Rwanda’s trade capabilities
are inhibited by a lack of access to water and rail trade routes. As such, Christianity moved into Rwanda in
the early 1900s, later than many other African nations. Outside cultural influences did not enter
into the country in a way that altered its societal development. Ideas and culture that did enter the country
cohesively spread throughout the land and benefitted from a people who were
connected and intermingled. The Holy
Spirit began to move in Rwanda in the 1920s. The Christian Mission Society
(CMS), an organization of the Anglican Church, began mission work in Rwanda in
1925. Joe Church was a doctor from
Cambridge who arrived in Gahini in 1928 as part of the Anglican Christian
Mission Society (CMS). He partnered up
with an African, Simeoni Nsibambi, and planted the seeds for Revival in Rwanda. Church’s revival team out of Gahini affected
the East African Revival which in addition to Rwanda, reached countries from
Burundi, Uganda, and into Kenya by the late 1930s.[12]
The groups of people in Rwanda have and continue to
live together and not separately. They have
shared a common language and culture. The
cohesive, or symbiotic, nature of Rwandan society was altered by the Belgians
in the 1930s when they issued identification cards denoting whether Rwandans
were Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa as an ethnicity.
 | |||
| Indangamuntu (IdentityCard) Jim Fussell, "Indingamuntu 1994: Ten Years Ago this Identity Card Cost a Woman Her Life," Prevent Genocide International, www.preventgenocide.org/edu/pastgenocides/rwanda/indangamuntu.htm#analysis. |
The problem with this is that the Kinyarwandan word ubwoko referred to a clan or a class and not a race.[13] Although members of society do not frequently
gain enough wealth to move up in class, it is possible. When Hutu farmers gathered enough wealth and
cattle they would become identified as Tutsi just as Tutsi could lose their
wealth and become Hutu. Identity cards
made that impossible and removed the societal class distinction from Rwandan
society. The ties that the people had to
the land and cattle were no longer tied to their identities and discontent and
fear flourished, eventually culminating in the 1994 genocide.
[1] Stephen Belcher, African Myths of Origin (London: Penguin
Books, 2005), 185.
[2] Marie-Claude Van Grunderbeek, and
Emile Roche, “Multidisciplinary Evidence of Mixed Farming during the Early Iron
Age in Rwanda and Burundi,” in Rethinking
Agriculture: Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives, eds. Tim
Denham, Jose Iriarte, and Luc Vrydaghs (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press,
2007), 300.
[3] David C. King, Cultures of the World: Rwanda
(Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish Benchmark, 2006), 53.
[4] “Kakiro Imigongo Cooperative,”
Atlas Obscura, accessed March 30, 2017, http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/kakira-imigongo-cooperative.
[5] Julius Adenkule, Culture and Customs of Rwanda (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), accessed March 29, 2017, eBook
Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost, 110.
[6] Ibid., 134.
[7] Timothy J. Stapleton, A Military History of Africa (Santa
Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013), accessed May 7, 2017, ProQuest ebrary, 125, 128.
[8] “Rwanda-History,” East African Living Encyclopedia,
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/NEH/rwhistory.htm, ¶4.
[9] Kevin Ward, “A Brief History of
the Church in Rwanda,” Dictionary of African Christian Biography, 2008,
accessed May 11, 2017, http://www.dacb.org/history/rwanda-briefhistory.htm, ¶1.
[10] John Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (New York: Vintage Books,
1997), 620.
[11] Farah El Akkad, “Rwanda,” Egypt Today (May 11, 2014), accessed
March 23, 2017, General OneFile, ¶3-6.
[12] Brian Stanley, “The East African
Revival: African Initiative Within a European Tradition,”
http://churchsociety.org/docs/churchman/092/Cman_092_1_Stanley.pdf, 6-9.
[13] Robert Stockhammer,
"Conditions of Identity in Writing Or: About a Genocide." Arcadia
43, no. 1 (2008): ¶4, accessed May 12, 2017,
http://ezproxy.liberty.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/docview/204065543?accountid=12085.
