Defeat Is the Only Bad News : Rwanda Under Musinga, 1897-1931

D I O B N Yuhi Musinga Defeat Is the Only Bad News R M, ‒ Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges Edited by David Newbury Foreword by Roger V. Des Forges T U W P The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059 uwpress.wisc.edu 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England eurospanbookstore.com Copyright © 2011 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews. 13542 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Des Forges, Alison Liebhafsky. Defeat is the only bad news: Rwanda under Musinga, 1896–1931 / Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges; edited by David Newbury. p. cm. – (Africa and the diaspora: history, politics, culture) “This text is in large part the dissertation of Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges as originally presented to the Yale University Department of History in 1972”—Editor’s note. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-299-28144-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-299-28143-4 (e-book) 1. Rwanda—History—To 1962. 2. Rwanda—Politics and government—To 1962. 3. Yuhi V Musinga, Mwami of Rwanda, 1883–1944. 4. Rwanda—Relations—Europe. 5. Europe—Relations—Rwanda. I. Newbury, David S. II. Title. III. Series: Africa and the diaspora. DT450.37.D47 2011 967.571´02—dc22 2010038905 For R Inkigi imwe ntigira inzu One pillar does not make a house For A and J Who shared in the post-doctoral research For the R P Who have endured more than their share of twentieth century catastrophes And for A, M, and K In hope for a more peaceful and just twenty-first-century world C L I ix F R V. D F xi E’ P xv A’ P xvii A’ A xix E’ N xxi E’ I: S R C T M’ A P xxiii G R T xxxvii 1A Tumultuous Transition: The Accession of Musinga 3 2The Catholic Church, the German Administration, and the Nyiginya Court 24 3The Missionaries, the Court, and the Local Community, 1904–1910 45 4Musinga’s Coming of Age, 1905–1913 71 5Extending Court Power, 1905–1913: The Conquest of the Northern Regions 99 6New Europeans, New Court Tactics, 1913–1919: The Arrival of the Belgians 130 7 Alliances That Bind—and Divide, 1919–1922: Belgian Rule and the Court 157 8 Divide and Rule, 1922–1925: Emerging Factions at the Court 184 vii viii Contents 9The Rationalization of Power, 1925–1931: The Deposition of Musinga 211 E’ E 241 A: R I 247 N 255 B 289 I 297 I Maps Rwanda rainfall 2 Rwanda: Selected Administrative Districts, circa 1931 2 Cultural Subregions of Rwanda 5 Historical Expansion of the Kingdom 7 Gisaka and Rwanda, circa 1900 34 Early Catholic Mission Stations in Rwanda, 1900–1905 46 Rwanda Revolts 105 Figures Yuhi Musinga frontispiece Kabare and Musinga, circa 1910 70 Muhumusa at the time of her capture by the British 98 Nyirakabuga, Kanjogera, Kagesha, Musinga, Murebwayire, and Kankazi, circa 1917 156 Musinga in his colonial uniform 212 ix F Alison became interested in the history of the central African polity of Rwanda in the summer of 1963 when she volunteered to teach Rwan- dan refugees living in what was then still called Tanganyika. Perhaps in- fluenced by her paternal grandparents’ origins in the German-speaking part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that became Czechoslovakia and by her maternal grandparents’ heritage in Scotland, she devoted the rest of her scholarly life to understanding the culture, politics, so- ciety, and economy of Rwanda, which features rich oral traditions, fierce court struggles, complex social formations, and a largely agro-pastoral economy. The first fruit of that academic quest was her doctoral dissertation, titled “Defeat Is the Only Bad News,” perhaps in recognition of the strongly pragmatic and achievement-oriented strain of Rwandan political culture that had helped protect the kingdom from the worst ravages of the slave trade but also resulted in tensions that manifested them- selves in periodic outbreaks of political and social violence. Instead of quickly revising and publishing that text, Alison devoted the next stage of her career to raising and educating our two children in an integrated public school system, supporting and assisting me in my own efforts to understand the history of Henan province in central China, and con- ducting further research in 1981–82 on the history of Rwanda prior to the reign of Musinga. She also taught courses on African history at the University at Buffalo and other institutions and published a book chap- ter on a Rwandan rebellion. At the end of the 1980s, as our kids completed high school and entered college imbued with their mother’s quiet passion for justice, and as my own interpretation of Chinese history matured in part under the influence of Alison’s work on Rwanda, she volunteered her services first as a member of the Board of Africa Watch and then as a consultant to xi xii Foreword the African Division of Human Rights Watch. She drew on her deep comprehension of Rwandan history to lead an international investi- gation into the severe human rights abuses in northern Rwanda that presaged the genocide that broke out in 1994. In that catastrophe, ele- ments near the top of state power responded to an invasion by an army of earlier refugees by mobilizing a significant portion of the population to target the Tutsi minority within the country along with their friends and protectors. Alison used her intimate familiarity with the history, lan- guage, and politics of Rwanda and her consummate skill in advocating policies at the national and international levels, as well as in the scholarly and public domain, to save as many victims of the cataclysm as possible and to bring to justice those who violated international human rights law, on both sides of the conflict. Although Alison and her colleagues at Human Rights Watch were unable, before her sudden and untimely death, to persuade the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to live up to its United Na- tions mandate to prosecute crimes of war and crimes against humanity as well as crimes of genocide, the struggle goes on to achieve even- handed justice in one venue or another for all of the victims of the Rwandan genocide. Even while frequently testifying at national and international tribunals as an expert witness, Alison also found time to write Leave None to Tell the Story,amajor report based on her research and that of her colleagues. The book has already been translated and published in French and German and is now scheduled to be published in Kinyawanda. This will bring one of the most comprehensive and re- spected accounts of the genocide to wider attention among the Rwan- dan people who have the largest stake, after all, in the proper interpretation of those historical events. That book, along with this one, will stand as two of the most important memorials to Alison’s twin legacies of loving life and seeking justice. It is with great humility as well as pride that I have responded to David Newbury’s kind invitation to write this brief foreword. On behalf of our whole family, I want to thank David for his gen- erous commitment of time and energy to lightly editing the manuscript so as to take account of more recent scholarship while remaining true to Alison’s original purpose and achievement. I am also grateful to Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf for organizing the conference at which David Newbury and Filip Reyntjens, among others, appraised Alison’s scholarship. I hope that these scholars and others will eventually be able to take Foreword xiii advantage of Alison’s archive, including the results of her research in 1981–82, to make further contributions to the historiography of Rwanda. R V. D F Buffalo, New York 4 May 2010 E’ P On 12 February 2009, a plane crash took the lives of fifty people, including that of Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges. She had been best known for her eloquent and informed witness on the 1994 genocide and its after- math in Rwanda. However, in addition to her exemplary work on human rights issues in Central Africa, Alison was also a scholar. Defeat Is the Only Bad News is her PhD dissertation, presented to Yale University in 1972. Seldom is a work of this nature published so long after it is written. However, in this case there are important reasons for doing so, for this study provides an invaluable entry to the historical context within which her later work on human rights and social justice was carried out. It is also an important contribution in its own right. Africans, of course, had long known of their own history, but Des Forges’s dissertation was one of the first scholarly works to move beyond the colonial writings on Rwanda and to examine carefully the internal dynamics of the royal Court of the kingdom at the time of European arrival. It was also one of the first to draw extensively on oral testimony in addition to working with a wide range of missionary documents, colonial archives, and sec- ondary sources. But Defeat Is the Only Bad News is important for its content as well as for its method.

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