Chronological Index:

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During the long twentieth century, defined here as beginning when the last precolonial mwami (King; plural: bami ) rose to power, the development of political violence in Rwanda emerged from two parallel but occasionally overlapping dynamics. The first is a period characterized by court violence during the two Rwandan Republics. The second, which is not as well known, is that of violence among peasants; the sequence of events involved is understandable, though the significance of the relationships spanning these events is more difficult to comprehend.

The repetitive nature of crises and situations (wars, movements of displaced persons, economic crises, the transition to a multi-party system) appears to define the way events unfold. Yet the way power functions on a daily basis cannot be dissociated from the way it provokes crises or reacts to them. The internal dynamics of power relationships in Rwanda, the fierceness of political competition, the appearance and extension of social classes linked to successive political regimes, and the relationships of these classes with the rural milieu (95 percent of the population are peasants) have largely determined the shape, and especially the extent of violent practices. This study will briefly attempt to present their distinctive characteristics.

 The Mwami : A Form of Court Violence

The struggles between clans, factions, and then regions combined with the gulf that separates the hierarchical structure from the submerged relations between actors indicate continuity in the way that power is exercised in Rwanda. Lemarchand characterizes the young Rwandan Republic as a ‘presidential mwamiship ‘ (Lemarchand, 1970: 269), underlining the continuity in the functioning of power, its codes and its rituals. Thus, the 1959 Revolution did not fundamentally change practices or the division of offices, and the architecture of power remained the same. At the centre rather than the summit of this system, the person of the King and then, later, of the President of the Republic, was supposed to transcend rivalries and divisions. The precolonial Rwanda discovered by the first European explorers, and subsequently by historians, was characterized as feudal. While use of the term has been challenged (Chrétien, 2003: 146-147), the monarchical and centralizing character of power is universally recognized. It is the King who brings society into existence. Through him, men and things are enthused with life; seasons and harvests depend on him and his decline betokens that of the whole country. The mwami is the receptacle of life, the source from which it springs. His creative power sets him above human beings (Umwami si umuntu – the King is not a man – is the title of two dynastic poems) and rituals recall his sacred character (Vansina, 2001: 110). His intimates, the Queen Mother and the court, fight over the exercise of power. The King is first among the political chiefs; the Queen Mother possesses considerable power and can create her own armies. Ritualists (abiru ) control the codes of royalty, as well as the divinations that they resort to before any important act. The most powerful of the clans fight over positions, armies and the status of Queen Mothers. Anxious not to be isolated, the mwami often relies on men who owe him everything and who are completely devoted to him (Vansina, 2001: 115). The violence of the reign of Rwabugiri (1867-1893: see below) reflects this everyday functioning of power and constant court rivalries.

‘Presidential mwamiship’

The break heralded by the 1959 Revolution did not upset these practices: ministerial cabinet positions were distributed among clans (Lemarchand, 1970: 268), attempted poisonings exposed rivalries (Reyntjens, 1985: 485), and ceremonies adopted the organization and dances of the old regime (Lemarchand, 1970: 265). The content of the revolutionary ideology, and the way in which the figure of Grégoire Kayibanda was perceived, qualify this picture. However, the thinness of these republican trappings, and the continuity in the operation of power before and after 1959, are exemplified by the regime of Juvénal Habyarimana (1973-1994).

The national ideology of development and its corollaries, and the professed ambition to transcend ethnicity, set the President of the Republic not only above, but also in a quite different order from, its citizens. The word designating authority (umubyeyi ) also means ‘progenitor’ – that is to say, the creative, fertile power attributed to the King. During the transition to a multi-party system, caricatures of Habyarimana gave him the features and pomp of a mwami (Taylor, 2004: 79-106). His assassination on April 6, 1994, echoed the death of the mwami Mutara in 1959 (see below); with his death, chaos threatened the entire Rwandan nation (de Lame, 1996: 305).

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