Historical Tales (Ibiteekerezo) and the History of Rwanda

摘要: Historical tales are the most abundant and the sources most used to reconstruct the history of the kingdoms of the area between the Great Lakes. This is especially true for the history of the Nyiginya kingdom in Rwanda, where such tales, preserved at the court as well as by local people on the hills, are even more abundant than anywhere else. It is not surprising then that they form the bedrock on which authors have built their reconstructions on the history of that kingdom. Yet little attention has been paid to a general critical examination of these tales. Here, and elsewhere in the region, their contents have generally been accepted as credible, after the arbitrary erasure of all references to passages judged to refer to miracles, after the arbitrary dismissal of the bits and the variants that do not conform to one's preferred version, and after either the exclusion of local “provincial” narratives, or as happened after 1960, the exclusion of all those that stemmed from the court. Such practices will simply not do.Because these tales form the bedrock of the history of the kingdom the Institute for Scientific Research in Central Africa (IRSAC) under my direction instituted a large collection of such sources between 1958 and 1962, and made them available in the original and in translation first in depots at Butare and Tervuren and later in 1973 on microfilm. Surprisingly enough, this collection as well as even major editions of other sources, have been completely ignored by most scholars working after 1960.