Twa Marginality and Indigenousness in Rwanda

Abstract

Following the internationalisation of the indigenous rights movement, a growing number of African hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and other communities have adopted indigenousness in claiming special legal protection. Their legal claims as the indigenous peoples of Africa are backed by many international actors such as indigenous rights activists, donors and scholars. However, indigenous identification is resisted by many African governments, some community members and some anthropologists. Felix Mukwiza Ndahinda explores the sources of indigenous identification in Africa and its legal and political implications. Noting the limitations of systematic and discursive, as opposed to activist, studies, it questions the appropriateness of this framework in efforts aimed at empowering claimant communities in inherently multiethnic African countries and adopts an interdisciplinary approach in order to capture the indigenous rights phenomenon in Africa. For the past several centuries, Rwanda has been inhabited by three groups which have successively been referred to as races, classes, tribes or, ethnicities. Colonial encounter towards the end of the nineteenth century marvelled at what they saw as a sophisticated level of centralization of a Rwandan kingdom inhabited by three very different peoples with attributed different historical roots. Before examining the current situation of Twas in Rwanda and their indigenous claims in perspective, the present chapter takes a retrospective look at historical and socio-anthropological considerations over this identity. The rationale is that, while history might seem irrelevant in efforts aimed at addressing the present predicament of Twas of Rwanda and other (former) hunter-gatherer communities in the region, interrogation of the past might inform the present and suggest remedies for the future.