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Vansina, Jan. 2004. THE ANTECEDENTS OF MODERN RWANDA: THE NYIGINYA KINGDOM. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 354 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
What forces shaped the formation, expansion, and workings of the Nyiginya kingdom of Rwanda (c. 1650-1897)? What are the historical depths of categories, ideologies, and material contradictions that inflected the racialized violence in twentieth-century century Rwanda? Jan Vansina explores these questions and others in The Antecedents of Modern Rwanda, his own translation from the French of his Le Rwanda ancien: Le royaume nyiginya (Paris: Karthala, 2001). As a sweeping, original revision of the dominant positions on these issues-an attempt "to present a starting point for thinking about Rwanda's past in the light of the present" (p. 196)-historians and students of contemporary central Africa cannot afford to ignore it.
Vansina lists his major revisionist accomplishments in the conclusion (pp. 196-197), and here and there in the main narrative (for example, pp. 134-149). The Nyiginya kingdom arose in the second half of the seventeenth century as a coalition between a newcomer (Ndori) and local "kings," a coalition in which secular and ritual power were separated in practice and joined only in the person of the new king. Ndori introduced the ubuhake contract, tying clients to patrons with clients "trading political submission for military protection" (p. 47) from their patron. Most importantly, Ndori developed numerous nonterritorial, permanent armies with a hereditary pool of combatants recruited from lineages dispersed across the country. Warriors and commanders, when they raided and made war, not only "produced" wealth in cattle, women, and children, they also tended their own herds and managed agricultural production on hills under their control. Their dispersal and entrenchment ensured that secession did not follow from structurally endemic successional crises. Instead, aristocrats competed over wealth, power, and prestige in an increasingly violent and ruthless court culture. Aristocrats pursued their interests free from concern with public welfare-which was, after all, the king's concern. This state of affairs led to a weakened kingship and "the triumph of the law of the strongest and its train of troubles, insecurity, and clamor for revenge"...