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Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Corinne Boter, Shane Doyle, Andreas Eckert, Leigh Gardner, Ewout Frankema, Hilde Greefs, Dácil Juif, Doreen Kembabazi, Niek Koning, Sven van Melkebeke, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Aidan Russell, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable input on the manuscript. I thank Ashley Rockenbach for sharing some archival finds in the Kabale District Archive (Uganda), and Pim Arendsen for assistance with the maps. I acknowledge the financial support of the European Research Council under the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (ERC Grant Agreement no. 313114) as part of the project ‘Is Poverty Destiny? A New Empirical Foundation for Long-term African Welfare Analysis’. Author's email: [email protected].
INTRODUCTION
On 26 May 1925, several years after Belgium had consolidated its League of Nations Mandate over Ruanda-Urundi, a Belgian administrator of Rukira territory in eastern Ruanda notified his superior that his subjects had begun moving out of his administrative area, seeking what appeared to be seasonal employment in neighbouring British territory. About a fifth of the adult men in the area were involved in such trips. This sudden mobility was not confined to a small area: the Rukira report was part of a broader inquiry, and fellow administrators throughout Ruanda conveyed similar messages about an unexpected onset of uncontrolled migration to the British territories to the north and east.1
Although dwarfed in size by the Belgian Congo (Fig. 1), Ruanda-Urundi harboured over a third the number of inhabitants of its giant neighbour, constituting – by far – colonial Africa's most densely populated territorial unit. Thanks to its fertile soils, elevated topography, and strong but inward-looking political institutions, the area had been able to sustain a dense population and had remained comparatively shielded from the nineteenth-century demographic shocks related to the slave trades and the spread of communicable human and animal diseases. Despite the abundance of people, the German and – initially – the Belgian colonizers had refrained from tapping Ruanda-Urundi as a labour reservoir, believing that the native population, used to relatively cool and disease-free mountainous conditions, would not tolerate other climates. Additionally, as the Belgian administration argued as late as 1923, the indigenous people were ‘too attached to their country to envisage the possibility of taking them out of their environment’.2
Fig. 1.