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Rwandan literature is literature both oral and written in Kinyarwanda, or French, particularly by citizens of Rwanda.
Rwanda's literary history is largely an oral one. The traditional texts were classed in two main categories: more formal, royal documents, which are described as 'official tradition', and the non-formal, popular literature. The distinction between these categories is based on whether or not the literature was controlled officially, rather than denoting any sort of value judgment regarding the content.
To this day, storytelling and public speaking are much admired, and good storytellers are respected in society.
Very little literature has been written in Kinyarwanda (the native language of the country), but there are a number of books written in French. The clergyman and historian Alexis Kagame (1912–81) researched the oral history of Rwanda and published a number of volumes of poetry and Rwandan mythology. Saverio Naigiziki wrote an autobiography, Escapade rwandaise (Rwandan Adventure) and a novel, L'Optimiste (The Optimist), about the marriage of a Hutu man and a Tutsi woman.
In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, Benjamin Sehene (b.1959) wrote Le Piège ethnique (The Ethnic Trap) (1999), a study of what led to the genocide. He also wrote Le Feu sous la soutane (Fire under the Cassock) (2005), an historical novel focusing on the true story of a Hutu Catholic priest, Father Stanislas, who offered protection to Tutsi refugees in his church before sexually exploiting the women and participating in massacres.
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Human occupation of Rwanda is thought to have begun shortly after the last ice age. By the 16th century, the inhabitants had organized into a number of kingdoms. In the 19th century, Mwami (king) Rwabugiri of the Kingdom of Rwanda conducted a decades-long process of military conquest and administrative consolidation that resulted in the kingdom coming to control most of what is now Rwanda. The colonial powers, Germany and Belgium, allied with the Rwandan court.
The Hutu, also known as the Abahutu, are a Bantu ethnic or social group native to the African Great Lakes region of Africa, an area now primarily in Burundi and Rwanda. They live mainly in Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they form one of the principal ethnic groups alongside the Tutsi and the Great Lakes Twa.
The Tutsi, or Abatutsi, are an ethnic group of the African Great Lakes region.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was an international court established in November 1994 by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 955 in order to judge people responsible for the Rwandan genocide and other serious violations of international law in Rwanda, or by Rwandan citizens in nearby states, between 1 January and 31 December 1994. The court eventually convicted 85 individuals at a cost of $1.3 billion.
Juvénal Habyarimana was the second President of Rwanda, from 1973 until 1994. He was nicknamed "Kinani", a Kinyarwanda word meaning "invincible".
The Rwandan Patriotic Front is the ruling political party in Rwanda. Led by President Paul Kagame, the party has governed the country since its armed wing defeated government forces, winning the Rwandan Civil War in 1994.
The Interahamwe is a Hutu paramilitary organization active in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.
The Rwandan genocide occurred between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. During this period of 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu, were slaughtered by armed militias. The most widely accepted scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 600,000 Tutsi deaths.
"Rwanda Nziza" has been the national anthem of Rwanda since January 1, 2002. It replaced "Rwanda Rwacu", which had been the national anthem since 1962.
Mutara III Rudahigwa was King (mwami) of Rwanda between 1931 and 1959. He was the first Rwandan king to be baptised, and Roman Catholicism took hold in Rwanda during his reign. His Christian names were Charles Léon Pierre, and he is sometimes referred to as Charles Mutara III Rudahigwa.
The Rwandan Civil War was a large-scale civil war in Rwanda which was fought between the Rwandan Armed Forces, representing the country's government, and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) from 1 October 1990 to 18 July 1994. The war arose from the long-running dispute between the Hutu and Tutsi groups within the Rwandan population. A 1959–1962 revolution had replaced the Tutsi monarchy with a Hutu-led republic, forcing more than 336,000 Tutsi to seek refuge in neighbouring countries. A group of these refugees in Uganda founded the RPF which, under the leadership of Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame, became a battle-ready army by the late 1980s.
Benjamin Sehene is a Rwandan author whose work primarily focuses on questions of identity and the events surrounding the Rwandan genocide. He spent much of his life in Canada and lives in France.
The Banyarwanda are the cultural and linguistic group of people who inhabit mainly Rwanda. Within the Banyarwanda there are three subgroups: Hutu, Tutsi and Batwa. Some Banyarwanda live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, having migrated there from neighbouring Rwanda in waves. In the Congo, they live in the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu. There are also 1 million Banyarwanda in Uganda, where they live in the west of the country; Umutara and Kitara are the centres of their pastoral and agricultural areas.
On the evening of 6 April 1994, the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, was shot down with surface-to-air missiles as it prepared to land in Kigali, Rwanda. The assassination set in motion the Rwandan genocide, one of the bloodiest events of the late 20th century.
These are some of the articles related to Rwanda on the English Wikipedia pages:
Alexis Kagame was a Rwandan philosopher, linguist, historian, poet and Catholic priest. His main contributions were in the fields of ethnohistory and "ethnophilosophy".
Louise Mushikiwabo is the fourth and current Secretary General of Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. She previously served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Rwanda from 2009 to 2018. She also served as Government Spokesperson. She had previously been Minister of Information.
Our Lady of the Nile is a French-language novel by Scholastique Mukasonga, originally published in 2012 by Éditions Gallimard. It is Mukasonga's fourth book and first novel. The English-language translation, published in the United States in 2014 by Archipelago Books, was done by Melanie Mauthier, a poet and writer from the United Kingdom.
The double genocide theory accuses the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) of engaging in a "counter-genocide" against the Hutus that occurred in addition to the Rwandan genocide. Some scholars of Rwanda, such as Scott Straus and Gerald Caplan, say that RPF violence against Hutus does not match the definition of "genocide," considering that it instead consisted of war crimes or crimes against humanity.
In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front is a 2018 non-fiction book by Canadian journalist Judi Rever and published by Random House of Canada; it has also been translated into Dutch and French. The book describes alleged war crimes by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), Rwanda's ruling political party, during its ascent to power in the 1990s.
