The historiography of Rwanda is largely dominated by accounts that highlight men's experiences, and particularly those of political elites. While historians Alison Des Forges, Sarah Watkins, and Jan Vansina have written about women elites, such as the abamikazi (queens) and abagabekazi (queen mothers), who at times exercised significant political power during Rwanda's monarchical past (from c. 16th century to 1962), far less is known about the everyday lives of ordinary rural Rwandan women and the contributions they made to their communities at different points in the nation's history.
This paper begins to address this gap by analysing a series of life history interviews with an elderly woman from Karongi district in western Rwanda named Nyiramuzungu. Her life history to date encapsulates significant shifts in political power related to Belgian colonial rule (1916-1962), independence in 1962, and the First (1962-1973) and Second (1973-1994) Hutu Republics, as well as the 1994 genocide and the subsequent rise to power of the current ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Of particular importance, Nyiramuzungu’s account of her childhood suggests she consistently transgressed what are commonly understood to be pervasive gender norms in Rwanda—whereby women are expected to be modest, submissive, and are primarily valued in terms of their ability to be ‘good wives and mothers’—without any ill effect. Similarly, in the weeks preceding her marriage, she become an imandwa—an initiate of a once-prominent indigenous Rwandan religion known as kubandwa—through which she gained immense social status for her ability to accurately divine the future and identify the cause of people’s suffering by communing with the ancestors. Her enhanced status began to decline with the spread of Roman Catholicism, however, followed by the sudden death of mwami (king) Rudahigwa in 1959. From this point forward, she was condemned within her community and by European missionaries as a satanist, and experienced prolonged hardship that escalated as she aged, and left her increasingly vulnerable within her community due to her perceived transgressions of Rwanda’s evolving gender norms and spiritual beliefs.
Additionally, Nyiramuzungu’s narrative offers insights for present-day Rwanda, which is lauded as a model for promoting gender equality within and beyond Africa due to its efforts to increase women’s political representation in all levels of the government, among other initiatives. Nyiramuzungu is cautious about gender equality, a position that is seemingly influenced by her first-hand experiences of the patriarchal backlash that she experienced alongside the mass conversion of Rwandans to Roman Catholicism during the Belgian colonial period, among other factors.
Taken together, Nyiramuzungu’s life history raises provocative questions about the evolution of Rwandan gender norms throughout the twentieth century and how colonisation impacted the everyday lives of Rwandan women, beyond the often-discussed entrenching of ethnic identities among civilians. Similarly, her narrative offers insights for current understandings of the spiritual, political, and cultural influence that rural women could exercise at different points in Rwanda’s past and the present, and challenges the perception that Rwanda has always been a firmly patriarchal society. Beyond Rwanda, it reinforces a growing trend at the interfaces of gender history and African studies that amplifies women's voices to explore their agency within their communities, as a means of adding nuance to the historical record in nations across the continent.