Banyarwanda
[3][4] Scholars from the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, building on earlier work by Malcolm Guthrie, placed Kinyarwanda within the Great Lakes Bantu languages.
The earliest known inhabitants of the African Great Lakes area were a sparse group of hunter gatherers, who lived in the late Stone Age.
[7][8] According to some theories these early inhabitants were the ancestors of the Twa, a group of aboriginal pygmy hunter-gatherers who remain in the area today.
[9] Between 700 BC and 1500 AD, a number of Bantu groups migrated into the territory, and began to clear forest land for agriculture.
According to oral history, Rwanda was founded on the shores of Lake Muhazi in the Buganza area, close to the modern city of Rwamagana.
[citation needed] The kingdom reached its greatest extent during the nineteenth century under the reign of King Kigeli Rwabugiri.
[31] The first exodus of ethnic Banyarwanda from the jurisdiction of the Rwanda kingdom was the Banyamulenge, who crossed the Rusizi river into the South Kivu province of the Belgian Congo.
The first major contact between the Banyarwanda and the Europeans occurred in 1894 when explorer Gustav Adolf von Götzen crossed Rwanda from the south-east to Lake Kivu and met the king.
[38][39] The Germans did not significantly alter the social structure of the country, but exerted influence by supporting the king and the existing hierarchy and delegating power to local chiefs.
[49] These exiles, unlike the Banyarwanda who migrated during the pre-colonial and colonial era, were regarded as refugees in their host countries,[50] and began almost immediately to agitate for a return to Rwanda.
[54][55][56] In the 1980s, a group of 500 Banyarwanda refugees in Uganda, led by Fred Rwigyema, fought with the rebel National Resistance Army (NRA) in the Ugandan Bush War, which saw Yoweri Museveni overthrow Milton Obote.
[64] The victory of the Tutsi-led rebels led to a fresh Banyarwanda exodus, this time of Hutu who feared reprisals following the genocide.
[65] The largest refugee camps formed in Zaire, and were effectively controlled by the army and government of the former Hutu regime, including many leaders of the genocide.
[66] This regime was determined to return to power in Rwanda and began rearming, killing Tutsi residing in Zaire and launching cross-border incursions in conjunction with the Interahamwe paramilitary group.
[69] The Rwandan army joined forces with Zairian Tutsi groups, including the Banyamulenge and Banyamasisi, attacking the refugee camps.
[78][79] A considerable amount of traditional arts and crafts is produced by the Banyarwanda, although most originated as functional items rather than purely for decoration.
[80] Imigongo, a unique cow dung art, is produced in the southeast of Rwanda, with a history dating back to when the region was part of the independent Gisaka kingdom.
[82] Traditional housing styles make use of locally available materials; circular or rectangular mud homes with grass-thatched roofs (known as nyakatsi) are the most common.
[90] Like most other Bantu languages, Kinyarwanda is tonal and also agglutinative: most words are formed as a series of morphemes, including a prefix, a stem, and sometimes a preprefix.
[97] History and moral values were also passed down through the generations by word of mouth, and the oral tradition was used as a form of entertainment in precolonial days.
[97] The most famous Rwandan literary figure was Alexis Kagame (1912–1981), who carried out and published research into oral traditions as well as writing his own poetry.
