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Concept
Banyarwanda
Summary
The Banyarwanda ( Banyarwanda are a Bantu ethnolinguistic supraethnicity that comprises the dominant ethnic groups of Rwanda, namely the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa among others. The Banyarwanda are also minorities in neighboring Burundi, DR Congo, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya.
Although the ethnic make-up of Burundi is similar to that of Rwanda, Banyarwanda is a political neologism used solely in Rwanda since the 1990s in order to mitigate ethnic division within the country following the Rwandan Civil War and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
In the 1930s the Belgian colonial authorities, who controlled both Congo, Rwanda and Burundi at the time, implemented programs to encourage large numbers of Banyarwanda to emigrate to the Belgian Congo from Rwanda and Burundi. The population of Banyarwabda has increased latter by large numbers fleeing violence in those two countries especially in the 1960s and the 1990s.
An estimated 524,098 Banyarwanda live in Uganda, where they live in the west of the country; Umutara and Kitara are the centres of their pastoral and agricultural areas.
The Banyarwanda, through their language of Kinyarwanda, form a subgroup of the Bantu peoples, who inhabit a geographical area stretching east and southward from Central Africa across the African Great Lakes region down to Southern Africa.
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. This classification groups the Banyarwanda with nineteen other ethnic groups including the Barundi, Banyankore, Baganda and Bahunde.
History of Rwanda
The Banyarwanda are descended from a diverse group of people, who settled in the area through a series of migrations. The earliest known inhabitants of the African Great Lakes area were a sparse group of hunter gatherers, who lived in the late Stone Age. They were followed by a larger population of early Iron Age settlers, who produced dimpled pottery and iron tools.
Official source
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