The Banyarwanda: A People the Border Could Not Divide, and the Ancestral Wisdom They Carry

Banyarwanda means the people of Rwanda. A single person is a Munyarwanda, the language is Kinyarwanda, and the bond is older than any passport. It is not one village or one lineage. It is a people held together by speech, memory, and the hills that shaped both.

One of Ubuntu Village’s partners in Uganda is Munyarwanda. When we asked ourselves what our readers have been given about her people, the honest answer was: mostly headlines about borders and politics, and very little about how the Banyarwanda understand the Creator, the ancestors, the land, and each other. This post begins there, with their own ways of knowing. The politics matter, and we will name them with care, but they come after the wisdom, not before it.

Who the Banyarwanda Are

The Banyarwanda are Kinyarwanda-speaking communities living across Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, and eastern Congo, as reported by the Daily Monitor. In Uganda, Banyarwanda have lived in the southwest, in Kigezi and Ankole, since the early 1900s, according to Cultural Survival.

That history is layered, and it deserves to be told in layers. By 1982, more than one million Banyarwanda lived in Uganda. Some families were long-established residents. Others arrived as laborers beginning in the 1920s. Others, fewer than 100,000, came as refugees from the conflicts in Rwanda between 1960 and 1972. A Munyarwanda in Uganda today may descend from any of these threads, which is why no single story, and no single word like “tribe,” holds them all.

One People, Divided by a Line Drawn Elsewhere

The Daily Monitor notes that colonial borders drawn after the 1884 Berlin Conference split this ethnic group across territories. Rooms in Europe decided where one country ended and another began, and families who shared a language, a grandmother, and a harvest calendar suddenly found themselves on different sides of a line they had never agreed to.

A language does not stop at a boundary marker. Neither does a way of knowing. What follows is the wisdom the Banyarwanda carry in Kinyarwanda, wherever the line puts them.

Imana: The Creator Who Holds the World

At the center of traditional Rwandan cosmology stands Imana, the Creator. A study of ancestral knowledge in eastern Rwanda, published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, describes Imana as the absolute ruler of the universe and the essence of life, including the fertility of the land and of people.

The same study notes that this faith was not housed in temples. It lived in prayer and in names. Children were named for the attributes of the Divine, such as Rurema, the Creator, and Ruhanga, the giver of life. To call a child by such a name is to say, every day, that the child belongs to something larger than the household.

Banyarwanda and Barundi tradition also keeps a story about death. As summarized in this overview of Imana, Imana first intended humanity to be immortal, but Death slipped into the human world through an old woman’s carelessness and remained. It is a tender, human story, one that explains grief without shaming the griever.

Guterekera: Staying in Conversation with the Ancestors

The Böll study describes guterekera, the practice of keeping the ancestral spirits in good relationship with the living. The teaching behind it is that each person has a visible body and an invisible “shadow,” and that after death the shadow becomes a spirit. Those spirits can influence the living, for good or ill, and so families and clans reach toward them through ritual.

We share this as cultural memory and as education, not as instruction. What it teaches is plain: death is not a door that closes. The ancestors remain part of the household, and the household owes them attention. If you have read our post on what the body remembers from Uganda’s red soil, you will recognize the thread: communities named inheritance long before laboratories did.

The Land Is Kin: Sacred Trees and the Umuganura First Harvest

In the same Böll study, farming is described as traditional and organic, rain-fed and nourished with organic fertilizers, on hills that were once densely forested. Certain trees, including sycamore and erythrina, could not be cut because they were a sanctuary to spirits. During drought or conflict, rituals were performed beneath Ficus thonningi trees to call on divine help. Conservation here was not a policy. It was a relationship.

The year turns on the Umuganura harvest festival. The Böll study describes it as a celebration of the first harvests of pumpkin, sorghum, and millet, honoring new life and the unity of the people. Before anyone eats from the new season, the community gives thanks together. Gratitude is the first tax, and everyone is a taxpayer.

For readers who care about food sovereignty, soil, and climate resilience, there is nothing quaint here. A people whose farming rested on organic fertility, protected groves, and shared thanksgiving was practicing regenerative agriculture long before it had a name. Our post on the Nile and ancestral water memory follows the same teaching downstream.

The Vine and the Tree: A Proverb from Kisoro

In Kisoro, in southwestern Uganda, the Bafumbira speak a proverb in Rufumbira: Imbuto zikurura zishingirwa ibiti. A climbing plant with tendrils cannot grow on its own without a tree’s support. African Proverbs, Sayings and Stories explains that the Bafumbira lived communally, bringing others into every major decision, from raising children to arranging marriages to religious practice, and that a person who handled such matters alone would seem out of place.

The same source notes that the Bafumbira are made up of three indigenous groups: Bahuutu, Batutsi, and Batwa. Here, in one proverb, are people living in interdependence across the very categories that outsiders have so often turned into walls.

We hear an echo of Ubuntu, I am because we are. The Banyarwanda are not Nguni, and Ubuntu is not theirs to carry; we name the echo, not a claim of sameness. Different peoples, different languages, the same insight: no one grows alone.

What the Banyarwanda Have Endured, and What It Asks of Us

A people is never only its wounds. But readers deserve to know the record, so we name it briefly and with care. According to Cultural Survival, beginning on October 1, 1982, government-orchestrated displacement targeted Banyarwanda in Uganda regardless of citizenship status. Roughly 44,000 people fled to Rwanda before that country closed its border on November 1, and about 35,000 remained in Ugandan settlements.

The question of belonging has not been fully settled. The Daily Monitor calls the Banyarwanda citizenship debate one of the unresolved questions in contemporary Uganda, dating back to the 1960s. Banyarwanda are listed in the Third Schedule of Uganda’s 1995 Constitution, which names the indigenous communities of the country as of February 1, 1926. Minority Rights Group, in its 2021 analysis, questions how the 1926 cutoff behind that list is applied across communities.

A note on conflicting accounts: the sources do not agree on when the Banyarwanda arrived in Uganda. Cultural Survival places their settlement in the southwest from the early 1900s, while the Minority Rights Group author describes an arrival in the 1960s. We hold both without choosing between them. As the section above shows, Banyarwanda in Uganda descend from several waves: long-established residents, laborers from the 1920s, and refugees between 1960 and 1972.

We are not here to litigate Uganda’s laws. We are here to say that dignity does not wait for a ruling. When our team in Uganda sits with a partner, we do so as people who respect where she comes from. The repair traditions of Africa, which our post on community justice explores, begin with exactly that: remembering that someone belongs before asking what they owe.

Carrying the Hills Forward

The Banyarwanda teach that the Creator is near, that the ancestors remain, that trees and soil are kin, that the first harvest belongs to everyone, and that a vine needs its tree. Each of these ideas is a public health idea, a justice idea, and an ecological idea, held together as one way of living.

That is the kind of knowledge Ubuntu Village exists to honor: not as a curiosity, but as a living body of wisdom that communities in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria already hold, and that the rest of us are invited to learn from, with humility.

If this reached you, it may reach someone whose family carries a name that a border once tried to cut in two. Share it with them.

I Am Because We Are. And Together, We Heal.