When you read Jan Vansina’s books on Rwanda—such as Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom and Le Rwanda Ancien: Le Royaume Nyiginya—you are left wondering why he exerted so much effort to distort Rwanda’s pre-colonial history. His writings reveal a troubling obsession with the Abanyiginya dynasty, rooted in a desire to absolve Belgium of its colonial crimes and sow division within Rwandan society. Vansina, a Belgian historian and anthropologist, launched his career in the Belgian Congo before moving to Rwanda, where he worked at the Institute for Scientific Research in Central Africa (IRSAC) in Huye. His fame largely stems from the aforementioned books, which recast Rwanda’s past in a way that serves colonial justification rather than historical truth. In these works, Vansina claims that the relationship between Hutu and Tutsi in pre-colonial Rwanda was fundamentally hostile, framing the Tutsi as dominant oppressors and the Hutu as perennial victims. He portrays pre-colonial Rwanda as ruled by the “law of the strongest”—a Tutsi aristocracy that allegedly subjugated others long before colonialism arrived. This framing seeks to pin the roots of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi on the Nyiginya monarchy, rather than on Belgian colonial policies of ethnic division and manipulation. This distorted narrative continues to inspire contemporary commentators. For example, Jean-François Le Drian, editor at Epoch-e and a known critic of Rwanda and President Paul Kagame, recently published an article titled “The Concept That Post-Genocide ‘Reinvented’ Rwanda Is an Illusion.” In it, he draws a problematic comparison between modern Rwanda and the Nyiginya monarchy, using Vansina’s work to claim that today’s Tutsi-led government is oppressing the Democratic Republic of Congo in the same way the monarchy allegedly oppressed Hutu subjects in the past. But let us focus on Vansina himself and his deliberate effort to sabotage Rwanda’s historical record. As we previously noted in “Debunking the Myth – The True Origins of Ibimanuka vs. Abasangwabutaka in Rwanda,” early European scholars arrived in Africa under the guise of academic inquiry, collecting oral histories only to reinterpret them in ways that justified colonialism and fractured the unity of indigenous nations. Vansina was no exception. His mission was not to uncover the truth, but to rewrite Rwandan history in a way that absolved Belgium and perpetuated harmful divisions. A key part of Vansina’s strategy was to discredit the Abiru—Rwanda’s traditional custodians of royal history and oral tradition. He dismissed them as mere courtiers who allegedly invented a mythological history glorifying the Tutsi and the Nyiginya dynasty. By undermining the Abiru, Vansina created space to introduce a new narrative—one that painted Rwanda as a warlike, oppressive state long before Europeans arrived, thus offering a moral justification for Belgian intervention and control. Vansina’s agenda becomes even clearer when he writes that Rwanda’s expansion was driven by the military and administrative superiority of its nobility and monarchy. He extends this claim beyond Rwanda, implying that the Tutsi of Rwanda—and by extension, those in neighboring countries like Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and the DR Congo—have an inherent inclination to conquer and dominate. This pseudo-historical argument provides ideological cover for colonialism and now resurfaces in attempts to depict Rwanda as an aggressor in regional conflicts, especially in eastern DR Congo. Israël Ntaganzwa, a Rwandan researcher based in New York, offers a piercing critique of Vansina’s work. In response to Le Rwanda Ancien, he wrote: “Vansina never challenged Belgian colonialism, whose atrocities were extreme even by European colonial standards. Whether due to loyalty to the house of Leopold, fear of losing funding, or simply a lack of moral objection, his silence speaks volumes. It casts doubt on his objectivity, his motives, and his professionalism.” Indeed, Vansina concludes with a deeply chauvinistic vision of Rwandan history, writing that the Batutsi were a “race of supermen,” destined to conquer and dominate, and that this destiny would continue into the future. This view, far from being scholarly, is dangerously ideological. It provides fodder for critics like Le Drian, who use Vansina’s narrative to falsely assert that Rwanda harbours imperial ambitions today. To suggest that the Nyiginya dynasty or Batutsi heritage is responsible for the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi is to fundamentally misunderstand—and dangerously misrepresent—Rwanda’s history. As President Paul Kagame has aptly said, the real blame lies with Belgium, which “messed up not only Rwanda but the entire region, dividing people along borderlines and ethnicity—and today continues to hound Rwanda.” Vansina’s legacy is not an accurate recounting of Rwanda’s past but a calculated distortion designed to whitewash colonial guilt and undermine the unity of a nation still healing from the wounds of genocide. That is the real historical illusion.
