ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the changing historical perspectives and their implications for the current political climate and the archaeological research undertaken in Rwanda. In colonial constructions, and under the postcolonial Hutu Republic', they were characteristically presented as ethnoracial identities with associated, well-defined, immutable, specialised subsistence orientations. In contemporary Rwanda the interpretation and presentation of precolonial history is extremely sensitive because successive 20th-century administrations used the precolonial past as an ideological resource to legitimate their policies. The Hamitic Myth was recycled during the colonial period to explain the presence of cultural accomplishments in sub-Saharan Africa, which might otherwise have contradicted the aims of the colonial mission. The ethnoracial construction of precolonial Rwanda was repeated in popular publications with Hutu nationalist sympathies, such as Kangura and La Medaille Nyiramacibiri, and in the broadcasts of Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines. The Nyiginya Kingdom is believed to have emerged out of preexisting agricultural and pastoral communities in what is now central Rwanda.
