ABSTRACT
And now it was time for us to begin our journey south. After a final week at Makerere we had just seven weeks more in which to reach Cape Town for the homeward voyage to England. I was quite sure that the first of these weeks should be spent in Rwanda, where Jan Vansina, who was clearly leading the field in the methodology of collecting and interpreting oral tradition, was now at work as the local chef de centre of the Belgian research organisation IRSAC. I had met him at our conference at SOAS in the previous year (1957), and he had kindly offered to place his guesthouse at Astrida at our disposal and allow me to look over his shoulder while at work. The essence of Vansina's contribution was that, whereas nearly all the early attempts to record traditions had been limited to the official versions of history preserved and manipulated by states and dynasties, he had set out to collect in addition those of ordinary clans and families. In fact, in his first large research project on the Kuba of the Kasai, he had attempted to interview, at least briefly, every member of the society of seventy thousand people who had any claim to a knowledge of the past, an exercise that had brought him into personal contact with some fourteen hundred individuals. I particularly wanted to see how, in Rwanda, he was adapting his methods to a society of three million.
