ABSTRACT

A political organization is the totality of culturally patterned relationships between certain individuals who possess the legitimate use of physical force and all the others who inhabit a certain territory at a certain time. Frequently what is political is identified with what concerns power. Lasswell has listed a series of social values and a series of institutions through which these values are formalized and shared among the members of a group. Another sort of power to be distinguished from political power is social power. Intergroup political relations are essentially different. They do not imply inferiority and superiority. In Ruanda, there were two types of relationships sanctioned by legitimate coercion on the part of the superior. The centre of Ruanda and the regions which were close to a foreign territory not regarded as dangerous were divided into what we shall call administrative districts. The theory of the Ruanda kingship was that the mwami was an absolute monarch in the fullest sense.