Who are the Twa?
The Twa, or Batwa (meaning ‘Twa people’), were the original pygmoid inhabitants of what is now Rwanda and surrounding lands.
Found today in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Burundi as well as Rwanda, they were hunter-gatherers living in primary rain forest. Then the Hutu and the Tutsi arrived to fell the trees and domesticate the landscape and slowly but surely the world of the Twa disintegrated. Today they make up less than one per cent of Rwanda’s population, the poorest of the poor for the most part and, despite some state efforts to assist them in recent years, they remain marginalised and victims of discrimination.
Their plight is reflected in Broken heart of Africa, through the story of Kabira and his people.
They were the last of Rwanda’s forest Twa, former inhabitants of the Gishwati forest, southwest of Ruhengeri. From what had been the fastness of a thousand square kilometres at the start of the 20th century, they had watched the remnants of their world fall around them.
Around the Great Lakes region, conflict had occurred on and off for centuries as Twa defended the forests against their unstoppable destruction by farmers and herders.
‘The blood of our forefathers colours Rwanda’s earth,’ Kabira said.
Some fought well into the 20th century on all sides of the present-day borders of south-west Uganda, north-western Rwanda, eastern Congo and Burundi, fierce, bloody resistance ending in bloodier suppression.
The colonial Belgians brought another threat: something called conservation. For a while it helped the Twa, slowing the rate of destruction and, as with the gorillas, buying the people of the forest some breathing space. It had been short-lived. Conservationists saw no place for human habitation in what they sought to protect, no place for people who made use of forest resources. No place for hunter-gatherers. The Twa would have to go. Period.
And go they did in the 1970s and 80s. From the Volcanoes National Park, from parks across the Zairian and Ugandan borders, and from the southwestern Nyungwe Forest leaving the mahoganies and ebonies of Central Africa’s largest stretch of mountain forest to chimpanzees, colobus monkeys, grey-cheeked mangabeys, giant hornbills and red-breasted sparrow hawks.
The term was ‘involuntary resettlement’ but for most there was nothing to settle upon. No land was provided, no compensation.
In the Gishwati Forest they had hung on determinedly but were finally expelled in the 80s and 90s when, with World Bank support, a scheme the Bank thought would protect the forest turned most of what remained into dairy pasture for non-Twa people with connections.
Now, it seemed, the end game had started. Only a handful of Twa in Rwanda could survive on the land they occupied. Most were like Kabira. What they had was the earth around their house. What land anyone had mostly came from old world Tutsi patronage and the last decades had seen much eaten away, stolen one way or another, by officials, by land-hungry neighbours.
Kabira owned nothing. He was a squatter, a displaced person who had found shelter with cousins on land ceded to them for loyal service by a Tutsi overlord in the 1930s. The fields were small, the land poor, but they had been enough and Kabira had contributed his labour. But bit by bit the land had been appropriated and except for one small parcel was now in the hands of Hutu farmers.
It wasn’t clear who owned it only that Kabira’s cousins didn’t. ‘Who says this is your land?’ an official from Ruhengeri had asked, more concerned by the dust on his shiny shoes than customary legal procedure. ‘I can find no records. There is no registration. You Twa…you live in a dream world.’