Rwanda - Colonial History
Remoteness and difficulty of access caused the area of Rwanda-Burundi to be one of the last regions of Africa to be penetrated by Europeans. The perimeters of the area had been traversed by the British explorers Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke as early as 1855 in their search for the source of the Nile, but they did not enter Rwanda. In 1861 Speke again passed along the northeastern frontier on his journey to Lake Victoria. Henry Morton Stanley, who came into this same frontier region in 1876, did not penetrate into Rwanda, but started a long controversy between European powers when he claimed to have acquired treaties with several chiefs to a "Mont Mfumbiro" in north-western Rwanda.
The Conference of Berlin in 1885 designated the Kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi as a German sphere of interest, although it was not until 9 years after the conference that the first European traversed Rwanda. He was the German explorer Count von Gotzen, who later became governor of German East Africa. Before his explorations, the European political debates concerning the frontiers of the several spheres of interest in Africa were merely conjectural. Lack of accurate geographical information, vague boundaries, Stanley's claims on behalf of Great Britain to an unknown "Mount Mfumbiro," and overlapping territorial claims formed the basis for a border controversy among Belgium, Germany, and Great Britain that lasted for over a decade.
The area of Rwanda-Burundi was located at the strategic junction of three empires. Belgium's King Leopold II, who held personal dominion over the Congo Free State, wanted the region for its access to Lake Victoria and as a link to the east coast of Africa. Germany desired the area as a part of the formation of a great Mittelafrika, a German central African empire. The British saw the territory as a necessary link in the proposed Cape-to-Cairo railroad, uniting British possessions in the north with those in the south.
During the first decade of the 20th century there was extensive European diplomatic maneuvering in regard to the exact location of the borders of the African territories. The death of King Leopold II in 1909 cleared the way for a 1910 agreement whereby representatives of the three powers settled on the natural frontiers as the boundaries between their possessions, and the territories known today as Rwanda and Burundi officially became possessions of Germany.
During the period of the European diplomatic struggle over colonial boundaries, there were other important forces at work in the region of central Africa. As early as 1898 the Roman Catholic order of the Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers) founded missions in Burundi and, in 1900, the first stations were founded in Rwanda. Protestant missions established their first posts in Rwanda in 1907 and 1908. With their emphasis on education and implicit egalitarianism, the missions had a significant influence on the history of Rwanda during the colonial period.
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