This chapter examines the impact of European colonial border making – internal as well as external – on the Lake Kivu region. After the border dispute was settled, Belgians sought to eliminate the Rwandan monarchy’s political claims over the region. Yet, local elites, often chiefs, used these new spatial orderings to promote their own interests, bringing the border between Congo and what was then the German territory of Rwanda into practice. After World War I, when Rwanda had become under Belgian tutelage, the Belgian administration transitioned into more systematic interventions in the political organizations of these societies, fundamentally changing them. In Rwanda, it meant increasing control over regions that had before exerted more autonomy, while rule became increasingly tied to one group – Tutsi – even if the large majority of Tutsi never held positions of political power. In Kivu, the reorganization of these societies also implied an increased territorialization of these societies, with an impact on forms of identification becoming more fixed, as well as tying access to resources more firmly to “belonging” to a certain “national” or “ethnic” territory. Thus, while borders could be straddled to escape oppressive circumstances or to improve livelihoods, they also had the potential to increase conflicts over resources, and to be used as a tool for exclusion.

I met Kilalo, then ninety years old, for the first time in 2010. He lived – and was later buried – in one of the villages that make up Monigi. Back then, it was close to the city, but still Goma’s rural hinterland. Since that time, the city of Goma has been rapidly encroaching on Monigi, as recurrent waves of violence have brought ever more people to the city in search of refuge. From the entrance of Kilalo’s small house, Rwanda was always visible, even if during the dry season the dust in the air only revealed the contours of its first hills. During one of our first conversations, he told me: “When my friend from Rwanda comes here, and I have a piece of land, why not give it to him? Like today, the Congolese refugees who are in Rwanda, they also went without UNHCR [UN’s Refugee Agency].”

The last chapter of the book critically examines the production of history within multilayered matrices of power – influenced by “precolonial,” colonial as well as contemporary contexts. Two key concepts are the main focus of this chapter: the “greater Rwanda” thesis for Rwanda, and “balkanization” discourses for Congo. The chapter traces how both concepts instrumentalize the past to explain the present, and at times are used to justify violence or interference within the context of tense relationships between Rwanda and Congo as well as the protracted conflict in the region since the 1990s. The chapter shows that while both discourses are crucial to understand meta-narratives of the nation in both countries, they also need to be considered in their cross-border context, as they are in constant dialogue and function as cross-border foils.

The chapter also addresses how in Congo historical narratives are mobilized in debates over citizenship, a pivot of conflict in the region, emphasizing that these discourses were often constructed with the imperial débris left by the Belgians. The chapter further considers how memories about Rwandan aggression in the nineteenth century are used to “naturalize” conflicted relations between Rwanda and Congo, turning “suffering together” – at the hands of Rwanda – into an important part of defining Congolese nationality. However, as the chapter also emphasizes, while such victimhood discourses are often instrumentalized politically, they do not mean the suffering is less real. Moreover, in Rwanda as well, suffering has at times been turned into a political tool.

This chapter examines the period around independence in Rwanda and Kivu. The 1950s saw the maturation and increasing salience of “national” and “ethnic” aspects of people’s identities as they became central to political discussions over “autochthony” and access to resources. Changing political contexts made the ground more fertile for “ethnic,” as well as “national” identity to become part of the political vernacular.

For Rwanda, it focuses on the refugee waves that were the result of political violence against Tutsi in the period between 1959 and 1964. It shows that focusing too narrowly on the forced nature of their mobility disguises previous connections that were conducive to helping Tutsi refugees establish themselves in Congo. The chapter thus reiterates the importance of looking at people’s “personal information fields” as well as other preexisting affective or other ties in understanding the patterns of their mobility. For Kivu, the chapter tries to explore what other fault lines become visible when one shifts the attention away from “identity” as the sole explanation for violent conflicts, such as the “Kanyarwanda wars” in the 1960s.

A last point this chapter makes is the changing meanings of the border between Rwanda and Congo, for people living in its vicinity as well as for the Belgian administration. Whereas the Belgians had always benefited from the close connections between Kivu and Rwanda, this changed almost overnight in 1960 when Congo became independent. Both Rwandans and Congolese had used cross-border connections to build political networks and to organize out of the reach of the colonial state and traditional authorities. After Congo’s independence, the loss of control over subversive activities just across the border caused anxieties for the Belgians in Rwanda. For Congolese and Rwandans, independence turned the border into a national boundary, separating Rwandan from Congolese political sovereignty as well as altering the sense of national belonging.

This chapter explores the challenges faced by the Belgian colonial administration in controlling mobility within and across the borders of Rwanda and the Belgian Congo. After Rwanda had become an official mandated area of Belgium, efforts to regulate movement became integral to economic and labor control. The chapter then sets out to explain the inherent contradictions of this asymmetrical labor system englobing both shores and hinterlands of the Lake Kivu region in which Rwanda came to serve as a labor reserve supporting Belgian economic interests in Kivu, and further away in Katanga. The need for labor in the Belgian Congo became one of the main factors explaining its persistent interconnections with Rwanda during the colonial period; the deep-rooted historical ties between the societies around the Lake another.

These interconnections also amplified and altered pre-existing patterns of mobility. This caused problems for the Belgian administration at both sides of the border as they needed to control mobility without damaging the colonial labor market. The chapter shows that they often prioritized economic benefits over their own rules and regulations, and the interests of the Belgian Congo over those of Rwanda. Here as well, chiefs played ambiguous roles, in regulating the movement of commoners and mobilizing labor. The system fostered competition among chiefs for both people and their labor. It incentivized chiefs to closely monitor their subjects, imposing a heavier burden on ordinary people and prompting them to seek better conditions elsewhere.

Popular discourses on conflicts in the Great Lakes region argue that many of these conflicts have been caused by “erroneous” borders that cut up communities for European interests. This chapter argues that rather than with where these borders were drawn, the problem is what they did and do. In the second half of the nineteenth century in the Lake Kivu region, communities could not be neatly delineated and matched to clearly circumscribed territory, as relations between territory and identity were different. The divergence between how political communities were perceived was not just between “European” and “African” conceptions but also between those of a centralizing state – the Nyiginya kingdom – and those societies in the “frontier” that had other forms of sociopolitical organization.

Starting from a discussion of the tumultuous context at the turn of the twentieth century, the chapter addresses the imperial conflict between Germany and the Congo Free State, who both claimed Lake Kivu and its hinterland as their imperial possession, in what became known as the “Kivu-Bufumbiro conflict.” The chapter traces the different perspectives over how to understand the sociopolitical context and unsettled spatial organization that emerge from the debates between imperial powers in the context of this conflict The chapter concludes with an examination of the early impact of European border making on local populations, and the ways in which they tried to use the colonial border for their own survival.