StapleRwanda
Ubugali
Cassava or maize flour cooked stiff, eaten with beans, greens or fish. The Rwandan table's fixed point, taken by hand and dipped.
Serves 6 · 30 minutes
Rwandan Returnees
The generation born in exile — Tutsi refugees driven out from 1959 who grew up in Ugandan, Burundian and Congolese camps, built the army that stopped the genocide, came home in 1994 to a country most had never seen, and now govern it.
Identity
Population: Around 700,000 returned in the years after 1994
Location: Kigali and across Rwanda, with the strongest concentration in the capital and the eastern province
Language: Kinyarwanda, with English from the Ugandan exile and French from the Burundian and Congolese
Language family: Niger-Congo → Bantu (J60, Rwanda-Rundi)
Traditional governance: The Rwandan state itself: the returnee generation supplied the RPF leadership and holds a substantial share of senior civilian and military posts.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Ugandan-raised
The largest group, English-speaking, many of whom served in Museveni's NRA before 1990.
Burundian and Congolese-raised
French and Swahili-speaking, with a different exile experience and network.
Tanzanian and Western diaspora
Smaller communities, including those raised in Europe and North America.
Culture
Clothing: Contemporary urban dress; mushanana wrap for women at ceremony; the intore dancer's headdress at national occasions.
Food: Rwandan staples of beans, plantain, cassava and potato; Ugandan and Kenyan foods that entered Kigali with the returnees and stayed.
Ceremonies: Kwibuka, the annual hundred days of genocide commemoration; umuganda, the compulsory monthly community work day; kwita izina, the gorilla naming ceremony as national theatre.
Marriage customs: Church and civil marriage with gusaba bridewealth negotiation; marriages across the exile-country divide were a deliberate feature of the post-1994 settlement.
Initiation rites: Ingando and itorero civic camps, which the government uses to teach a shared national account, and which returnees and survivors attend together.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Rwanda and Uganda, at national rather than community level — 21 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
Rwanda
9 dishes
National dishRwanda
Isombe
Pounded cassava leaves with aubergine, spinach and groundnut paste, cooked long and dark. Rwanda's most characteristic dish, served with ubugali or rice.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
National dishRwanda
Ibirayi n'Inyama
also Potato and beef stew
Potatoes and beef simmered with celery, leek and tomato into a straightforward, well-made stew. The dinner of the Rwandan highlands, where the potato is king.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Street foodRwanda
Brochettes na Ibirayi
Goat skewers with fried potatoes, the standard order at every Kigali bar. Ordered by the number of sticks and eaten with a bottle of Primus.
Serves 4 · 45 minutes, plus 2 hours marinating
Street foodRwanda
Akabenz
also Fried pork, Kabenz
Pork boiled then fried hard in its own fat until the edges crisp, served with a bowl of chilli and a beer. The dish that fills Kigali's bar terraces on a Friday.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Festival & feastRwanda
Agatogo
Plantain stewed with meat, beans and vegetables in one pot, made for family gatherings and for guests. A dish of the banana-growing hills.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Regional specialityRwanda
Ibihaza
Pumpkin cooked with beans until both collapse into a thick sweet-savoury mash, an old dish of the countryside and a favourite of the hungry season.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Drink & sweetRwanda
Urwagwa
Banana beer fermented with roasted sorghum, drunk at every ceremony and negotiation. In the old kingdom it was offered at every stage of a marriage agreement.
Serves Makes about 5 litres · 4 days
Drink & sweetRwanda
Icyayi cy'Amata
also Milk tea, African tea
Tea brewed directly in milk with ginger, from a country that grows some of the world's best tea and exports nearly all of it.
Serves 4 · 20 minutes
Uganda
12 dishes
StapleUganda
Matoke
Green cooking bananas steamed in their own leaves until soft and yellow, then mashed. The staple of the Baganda and the food that defines central Uganda.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
StapleUganda
Katogo
also Matoke katogo, Breakfast stew
Green bananas cooked in one pot with offal, beans or groundnut sauce until they absorb everything. Uganda's breakfast, argued about endlessly for what should go in it.
Serves 4 · 50 minutes
StapleUganda
Kalo
also Millet bread, Atap
Finger millet flour worked into a dense dark brown loaf, often with cassava flour for body. The staple of eastern and northern Uganda, torn and dipped into sauce.
Serves 6 · 35 minutes
National dishUganda
Luwombo
Chicken, beef or groundnut sauce steamed inside a banana leaf parcel, invented in the 1880s by a cook to Kabaka Mwanga II. Opened at the table so the steam is released in front of the guest.
Serves 6 · 2 hours
Street foodUganda
Rolex
An omelette rolled inside a chapati, whose name is a compression of rolled eggs. Sold from griddle stalls outside every campus and taxi park in Uganda.
Serves 2 · 30 minutes
Street foodUganda
Grilled Tilapia
also Ngege, Fish choma
Whole tilapia from Lake Victoria, scored, rubbed with garlic and lemon and grilled over charcoal at the landing sites. Eaten with the fingers and a heap of kachumbari.
Serves 4 · 45 minutes, plus 1 hour marinating
Street foodUganda
Gonja
also Roast plantain
Sweet plantain roasted whole over charcoal until the skin blackens and the flesh caramelises, sold at every Ugandan roadside and taxi stage.
Serves 4 · 25 minutes
Festival & feastUganda
Binyebwa
Groundnut sauce, sometimes with mushrooms or smoked fish, steamed or simmered and served over matoke. The sauce that goes with everything at a Ugandan celebration.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Festival & feastUganda
Muchomo
also Goat muchomo, Nyama choma ya mbuzi
Goat meat on sticks, salted and grilled slowly over charcoal, the fixture of every Ugandan celebration and the reason the town of Nakasongola is on the map.
Serves 8 · 1 hour 15 minutes, plus 2 hours marinating
Regional specialityUganda
Malewa
Smoked bamboo shoots stewed with groundnut, a Bagisu dish from the slopes of Mount Elgon. Prepared at imbalu circumcision ceremonies and sold dried in Mbale market.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes, plus soaking
Regional specialityUganda
Eshabwe
also Ghee sauce, Ankole ghee sauce
Clarified butter whipped with rock salt and water until it turns white and thick, the ceremonial sauce of the Ankole and Toro pastoral kingdoms. Poured over millet bread or matoke.
Serves 6 as a sauce · 30 minutes
Drink & sweetUganda
Bushera
Sorghum or millet flour fermented into a thin sour drink, served fresh to children and left longer to turn alcoholic for adults. A Bakiga and Banyankole staple.
Serves 6 · 20 minutes, plus 1 to 3 days fermenting
Stories & Oral Literature
Growing Up as a Refugee's ChildSocial account
The 1959 revolution and the killings that followed drove hundreds of thousands of Tutsi into Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania and the Congo. Rwanda refused their return for three decades, arguing the country was full. A generation grew up in Nakivale and Oruchinga camps and in Ugandan towns, stateless, educated in English, and forbidden by law from returning to a country their parents described from memory.
Two Languages in One CountryContemporary account
Rwanda switched its education system from French to English in 2008. It was a decision with obvious diplomatic causes and an obvious domestic one: the leadership had been schooled in Uganda. For those who stayed through the genocide and were educated in French, the change reordered who could hold which job, and the divide between abasajya, those who came back, and those who never left, is discussed carefully or not at all.
Proverbs
“Akanyoni katagurutse ntikamenya iyo bweze.”
“The bird that does not fly does not know where the harvest is ripe.”
A Kinyarwanda proverb on travel, which exile gave a second meaning.
“We learned the country from our parents' mouths.”
A homeland known only as description.
“Home was a place we had to take back.”
The RPF's founding proposition.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Imana as the creator in Kinyarwanda cosmology; abazimu, the ancestors; the post-1994 state has built a deliberate national narrative that functions with comparable force.
Beliefs: Christianity overwhelmingly, Catholic and Protestant; Islam among a minority whose standing rose after 1994; older practice largely displaced; the national commemorative calendar is observed by everyone.
Ancestors: Many families' dead are in Uganda and Burundi rather than Rwanda, and reburial of those who died in exile has been a quiet preoccupation of the returnee generation.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Imana
The creator of Kinyarwanda cosmology, said to spend the night in Rwanda
Abazimu
The ancestors, honoured in family practice
Kwibuka
Not a deity, but the commemoration that structures the national year
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Kigali's rebuilt and expanded quarters; imidugudu, the planned villages into which returnees and others were resettled; camp housing left behind in Uganda.
Building techniques: Contemporary construction; the imidugudu programme moved much of the rural population from scattered homesteads into grouped villages, a policy that returnees' resettlement helped drive.
Village layout: Kigali reorganised on a master plan, with the returnee generation's arrival among the reasons the capital's population multiplied several times over.
Artifacts
Kwibuka commemoration
Institution
The hundred days of national genocide remembrance beginning each 7 April.
Imidugudu villages
Architecture
Planned settlements built to house returnees and to regroup the rural population.
Nakivale and Oruchinga camps
Heritage site
The Ugandan settlements where the exile generation grew up.
Intore dance
Performance
Warrior dance of the old court, revived as national performance after 1994.
Historical Timeline
1959–1963
The Hutu revolution and subsequent killings drive hundreds of thousands of Tutsi into exile.
1960s–1980s
A generation is raised stateless in Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania and the Congo; return is refused.
1987–1990
The RPF is founded among Rwandan exiles in Uganda; the invasion begins in October 1990.
1994
The genocide kills around 800,000; the RPF takes the country and around 700,000 exiles return.
2008
Rwanda switches its education system from French to English, reflecting where the leadership was schooled.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Britannica: Rwanda — historyEncyclopaedia Britannica
- UNHCR: Rwandan refugee returnsUNHCR
Premium & scholarly sources