Most people know Rwanda only as the site of a genocide in 1994 which has overshadowed the
country's relatively peaceful past before and after colonization by first Germany and then
Belgium. Rwanda's precolonial history fascinated many European researchers explorers and
colonial officers mainly because they (falsely) deemed it untainted by external influences
relatively well organized and quite belligerent. Most sources about Rwanda's precolonial
history come from Belgian researchers officers and administrators and from White Father
missionaries. They were published in French and English and focused on the political
establishment and its history. But there are also some less well known Polish and German
testimonies about the everyday life of ordinary Rwandans which allow deep (though not
unbiased) insights into Rwandan family life religious habits and customs education
architecture and agriculture trade slavery and gender relations. In Every Day Life in Early
Colonial Rwanda these testimonies are presented for the first time in English translation. They
stem from Jan Czekanowski a Polish researcher nobleman and member of the Duke of
Mecklemburg's Central Africa expedition 1905-1907. Czekanowski's research was later published
in German but he also left behind a diary (in Polish and German) with unpublished
observations. Excerpts from the memoirs of protestant missionary Ernst Johanssen and several
unpublished records from German and Belgian archives about everyday life accompany them. They
enable the reader to get an idea about how Hutu Tutsi Twa Hindu and Arab traders used to
live at the advent of the twentieth century.
