Stefanie Bognitz, PhD Senior Fellow, Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa, University of Ghana
Kantorowicz, Kandt and Kanayoge: On the Violence of a Colonial Anthropologist in Rwanda
Abstract
In this article, I intend to revisit some of unsettling observations of Richard Kandt in Caput Nili. In my attempt to write a critical anthropology of Kantorowicz, Kandt and Kanyonge, I will examine his many identities that unfold in his epistolary writing. I situate his authorship on “Africa” and “Rwanda” as more than another “travel report” by underlining his authority-in-authorship. Instead, his published monograph is an ethnography that produced and made possible “the gaze” onto the other for a “European” audience. I ask who speaks and who is silenced. I put forth an invitation to imagine what would happen when those alterized in Kandt’s lines of Caput Nili speak back to us. Kandt is more than a by-standing observer or travelling author. He writes people into the landscapes he traversed so that they are rendered without name, identity or purpose. As a self-styled anthropologist of his time and place, he “explores” Rwanda during the height of race-making, and racializing scientific theories and methods in Europe. His is a time of defining “civilization”, “race” and “intellect” on the basis of the measurement of human beings and human remains that were systematically collected – including from Rwanda during punitive missions ordered and organized by the colonial agents – in order to be shipped, categorized, measured, classified and archived to this day in the empire’s capitals, including Berlin. Richard Kandt is not a silent witness to these happenings during the heyday of territorial colonialism in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference (1884-85) regulating European colonial presence within newly outlined borders on the African continent or the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference (1889-90) abolishing slavery for the advancement of colonial policies in newly established territories by either indirect rule or divide and rule. Kandt’s imperial agency might have been shrouded in the scientific quest for knowledge production. But it is this very process, that knitted together knowledge, power, domination and empire at the dawn of the 20th century.
Introduction
Through the violence of the colonial anthropologist, a violence structured by epistemic disregard and the systematic effacement of Rwandan lifeworlds, I return to Richard Kandt’s troubling remarks in the 1904 first edition of Caput Nili: Eine Empfindsame Reise zu den Quellen des Nils (Caput Nili: A Sentient Journey to the Sources of the Nile, author’s translation). This is not in order to recover a canonized anthropologist, but to trace the fractures, silences, and colonial violence and erasure that make his observations possible in the first place and that continue in the twenty-first century. In seeking to write towards a critical anthropology of Kantorowicz, Kandt, and Kanayoge, I examine the colonial epistemic violence embedded in Kandt’s epistolary writing. By epistemic violence, I draw on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) analysis of how dominant frames of reference and modes of knowing, particularly those produced through colonialism and European, elite discourse, operated through practices of controlling or disregarding others. These regimes of colonial ways of knowing were tied to imperial expansion and colonialism and thus formed ways of controlling, overwriting, or erasing the epistemologies of those they claimed to describe, displacing people’s ways of living, learning, world-making, and relating to reality. In this context, I refer to the modalities of seeing and knowing through which unfamiliar worlds, including the Kingdom of Rwanda under the Nyiginya dynasty, were classified and rendered legible only in ways that distorted, silenced, or erased what was manifestly Rwandan, or of the people in Rwanda. As Kandt traverses and writes ‘Rwanda’, this colonial episteme enacts a mode of violence. I underline the impossibility of doubt regarding Kandt’s colonial fantasy: his own writing provides sufficient evidence of the German empire’s determination to establish a settler colony that imposes itself on the people in the name of so-called ‘civilisation’ and on the land with claims to its soil and resources, all under the promise for the ‘civilised Europe’s’ prosperity and advancement.
I situate the ‘authorship’ of Richard Kandt on ‘Africa’ and ‘Rwanda’ as more than just travel accounts, foregrounding the epistemic and material violence embedded in his work as a colonial anthropologist-ethnographer. I read his published monograph as an ethnography of its time that produced and authorized a particular colonial gaze on the otherised Rwandans for an imaginary European audience. Central to this critical anthropological inquiry are the questions of who is granted the authority to speak and who is rendered silent, and what might happen if those otherised as irreconcilably different in Kandt’s Caput Nili (hereafter CN) retrieved their voices and were to speak back to us?
Kandt is more than a bystander-observer or travelling ethnographer. Before becoming a colonial settler and later an imperial resident, he traverses what he, as a colonial agent, sees as Terra Nullius ‘empty land/scapes’ (see also Dunbar-Ortiz 2015), spread out before his gaze, awaiting discovery and revelation to the world. When he does encounter people, they appear without names, identities, or purposes on earth. As a ‘self’-styled anthropologist of his imperial time and place, he ‘explores’ Rwanda at the height of European race-making, when epistemic violence or racialized ‘scientific’ theories and methods were being consolidated. This was an era in which ‘civilization’, ‘race’ and ‘intellect’ were defined through the measurement of human faces, bodies and human remains, systematically collected, including from Rwanda, during punitive expeditions and the looting of burial grounds ordered and organised by colonial agents oftentimes aided by missionaries.[1] These remains were boxed, shipped, categorised, measured, classified and archived, practices and processes that continue to this day in the empire’s capital Berlin (Biwa 2017, Moradi 2022, Rasool 2015). What is striking in Kandt’s travel account is that the people he encounters, and on whom he depends to organise his movement, are immediately wrapped into the racialised categories that form the foundation of the ‘theories’ in physical anthropology that he applied. Employing critical decolonial thinking, CN shows race-making and tribal classification embedded in its very lines. More troubling is the decades-long reception of CN as just a travelogue, rather than as a foundational evidentiary document of race-making that bolstered the German empire’s and western Europe’s claim of ‘racial superiority’. We know how such claims culminated in the violent frenzies of the Great War (Ivita in Kinyarwanda, later on, the ‘First World War’), an imperial war that shaped relations and hierarchies of power in the German-occupied territories of the Rwandan kingdom (Kabagema 1993, Trouillot 2015).
Richard Kandt was not a silent witness to this violence during the heyday of imperial territorial expansion through conquest that followed the Berlin Conference (1884–85). At that gathering, European imperial monarchs met to divide and claim the African continent through violent displacement and annihilation of peoples, the plunder of cultural heritage and material wealth, and the extraction of knowledges from the continent. Likewise, the Brussels ‘Anti-Slavery Conference’ (1889–90), which claimed to ‘abolished slavery’, in fact served to ‘legitimise’ and intensify colonial governance in newly established territories, whether through indirect rule or the imperial program of divide and rule. Although Kandt’s imperial calculations were shrouded in the language of ‘scientific quest for knowledge production’, it was precisely through such practices and processes that knowledge, power, colonial domination and empire-building were woven together at the dawn of the 20th century.
What is in a Name?
In my title, I invoke three distinct names, carefully aligned through alliteration and seemingly apt to capture the person at the centre of this inquiry. But aesthetics or coherence should not distract us. Names are never innocent; something always remains concealed within them (see also Bulawayo 2013, Derrida 1995). The person we have come to know as Richard Kandt, indeed, bore more than one name. This multiplicity may be read as an effect of mobility: a life lived within and across colonial borders, marked by translation, adaptation, and erasure. I begin with the first two names before turning to the third, which demands closer attention. Richard Kantorowicz was Kandt’s birth and family name. Born in Poznań, then part of Poland, to Jewish and Protestant parents, his surname was rooted in a Polish-Jewish genealogy. Upon beginning his studies in Munich, he was baptised and adopted the name Richard Kandt (Bindseil 1988). While he relinquished the name Kantorowicz, he didn’t abandon his father’s inheritance. Family wealth would later finance his travels to the African continent. The abandonment of his family name can be read less as a personal reinvention than as a strategic response to the German imperial academic setting, where Kantorowicz would have signalled a Polish-Jewish origin and thus subjected him to anti-Semitic exclusion (Aly 2014; 2020). Beyond this imperial condition of Kandt’s identity-making, is the third name, Kanayoge. It is through this name that we enter a nocturnal scene in CN (287f). Yet, it is necessary to go further and beyond the night of Kanayoge. To learn from what might lie hidden in the name (Derrida 1995, xiv; 68), we must move beyond the scene itself and attend to the moment in which the muted and colonised other speaks through the act of naming, interrupting the colonial archive with an event of address and recognition; it is a Rwandan voice who announces the conferring of a name unto a German colonial agent. It is thus a colonial context, a world of epistemic violence. Kandt seizes this situation as an opportunity to explain what he calls his ‘Rwanda-name’.
- "meinen Ruanda-Namen Kanajoge" (CN 1904, 287)
- "Als ich gestern Abend vor meinem Zelt saß und bei Lampenschein mein Tagebuch vervollständigte, hörte ich plötzlich vom anderen Ufer her meinen Ruanda-Namen Kanajoge rufen" (CN 1904, 287)
Kandt speaks of a ‘mutilation’ when recounting to his readers the ‘Rwanda-name’ he was given. In doing so, the anthropologist misjudges the semantic and cultural weight of a term assigned to him in Kinyarwanda, a language he neither speaks nor fully apprehends. His access to Rwanda is linguistically mediated through Kiswahili, which he has already interiorized as the German East African colony extends westward. To a certain extent, Kiswahili thus forms his frame of reference. It is as Johannes Fabian has noted, a Janus-faced language: for one, a language with a protracted colonial history and entanglement and, for another, a language of mobilization and liberation (Fabian 2001, 15). But why would Kinyarwanda speakers be accused of ‘mutilating’ Kiswahili? The charge discloses less about linguistic practice than about Kandt’s complete disregard for the force and autonomy of Kinyarwanda. He insists on the idea of mutilation because he wishes to be addressed as ‘Master’. But Kinyarwanda has no equivalent for ‘Master’ in this colonial ‘white supremacists’ sense. Kanayoge does not confer authority; it is an inferiorizing designation. Its phonetic proximity to Kantorowicz and Kandt registers as alliterative coincidence, but its meaning is unmistakably derisive. It functions as a mock-name for the ‘white man’ who bathes obsessively and resides by the water.
Kandt’s failure to recognize this critique can only be attributed to an imperial attitude. His journey into Rwanda, frequently described with the vocabulary of ‘penetration’, a term saturated with violent and patriarchal fantasies of untouched territory, begins in the land of Kiswahili-speaking people and regions of what German colonial authorities call German East Africa (see also Chrétien 2007, Götzen 1899, Wissmann 1892). Kiswahili, used extensively in military communication between German colonial agents and askari, armed soldiers[2], structures both the colonial field and Kandt’s own interpretive horizon. From within this framework, Kandt remains unable to understand the incisive social commentary and linguistic structure embedded in Kanayoge. The mutilation he decries is not enacted by Kinyarwanda speakers rather, it is Kandt who mutilates Kinyarwanda, by refusing to hear its critique, and by subordinating it to an imperial linguistic order that presumes mastery where none is granted.
Nyiginya (1894)
Covering no less than three decades of imperial rule, Mwami Kigeri IV Rwabugiri became the first Rwandan King to come into contact with colonial agents from Western Europe. King Rwabugiri governed a kingdom whose territory was largely unknown beyond its borders: ‘slave’ routes didn’t traverse its terrain, and Rwabugiri carefully defended his subjects from trade and exchange with merchants from the Swahili coast. Western European reckoning insists that the year 1894 marks this first encounter. I deliberately cross out this calendrical precision, as it neglects Rwandan temporalities (Kagame 1956; 1976, Kimenyi 2004, Martinon 2007). From the European perspective, however, the moment is recorded as a ‘mission,’ or rather an expedition, to what they imagined to be the ‘secluded’ kingdom of Rwanda.
This kingdom, this inconceivably vast space, rwa-nda, understood as the ‘surface occupied by a swarm or a scattering’ (cf. Vansina 2004, 35), was an attempt by its inhabitants to give form to vastness: a land expanded and defended by its kings through periods of violent conquest and annihilation, as well as through times of peace and consolidation.
The self-appointed representative of the German empire, newly invigorated by colonial ambition on the continent of Africa, Gustav Adolf Graf von Götzen, arrived with an aspiration no less grand than a traversal of the continent at once from East to West (Götzen 1899). Rwanda, encountered en route, became the stage for what might be read as a first encounter between two ‘divine’ kingdoms, each under rulers who claimed authority entrusted by God at the centre of their respective courts. While historical accounts have inscribed von Götzen’s meeting with Rwabugiri as the advent of Rwanda’s colonization, I wish instead to recall the labour of decolonization. In this regard, I turn to Frantz Fanon, who writes:
- "Decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation, their first confrontation was coloured by violence and their cohabitation – or rather the exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer – continued at the point of the bayonet and under cannon fire. The colonist and the colonized are old acquaintances. And consequently, the colonist is right when he says he ‘knows’ them. It is the colonist who fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject. The colonist derives his validity, i.e., his wealth, from the colonial system" (Fanon 2005, 2)
Before Kandt’s departure to the African continent and his entry into Rwandan territories in June 1898, he relocated to Berlin. By this time, the region designated as German East Africa had already come under the authority of the German colonial office, following the Berlin conference in 1884–85 (Pesek 2005). Germany’s ascent to colonial power was not accidental. This was made clear by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who emphasized:
- "Meine Karte von Afrika liegt hier in Europa"
- "My map of Africa is here, in Europe"
- "Ihre Karte von Afrika ist ja sehr schön, aber meine Karte von Afrika liegt hier in Europa. Hier liegt Russland, und hier liegt Frankreich, und wir sind in der Mitte; das ist meine Karte von Afrika" (Otto von Bismarck zu Eugen Wolf, 1888)
What would later be termed ‘material culture’ in anthropology was, at the discipline’s inception, less a study of artefacts than a reframing of art itself (Diagne 2012). The establishment of ethnographic collections, produced through a colonial frenzy of collecting, assembling, representing, storing and owning ‘the world’ and ‘its cultures’, served to affirm the presumed superiority of western ‘European civilization’ over the worlds it defined as exotic, distant, savage, or primitive (Lips 1966). Through ethnographic practice art was rendered into artefacts, thereby substantiating a European conception of art history as a ‘universal’ narrative. This narrative located its centres in Athens, Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, for example, as the foundational sites of artistic progress and the Renaissance. By contract, ‘primitive art’, was understood as primordial, static, and outside history or without history, and therefore unchanging and without historical agency (Wolf 1982). But it was this very ‘primitive art’ that would later be said to inspire European modernism, notably the Cubists such as Georges Braque or the early Pablo Picasso, as well as the Expressionists, all of whom would enter the canon of ‘European’ art history.[3]
Thus, what was denied historical agency in its original context was mobilised as a catalyst for innovation within Europe, without a corresponding recognition of its histories or creators. When Kandt writes of his inspirations for ‘finding the source of the Nile’ in June 1898 from Akanyaru River, he explicitly cites the German colonial pioneer von Götzen. In doing so, Kandt situates himself within the racialised ideological and methodological framework of colonial anthropology, invoking its purposes and assumptions in the specific context of Rwanda.
- "Ich muss gestehen, dass […] sie [die Watussi] mir imponierten, obwohl mein Verstand sich dagegen sträubt, und obwohl ich mir hundertmal vorgesagt habe, dass diese Menschen doch intellektuell tief unter mir stehende Barbaren seien"
- "I must confess that […] they [the Watussi] have left an impression on me, although my rationality strongly resists such reasoning, and although I have repeatedly rehearsed this to myself a hundred times, after all, those humans are positioned intellectually further down below me and that they must be barbarians " (Kandt 1905, 270)
- "Colonized society is not merely portrayed as a society without values. The colonist is not content with stating that the colonized world has lost its values or worse never possessed any. The "native" is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil" (Fanon 2005, 6)
- "Rwanda! – A foreign ring to my ears two years ago, now I am awaiting an audience with its ruler!" (CN 1904, 255-56)
- "unlike in other parts of the (GEA) colony, hundreds of thousands of Bantu […] who call themselves Wahutu and live in feudal dependency from Watussi, a foreign [authochtonous] semitic or hamitic aristocratic caste (CN 257) whose ancestors come from the lands of the Galla south of Abyssinia. They rule the whole of the interlacustrine region, which they have charted out in provinces and districts. These [spaces and their inhabitants] suffer from the extractive administration of Watussi, whose giant, two-metre-high statures remind us of a world of folktales. At their helmet rules a king, who restlessly roams the land, builds his residences here and there. And finally, there is a tribe of dwarfs, the Batwa. Now I have come here to witness all of this with my own eyes. I will study their organization to the tiniest cell and will determine everything for the sciences. Before all of this will be destroyed by the influences of the occidental culture of the Missionaries and the [colonial] administration" (CN 258)
Kandt’s writing is marked by a prominent absence of interlocutors. Rather than engaging situated voices, he substitutes lived social relations with abstracted identities, collapsing heterogeneous and historically layered forms of belonging into two supposedly discrete ‘tribes’. In doing so, he obscures the complex social architecture of ubwoko, urugo, and inzu, flattening their relational and historical specificity into a crude colonial binary. This reduction is further reinforced through the ethnicization of difference: physical features are racialized, cognitive and moral capacities are ascribed, and two groups emerge as they are positioned in an antagonistic hierarchy. These provide the epistemic pretext through which colonial rule could be naturalised, justified and operationalised, particularly through ‘indirect’ colonial governance. By reconfiguring fluid social distinctions into natural and fixed political identities, colonial knowledge production actively politicised dominance and subordination to facilitate imperial intervention. As Mahmood Mamdani (2002) has argued, the political community of Abatutsi and Abahutu was a colonial invention that must be analytically distinguished from the social community of Abanyarwanda, whose members were embedded in shared social relations and values, that is, intermarriage, kinship, and everyday reciprocity, and from the cultural community constituted through Kinyarwanda, a shared language encompassing common knowledge systems, historical memories, and oral cultures.
Let me illustrate this with an example drawn from what colonial and postcolonial archives retrospectively describe as the ‘fiercely autonomous’ Kinyarwanda-speaking communities of north-western Rwanda. Prior to their violent incorporation into the Rwandan state, these communities did not recognise themselves as ‘Abahutu’. Their subjection was affected through a collaboration between German colonial troops and the mwami’s armies, a military encounter that was simultaneously a political conquest and an epistemic rupture. As Mamdani notes, they identified instead as ‘Bakiga’ – people of the mountains – and referred to the southern ‘Hutu’ who allied with ‘Tutsi’ forces in the ‘war of conquest’ not as Bahutu, but as Banyanduga (Mamdani 2002, 54). In other words, at stake is not a change in nomenclature, but the retroactive imposition of an ethnic taxonomy that came from colonial governance rather than from Rwandan lifeworlds. The category ‘Hutu’, stabilised in colonial administrative knowledge and sedimented in ethnographic and bureaucratic archives, was not discovered but produced – through conquest, classification, and rule. Ethnicity, in this sense, was not an inherited identity but a political artefact, forged in conditions of violence and consolidated through colonial strategies of ‘divide-and-rule’ and ‘indirect rule’. This example, one of many, take us to how colonial power operated not only through military domination but through epistemic violence: the reordering of social difference into rigid ethnic forms that rendered earlier modes of belonging natural and knowable (see also Peiter 2024). Ethnic identities thus come into existence less as expressions of cultural continuity than as effects of colonial intervention – born out of colonialism, colonial administration, and the archival practices that continue to naturalise these historically contingent categories.
Kandt establishes relations with the social, political and legal order of the kingdom. We learn that he was granted permission to photograph the Mwami and reproduced the image in Caput Nili (1904, 273). He was convinced that he alone had been received by the genuine Mwami, the adolescent Yuhi Musinga, rather than by his stand-in, Mpamarugamba (CN 1904, 271) – the considerably older decoy Mwami whom the White Father Jean-Joseph Hirth had been acquainted with in what was later framed as one of the alleged ruses of the advisers and diviners (abiru) of the Nyiginya kingdom. Such substitutions functioned as measures of protection and seclusion, intended to safeguard a vulnerable sovereign. Yet how, in turn, did the Mwami and his notables perceive Kandt? They were well aware that he traversed their territory and came into contact with dissatisfied subjects and marginal groups. In 1898, Kandt travelled without a court-appointed escort and chose to settle in the westernmost region. By 1900, however, the court sought to enlist him as an intermediary between the White Fathers and their own notables in the Southern Province. From the court’s perspective, the White Fathers had exceeded acceptable limits in their influence over local communities (Des Forges 2011, 26-29).
Proof of Violence
In a scene Kandt’s writing crystallises the German colonial presence in Rwanda. In this scene, Kandt’s askari – soldiers recruited in Dar es Salaam – have shot a hunter. When Kandt encounters the man, gravely wounded and bleeding, there is no moment of recognition or relation. He observes him with a distant pity, a detached colonial gaze one might cast upon an animal that has fallen prey in a hunt. Through Kandt’s words, the hunter’s face remains veiled: we are given no expression, no speech, only a body in agony. In this moment, Kandt reflects on the power to give life and to let die – not in his capacity as a medical doctor, but as a colonial agent charged with clearing paths and charting territory. Strikingly, he records no consideration of how the fallen man might be approached or treated as a patient in need of care. Instead, he stands apart, continuing to gaze upon ‘the other’, as an ‘other-than-human’ figure. Without examination, he calmly divines the hunter’s imminent death and the depth of his misery; a misery produced, in the first place, by Kandt’s own firearms. This is the coloniser’s technology of gunpowder at work (Lindqvist 1996, 46–52). Kandt did not just possess an arsenal of overwhelming weapons; he relied on it extensively. Rwandan forces, too, had already encountered modern European arms; arms without which there would be no modern German empire. In 1894, a small Rwandan military detachment attacked an armed expedition led by Gustav Adolf Graf von Götzen. Armed with spears, bows, arrows, and the hope that surprise might compensate for disparity, they nonetheless faced the crushing superiority of the expedition’s guns. After their defeat, there was no doubt left as to where power resided (see Des Forges 2011, 15).
Armed with prior encounters, Kandt learned to wager on surprise. He relied not only on force, but on spectacle: on the shock of a sound that announced itself as modern. The gunshot, erupting from the barrel, carried with it a claim to technological supremacy, a sound that could only be echoed by another invention of the same lineage. Fireworks, with their booming detonations and crackling sparks, were sent into the night sky as if to rehearse warfare as wonder (CN 1904, 276–77). Kandt ensured that these devices were not an afterthought. They were loaded alongside supplies, balanced on the heads and shoulders of porters, carried inland as both cargo and threat. When the moment came, he deployed them deliberately. From a neighbouring hill overlooking the royal court, he personally ignited the explosives under cover of night. The sky ruptured. This act was not without motive. It followed the Mwami’s firm refusal to provide the provisions Kandt demanded for his caravan of 150 men, and for his white stallion, before continuing westward. The fireworks were retaliation, staged as intimidation. An old imperial impulse, rehearsed yet again.
Below, within the royal enclosure, the night had already been carefully composed. Drums pulsed, flutes breathed, voices rose in song. Around the court, hundreds of fires burned in wide arcs, tended by night guards whose watchfulness was both ceremonial and protective. This was a nocturnal world of rhythm, light, and care, suddenly shattered by the foreign violence of exploding light and thunder. At this point, the question presses itself forward: who, in this scene, is the savage? The one who unleashes a night-time cataclysm on a living soundscape? The one who violates a social and cosmological order with the weapons of spectacle? Is it not Kandt himself, the ibisimba, the untamed, wild and bewildering animals, as Banyarwanda would later call the white colonists? The question deepens at the moment of execution. A hunter, condemned by Kandt’s imperial decree, lifts his arms. His gesture resembles the raising of a bow and arrow, aimed defiantly toward the sky. Even in the face of imminent death, he does not yield. He attempts to defend himself, and more than that, to defend his place in the world: his right to exist on his land, in his time. Kandt reads this act as foolishness. Another confirmation, in his eyes, of savagery. Yet who is the savage here? The hunter remains where he falls. His dying body is left behind as the caravan advances: porters, bearers, soldiers, askari pacing onward through the landscape as if nothing has occurred. The expedition continues, uninterrupted. We are left with the questions Kandt never asked. What was the hunter’s name? Where did he come from? Did his family ever learn of his murder? Were they granted the chance to mourn him, to bury him, to speak his name into memory? Did they seek justice, or retaliation, or revolt against Kandt and his moving empire? Were they among those who Kandt later dismissed as ‘brutish thieves’, accused of looting his tents under the cover of night? (CN 1904, 313-15). Or were they, like the hunter, simply defending their world, quietly, stubbornly, against an empire that mistook violence for modernity?
‘Material objects’ and artefacts collected by Kandt are today stored in the depot of the Ethnological Museum, part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in Germany. Among them is the identification number E 394/1899, dated 16 January 1899.[4] This number is not singular but belongs to a convolute of approximately ‘500 objects’ dispatched by Kandt to Berlin. According to the museum record, the shipment includes ‘a dispatch from Bunyabungo of looted, assembled bows of Watwa; a report about the Watwa; an expedition in July 1898 and the acquisition of Anthropologica; further travel documents. Letters: 1.’ This archival description invites an unsettling question: is it far-fetched to imagine that among these objects are the belongings of a hunter who was killed, his bow and arrow, gathered as loot and shipped to Berlin, where they remain to this day? The bureaucratic language of the inventory obscures violence, transforming loss into documentation and colonial murder into an accession number. The hunter is one among many, numbering in the thousands, who fell victim to German colonial presence in Rwanda. He joins a long procession of nameless faces and unmournable bodies erased from the historical record of German colonialism. Their murder was neither recorded with care nor acknowledged with grief; their memory has been systematically denied.
Yet the memory of the coloniser is everywhere. We encounter the German colonial-built environment known today as Kandt House; we read Kandt’s writings and consult his archives; we trace his military posts turned residencies in Ishangi and Kigali; we visit his grave in Nürnberg, adorned with a bronze eulogy, a map of Africa, a coffee plant, and the river Nile. Colonial commemoration is abundant, just not for the colonised. Now undergoing a process of museification, the Kandt House Museum has become a heterotopia, to borrow from Michel Foucault, a realm set apart from the ordinary terrains of everyday life (Foucault 2004). It mobilises a repertoire of institutional practices to assert cultural legitimacy: it searches, finds, collects, stores, archives, classifies, categorises, inscribes, and exhibits. In doing so, it produces audiences and assembles publics around collections, art and artefacts. It claims to represent material cultures, offering evidence of how cultures draw meaning from material objects. Yet within this carefully ordered space, the absence is deafening. The museum speaks fluently about objects, explorers, and expeditions, while remaining largely silent about the lives disrupted, the bodies violated, and the histories erased to produce those collections. A critical reading insists on attending to these silences, to the hunter whose bow may sit unlabelled in a Berlin depot, detached from his life, his death, and the violence that carried his belongings across continents (Smith 1999).
Amid the global fervour to dismantle monuments and undo the symbolic architectures of colonial conquest, the monument of Kandt in Kigali appears as a striking anomaly. Rather than marking a rupture with imperial memory, it gestures toward its quiet restoration. In the heart of the city, a statue erected in 2017 draws visitors into an encounter with a man cast in gold: an imperial figure resurfacing in a postcolonial landscape and post-genocide world. From an ethical or historical vantage point, this statue stands unmistakably as an imperial monument raised on the land of a formerly colonised territory. It flattens the complex and shifting identities that emerged around Kandt, known variously as Kantorowicz, Kandt, and Kanayoge, during the volatile years of colonial ‘indirect rule’. The monument forecloses these layered possibilities. It seals off the ambiguities of a man who moved between roles as colonial agent, colonial anthropologist, and medical doctor between 1897 and 1904, reducing them instead to a single, monumentalised presence. What remains visible is not the multiplicity of his engagements, but only Richard Kandt as the German Empire’s Resident and representative, ‘posted’ in Kigali between 1907 and 1914, when Rwanda was part of ‘German East Africa’.
In Nyarugenge, Kandt confronts us once more. Like many of the city’s newly polished surfaces, his effigy commands attention through its sheen (Hudani 2024, 38). The gaze is arrested by gold. Beneath the imperial agent’s boots, the map of Rwanda is etched into the ground, fixing territory underfoot. Clad in full military attire, the statue displays the regalia of empire: the iron cross resting at his neck, the cap held in one hand, the bayonet in the other. The first German Resident stands upright, eyes trained firmly on Kigali, as though still surveying, still claiming. Golden Kandt projects an impression of sleek authority. The gold-tinted surface consumes texture and depth, swallowing contour and elevation alike. The uniform seems to melt into the body it adorns, losing its distinction as garment even as it retains the stiffness of imperial discipline. In this way, the statue becomes strangely ephemeral. Its gleam promises permanence, yet its material betrays it. With each rainy season that settles over Kigali, the golden surface begins to erode. The monument slowly deteriorates under the shifting climate and time. One is compelled to ask whether the delicate labour of decolonisation, the dismantling of colonial monuments, memory, and memorialisation, has been quietly delegated to the elements themselves. In the end, it is the seasons, in the very landscapes Kandt once sought to study and master in their entirety, that begin to undo his golden afterlife.
(Shared) Heritage
In light of the history of colonial violence evidenced in Kandt’s Caput Nili, can we continue to speak meaningfully of ‘shared heritage’? Do sites marked by histories of violence and colonial domination hold equal significance for the former coloniser and the formerly colonised? And at what point in our education are colonial atrocities named, confronted, and understood? As we are called to learn, remember, and preserve the difficult, indeed, often unbearable, heritage of colonial violence, we must also learn how to care for new forms of heritage. A decolonising history and heritage cannot be limited to preservation alone; it must actively embrace critique, resistance, and refusal. It must centre the arts, cultures, languages, aesthetics, literatures, and architectures of those who resisted Kandt’s presence, as well as of those whose lives were lost under German colonial violence. Such an intervention requires more than reinterpretation; it demands the articulation of a new locus of culture and memory that is grounded in the lived experiences, epistemologies, and creative expressions of the formerly colonised, and that refuses the false symmetry implied by narratives of shared heritage.
This is best illustrated by delving into the architectural and urban history of the German colonial-built environment of violence that would come to form the heart of colonial administration of the urban centre of Kigali. Alison Des Forges quotes from one of Kandt’s correspondences to Catholic Mission at Kabgayi (J.N. 1356, 3 January 1911, Kigali, Correspondence Officielle).
- "To create the orderly though small capital he wanted, Kandt made use of 32,000 work days for construction and another 28,000 for transport, mostly for wood from the distant forests of Bushiru. The construction workers received a minimal salary, while the porters received nothing. As Kigali grew into a market center, the number of trade caravans increased. In 1910, 2,117 caravans with more than 20,000 men came to Kigali; the Rwandans had to provide all these men with food, water, and firewood. In 1911 the Resident recognized that this burden was excessive and ordered traders to pay for their supplies. Given the lack of supervision by the Germans, probably few actually did so" (Des Forges 2011, 85-86)
The Violence of Colonial Anthropology that Remains
Following Kandt’s footsteps through Rwanda, as reconstructed in his personal accounts, we encounter not ‘discovery’ but a cartography of colonial domination. His journeying is marked by humiliation and suppression of the Rwandans he meets, movements that simultaneously elevate his own presence as the singular knowing subject. Their world appears to him as incomplete without his ordering, his commands, his reckoning. It is a world rendered decipherable only through his intervention, its inhabitants cast as unruly matter requiring discipline. What materialises is not Rwanda as lived and known and felt by its people, but Rwanda as wounded by empire. As a colonial anthropologist in formation, Kandt sets out to locate the source of the Nile and to catalogue what he encounters along the way. But he can only see through imperial vision.
In Caput Nili, there is no moment in which the world is apprehended through the epistemologies, histories, or sensibilities of its inhabitants. Their ways of knowing do not interrupt his colonial gaze; they are subsumed by it. Kandt’s writing thus exemplifies an anthropology before its formal canonisation that is always already steeped in hierarchy, measurement, and racialised comparison. This is the anthropology that produced human difference through skulls, bodies, and speculative origins, giving rise to what Jean-Pierre Chrétien has identified as an ‘ethno-history’ shaped less by African pasts than by European racial prejudice (2003, 59). It is a discipline that did not just accompany colonialism but actively enabled its violent fantasies and executions (Asad 1973, Césaire 2000, Fabian 2002, Lindqvist 1996).
Kandt returns to Germany with a map. On it, he does more than claim the source of the Nile. His map is the condensation of extractive knowledge regimes deployed across Rwandan territories and the lands of the Nyiginya kingdom. It abstracts lived worlds into coordinates and surfaces, severing them from the social, political, and cosmological orders that sustained them. From this moment on, Rwanda exists cartographically in Europe. This very map will later serve the Belgian colonial occupation that begins in 1916. Whether lonely or accompanied, funded by the German colonial office or not, Kandt functions as an imperial agent (cf. Pesek 2010). His map is not an innocent artifact; it is a technology of possession that outlives his journey. To read Kandt today is therefore a demanding and uneasy labour. It is precisely here that the necessity of anti-colonial and decolonial-decolonising practices becomes clear, not as an abstract intellectual stance, but as an everyday ethical commitment. The smallest speech acts we often dismiss as insignificant but carry consciousness, accountability, and responsibility. The words we choose, the translations we authorise, the names we settle on for times, places, and worlds all shape how we relate to the humans, stories, and histories that constitute our shared world: a world from which there is no escape. This is what decolonial and deconstructive engagements with texts such as Caput Nili demand of us. Instead, they attune us to the ongoing work of refusing inherited hierarchies of knowledge, of unsettling imperial ways of seeing, and of practicing care in how we speak, write, and remember. This labour does not end with a text; it continues wherever we find ourselves inhabiting and narrating the world.
[1] The anthropologist Jan Czekanowski who travels in the 1907-09 expedition of Adolf Friedrich Duke of Mecklenburg writes in his monograph “into the heart of Africa” that “even in anthropology, in which I was more autonomous, the fathers facilitated my work. The collection of 1005 skulls, which came from Bukoba and Rwanda, was an achievement of this kind” (Czekanowski 2001, 30; author’s translation)
[2] The Rwandan song “Mpunga barungu” that translates into “I flee from the askari” dates from the time of German colonial presence. A wax cylinder recording from Jan Czekanowski, it is stored and integrated into the phonographic collections at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin to this day. This song testifies to the horrors the colonial forces presented to ordinary Rwandans. “Mpunga barungu” is more than a lyrical testimony, it evidences the resilience of Banyarwanda to resist and circumvent colonial domination and the violence that went along with it. As a song, it is composed and performed as a warning to others on the imminence and threat the askari presented to people’s everyday lives. The song is played in Samuel Ishimwe 2024. Reclaiming History - Kolonialismus und der Völkermord in Ruanda. DW Documentary. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPHP30EMYRo
[3] A “systematic scientific study expedition” to collect Rwanda would be led by Adolf Friedrich, Duke of Mecklenburg between 1907-09 alongside nine other Europeans, the materials of which were to be divided between the ethnographic museums in Berlin and Leipzig (Bolin 2021, 489; Czekanowski 1909).
[4] See the digital archive here: https://id.smb.museum/object/788463/e-394-1899
Acknowledgement
This text would not have been written on my own account and Kandt’s two 1904 antiquary volumes of Caput Nili would still sit untouched and undisturbed on my shelf. It is rather the labour of many others who moved me towards turning to this difficult subject of German colonial violence in Rwanda. At the Iriba Centre for Multimedia Heritage in Kigali, I am glad to continue to work together with Assumpta Mugiraneza. I am indebted to her, not only for her foresight of me conceiving this text, but her caring curatorial as well as intellectual labour. Also, at Iriba, I acknowledge the engagement and presence of Kayumba Cyitatire Jean Paul, Fabiola Rutamu, Bwimba Shema Eloi, Aline Usanase, Rose Mukankomeje, Gamaliel Mbonimana, Songa Teta Gaëlle and Yvan Kagame. I am indebted to the mostly voluntary and dedicated work of Mathilde Franc de Pommereau, Anna Merz and Ceke Mathenge at the Goethe-Institut Kigali. I wish to thank the Director of the Goethe-Institut, Anisha Helen Soff-Ochieng for her critical interest in Rwandan-German colonial history and her fearlessness to accommodate difficult pasts in the program and engagement of the Goethe-Institut, a German cultural institution in Rwanda. Jean de la Croix Hakizimana discussed and further illuminated many of the aspects, names and locations in Kandt’s writing with me. Jean Luc Usabwimana drew my eye to his critical art of grasping Rwandan land/scapes. Kanyankore Mucyo Arnaud invited me to radically rethink postcolonial Rwandan agency, knowledge and practice as he has, in his performative arts, already realized what I have only commenced to outline in this text. Émilienne Mukansoro welcomed me in her family home in Mushubati and together with Ejo Hacu invited me fearlessly to revisit experiences of genocide in light of colonial precursors to this violence. Isaie Nzeyimana made me aware of who lives in the shadow of colonialism. I acknowledge Lavie Mugangwa for edifying conversations, mindfulness and a most moving yoga practice in Ntarama. In Berlin, Andrea Scholz and Kristin Weber-Sinn invited me to visit the East Africa collections in Dahlem, a depot that contains more than 500 material objects Richard Kandt sent from Rwanda to the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin to consolidate the establishment of its ethnographic collections. I thank Marc Wrasse for critically comparing and tirelessly interrogating across temporalities and contexts of colonial and genocidal violence. As fellow travellers tracing the sites of Kandt’s presence in Rwanda, I wish to acknowledge Aubaine Hirwa, Ndanyuzwe Pacifique, Cyubahiro Kenny Evrard, Shyaka Rukundo Kelly Hubert, Marie Grace Uwizeye, Micomyiza Kareb, Sœur Godelive, Patrick Helber, Roey Zeevi, Caroline Assad and Kathrin Kollmeier. At Kandt House Museum, I appreciate the time and interest of Yvonne Gahongayire and Benjamin Nkurunziza dedicated to the knowledge production around Richard Kandt’s presence in Rwanda. I am grateful to the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa in Accra for a disciplined and collegial intellectual environment. I thank Fazil Moradi for a most rigorous engagement with this text. I am grateful to my parents for making space and giving a place to me to conceive and write this text.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Iriba Centre for Multimedia Heritage Kigali, the Goethe-Institut Kigali and the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana.
Biography
Stefanie Bognitz (PhD) is a social anthropologist with strong interest in epistemologies embracing the political, legal, ethical and everyday resonances and remaking after genocide. Her regional expertise, professional experience and theoretical concern cover aspects of legal, political, applied, public and critical anthropology spanning contexts in South Africa, Rwanda including the Great Lakes region of Africa and more recently Ghana and Germany. As an applied anthropologist, she worked as policy advisor, legal expert and consultant in Rwanda and Germany. She is currently a Senior Individual Fellow (2025-26) at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana.
Her publications include, “Crafting transitional justice: Significations of rights-based organizations and legal aid in Rwanda”. Nouvelles études pénales 24 (2013): 269-283; “Mistrusting as a mode of engagement in mediation: Insights from socio-legal practice in Rwanda,” in Florian Mühlfried, ed., Mistrust. Ethnographic approximations (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2018, 147-67); “Mediation in circumstances of the existential: Dispute and justice in Rwanda” in Günther Schlee and Karl Härter (eds.). On Mediation (New York: Berghahn, 2020, 146-178); “Dispute as critique: Moving beyond ‘post-genocide Rwanda’,” (Anthropological Theory, 23.4 (2023): 386-403); “Anton Wilhelm Amo: Signposts of a precarious biography”. Special Issue: Spectres of Anton Wilhelm Amo, guest-edited by Fazil Moradi and Stefanie Bognitz (Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies 4.1 (2024): 55-64); “Anton Wilhelm Amo: A biography in-between worlds”. Special Issue: Spectres of Anton Wilhelm Amo, guest-edited by Fazil Moradi and Stefanie Bognitz (Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies 4.1 (2024): 65-76); Alice Urusaro Karekezi and Stefanie Bognitz. “Forging a common humanity: The last thirty years since the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994”. In: Green, Linda, Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Nerina Weiss (eds.). Routledge Handbook of Mass Violence. London and New York: Routledge (Forthcoming 2026).
Contact
Stefanie Bognitz
Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana
https://miasa.ug.edu.gh/fellow/stefanie-bognitz/
https://ug-gh.academia.edu/StefanieBognitz
stefaniebognitz@gmx.de
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