Fia i Rwanda: Saturday 13 feb

Today some colleagues and I went to a town called Nyanza to visit a pottery workshop. The others had already been there and really liked their stuff and asked if I wanted to come along. It took about two hours to drive there which doesn’t say much about the distance since it takes quite a long time to go anywhere because of the mountainous terrain. Nyanza is a town of about 60 000 and is also the old royal capital from before independence when the country was still a monarchy. At the workshop they had some very nice things and I bought a teapot and two cups to go with it. The prices were cheap which suited me, the poor intern/student, very well.

Afterwards we went to a museum to look at the old royal palace where the king lived until 1961 when Rwanda became a republic. There were two different palaces to look at. One was a replica of the traditional hut the king used to live in before 1931. It was very interesting to see how people used to live before they took on the European style of building with bricks. It was all made of different kinds of straw and it was cool and comfortable in there. The second palace was build after 1931 when the incumbent king was chased out of the country by the European colonisers to exile in DRC and his son was crowned king. He was much more modern and progressive and took on the Christian faith as well as built himself a new palace in the colonial style. The building was not very interesting in itself but they did have a lot of old photographs where you could see the more traditional clothing and customs that I found fascinating. The royal family were some of the ugliest people I’ve ever seen and we speculated that this might be the result of inbreeding. They were all very tall too, over 2m most of them and had horrible teeth that stood right out horizontally from their mouths. The eyes looked funny as well so there was something not right about it. Anyway, there was also a picture of a high jumping competition where a man jumped over 2m (around 2,20-2,40m) with his feet first and then landing on his feet again. Impressive! This must have been sometime in the thirties or forties judging from the clothes the Europeans were wearing in the photo. I learned a little about the pre-colonial history as well when Rwanda mostly consisted of smaller kingdoms which were later conquered into a bigger united territory. I’m a big museum lover so I enjoyed the visit very much!