Literature & Ideas
Landmark
Alexis Kagame
1912 – 1981
Rwanda's foremost writer and scholar of its oral tradition
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Rwanda Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
Priest, philosopher and poet who wrote down Rwanda's oral traditions before they were lost, and composed poetry of his own in Kinyarwanda.
Alexis Kagame was born at Kiyanza into a family of court historians, ordained a Catholic priest in 1941, and spent his life on two projects that most people would have thought incompatible.
The first was rescue. The dynastic poetry, the royal genealogies and the ritual codes of the Rwandan court were held in the memories of a small number of specialists, and the institution that sustained them was collapsing. Kagame, who had been raised among those specialists, wrote them down — the ubucurabwenge, the ibisigo, the esoteric code of the monarchy — in volumes that remain the principal record of pre-colonial Rwanda and are the basis of almost everything written about it since.
The second was philosophical. His doctorate at the Urban University in Rome became La Philosophie Bantu-Rwandaise de l'Être, which argued through the grammar of Kinyarwanda that Bantu thought contains a coherent metaphysics — categories of being that are not Aristotle's and are not defective versions of Aristotle's. It is one of the founding texts of modern African philosophy and is still argued over.
He also wrote his own poetry in Kinyarwanda, including a long Christian epic in the traditional form. His reading of Rwandan history has itself been criticised for carrying the court's own perspective on caste, which is part of why he is still read closely rather than merely cited.
The first was rescue. The dynastic poetry, the royal genealogies and the ritual codes of the Rwandan court were held in the memories of a small number of specialists, and the institution that sustained them was collapsing. Kagame, who had been raised among those specialists, wrote them down — the ubucurabwenge, the ibisigo, the esoteric code of the monarchy — in volumes that remain the principal record of pre-colonial Rwanda and are the basis of almost everything written about it since.
The second was philosophical. His doctorate at the Urban University in Rome became La Philosophie Bantu-Rwandaise de l'Être, which argued through the grammar of Kinyarwanda that Bantu thought contains a coherent metaphysics — categories of being that are not Aristotle's and are not defective versions of Aristotle's. It is one of the founding texts of modern African philosophy and is still argued over.
He also wrote his own poetry in Kinyarwanda, including a long Christian epic in the traditional form. His reading of Rwandan history has itself been criticised for carrying the court's own perspective on caste, which is part of why he is still read closely rather than merely cited.
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