Emma Brunton
Published: 21 January 2019
Transformations in Women’s Spiritual Authority from Precolonial to Early Colonial Rwanda.
University of Glasgow
Transformations in Women’s Spiritual Authority from Precolonial to Early Colonial Rwanda.
This research uses Rwandan oral traditions to assess how Rwandan women used regional religions to accrue and exercise power within their communities during the pre-colonial and colonial eras, and traces how this changed over time. It will look at how the arrival of European colonisers restricted, enhanced or otherwise affected women’s access to and ability to exercise spiritual power, as well as what other regional factors may have impacted women’s spiritual authority in the twentieth century. In doing so, a historically informed analysis of women’s spiritual authority raises questions which complicate current perceptions of gender norms in Rwanda and beyond.
I will apply a feminist lens to colonial-era oral traditions collected by historian Jan Vansina in the 1950s, German and Belgian documents created by their respective colonial administrations, and missionary diaries written by the Roman Catholic ‘White Fathers’ in the first half of the twentieth century. I will also interview members of the Rwandan Council of Elders and Rwanda Academy for Language and Culture (RALC) to document new iterations of relevant precolonial and colonial-era oral traditions, and to engage with their perspectives on the archival materials that I will analyse.
First published: 21 January 2019