The Banyamulenge of South Kivu: The ‘Nationality Question’

My aim in this article is to address the question of the relationship between the ethnogenesis of the Banyamulenge in South Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and their status as nationals and citizens of that country. I do not intend to present a history of the Banyamulenge, aspects of which have been thoroughly researched by several noted scholars. Nor do I undertake an account of developments following the first Congo war of 1996/7 to the present day. Rather, I will focus on three principal questions that have impacted on the formative relationship between the ‘Banyamulenge’ of South Kivu province and the broader Congolese society; namely, the diverse historical forms and stages of regional migration of Kinyarwanda speakers into pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial Congo-Zaire; the nature of the post-independence Zairian state and its role in the manipulation and instrumentalisation of group identifications in the Kivu provinces; and the import of the discourses of nationalism and ‘nation-statism’ in the postcolony.