The gift and the theft. An economic-political interpretation of Rwandan missionary Diaries of White Fhaters(1900-1910)

This article proposes an economic/political interpretation of two missionary Diaries drafted in Rwanda in the first decade of the last century. The events recorded in these documents aid the reader in understanding how the missions were, in that period, centers of power that interacted with the local environment in a manner which was relatively independent of a colonial administration that was still weak. As a result, while the missionaries learned and incorporated certain Rwandan socio-political logics, they also introduced embryonic forms of capitalism. From this paper the reader can understand how, thogether with these elements of capitalism in the daily life of mission, a policy of ethnicization and feudalization of rwandan society started to take shape. A policy, with was to be fully realized twenty years later under Belgian colonial rule.