The royal genealogy of the senior Havu kingdom, along the western shores of Lake Kivu, repeats the general pattern noted above. But it does more, transforming “interest” to “suspicion” by deepening the parallels. Most written materials on Havu royal history give prominence to the tie-in between Nsibula, said to be the first king of this dynasty, and the Rwandan king Ruganzu Ndori.In addition, various other genealogies from west of the lake trace back firmly to Ruganzu: these appear independent both of each other and (except for the Havu royal genealogy) of the Rwandan sources. With multiple testimonies a parallax effect emerges, whereby genealogies of the royal family, of ritual groups, and of other commoner groups all converge on the figure of Ruganzu. Because of the renown of the name of Ruganzu, it is possible that these genealogies have been telescoped, retaining the name of Ruganzu while ignoring more recent events, or that events undertaken by other kings have been attributed to the reign of Ruganzu.But they are too closely parallel to other corroborative evidence available for Rwanda, they are too strongly and consistently convergent on a new dating for Ruganzu, and there are simply too many of them from different groups to be brushed aside complacently. The implications are intriguing.

On Ijwi Island, one of the genealogies to Ruganzu is that of the most important ritual group, the Abeeru—the men who make and guard the royal drum. The Beeru on Ijwi say that they came directly from Kabagali (in Rwanda) to Ijwi.The Rwandan sources confirm that the Ijwi Beeru came from Kabagali, and they elaborate on this story by noting that an early Rwandan ritualist left Rwanda as prisoner of Nsibula (a Havu king and a contemporary of Ruganzu and his predecessor, Ndahiro Cyamatare) and was established on Ijwi.How-ever, there is no evidence on Ijwi to point to Nsibula’s presence there; in fact, there was no kingdom even established on Ijwi at that time. Nonetheless, although the Rwandan traditions add circumstantial detail to the Ijwi accounts, the two traditions concur on the essential tie-in: the historical connections of the Ijwi ritualist family with Kabagali in Rwanda seem plausible. It is on the genealogical lengths that the sources most notably differ.

Although Ijwi genealogical reconstructions are problematic, the Beeru sources generally go back some eight to ten generations—very long genealogies by Ijwi standards. They claim to have come directly from Rwanda to Ijwi and not to have been associated with the senior line of the Havu dynasty, on the mainland west of Lake Kivu, before arriving on Ijwi. Furthermore, the Ijwi rituals differ from those of the senior Havu kingdom, as do oral histories pertaining to these subjects. In these aspects the Ijwi rituals conform more closely to the Rwandan ritual traditions. However, despite these ethnographic tie-ins, the oral traditions differ significantly. The traditions of the Beeru on Ijwi have no mention of Nyamutege, whom the Rwandan sources claim was seized in Rwanda by Nsibula and established by him on Ijwi—nor even of Nsibula, whom the Rwandan sources claim was instrumental in the Beeru placement on Ijwi. Given their later association with the Basibula royal dynasty on Ijwi, the omission of any reference to Nsibula is curious indeed.

Other discrepancies abound. Despite the lack of precise agreement on individual genealogical entries, there is general agreement among the Beeru on Ijwi that their departure from Kabagali occurred around eight generations ago. Rwandan sources note fourteen generations—almost double the Ijwi length— back to Nyamutege (from whom there is no continuous transmission to the Ijwi Beeru). Furthermore, we are referring to a Rwandan king list of sixteen names from 1959 (if one includes Rwaaka) back to Ndahiro II Cyamataare. It is not plausible to attribute these discrepancies to differences in generation lengths, because Rwandan patrilateral generations are generally taken to be quite long (at least for the more recent periods) and those on Ijwi, with the notable exception of the royal genealogy, much shorter. At the moment, then, the puzzle is this: what happened to the missing six to eight names from the Ijwi list? As noted above, the presence of such a recurring pattern was sufficient to arouse interest; what aroused suspicion was that, when looked at in closer detail, each case led to the same result, one that placed Ruganzu likely near the beginning of the eighteenth century.

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