Nearly six decades ago in 1959, as a two-year-old toddler was being whisked away to safety following an uprising against his community in Rwanda, a 23-year-old prince assumed the reins of power in an evidently troubled state.

The uprising, referred to as the “social revolution,” “the Hutu peasant revolution” or the “wind of destruction” — known as Muyaga in Kinyarwanda — ended the dominance of the Tutsi, the majority of whom fled into exile in Uganda and DR Congo where they lived for decades as a stateless Rwandan diaspora.

The 23-year-old prince was born Jean-Baptiste Ndahindurwa on June 29, 1936, and on assuming the throne became known as Kigeli V. His reign was short-lived as he was run out of town to Uganda barely two years later by the same forces that had earlier driven the family of the toddler. The toddler’s name was Paul Kagame.

Following Kigeli V’s departure, Belgium, then the colonial power in Rwanda, swiftly abolished the kingdom and declared the country a republic — an interference that hurt the monarch more than the loss of power itself as he would later reveal to a United Nations panel.

And so came to an end the reign of monarchs in Rwanda.

The flight

The would-be last official king of Rwanda fled eastwards into DR Congo and onwards to begin a life both as a refugee and a consistent advocate for the immediate, safe and unconditional return home of all Tutsi exiles — a desire he would personally never fulfil in his lifetime.

For the next three decades there were several attempts by Rwandan exiles to return to their motherland. All ended in catastrophe until 1990, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front waged a war that seemed better planned with a resolute leadership. It involved the now 33-year-old Kagame, who, in spite of several false starts, would eventually lead it to an unprecedented victory.

The central premise of the uprising by the Rwanda Patriotic Front/Army was their demand to return home after then president Juvenal Habyarimana had declared Rwanda “was full.”

Rwanda exiles, wherever they were, would do well to stay permanently there, said Habyarimana — whose death in a plane crash in April 1994 triggered the genocide that killed over a million Rwandans — mainly Tutsi and moderate Hutus — in just 100 days. It’s now officially known as the 1994 Genocide against Tutsis.  

Although Habyarimana could not have handed the RPF a better galvanising tool for their rebellion with that statement on exiles and the country being full, it failed to work on the exiled king, who, despite having no powers, could still have marshalled support to boost their cause.

The reluctant monarch, Kigeli V was not given to force much less an armed uprising, to fight his way back home.

In 1960, he reportedly told a United Nations hearing on the upheavals in Rwanda that he was not that hungry for power and would accept whatever the people decided about the future of the monarchy.

A difficult return

Had the RPF relied on him to galvanise support externally and inside Rwanda, little would have been extended to its mission, especially because many people inside Rwanda were of the opinion that the anti-government rebellion by the exiles was “placing those who had stayed in the country in jeopardy,” recalled Odette Nyiramilimo, a veteran RPF cadre and current Rwandan legislator at the East African Assembly, to Philip Gourevitch in his 1998 highly acclaimed book on the genocide: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.

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RPF went it alone in creating awareness inside Rwanda about the suffering of the exiles, and mobilised support with which they fought and took power.

In victory, Kagame made it his mission to bring Rwandan exiles home, even if, for some, it meant by force. Exile was humiliating, he reasoned. It robbed its unwitting victim of their dignity, without which there was no reason for living.

A 2013 profile of him in The New York Times records Kagame at 12 years and living in a camp in Uganda asking his father: “Why are we refugees? Why are we here? Why are we like this? What wrong did we do?”

Yet after the RPF’s win, there was one exile whose return Kigali was not enthusiastic about. Kigeli V’s.

Rwanda remains rural and deeply traditional. A returning monarch would have created a host of problems. If he did not, even inadvertently, reignite historical misperceptions about ethnicity that the government was labouring to eliminate, a power centre would inevitably have formed around the monarch that would have been difficult to deal with.

Bittersweet offer

Sometime in 1996, Kagame reportedly reached out to Kigeli V, who was then living in Washington DC, and offered him a deal. The stateless monarch was welcome to return home if he so wished, but only as a private citizen.

It was a bittersweet offer. Kigeli V had, all his life up until now, laboured to maintain regal status and tradition even under the most difficult of circumstances — such as living off government rations.

He, for instance, had not married, taken a job, or ever driven himself anywhere because his kind were prohibited from doing so while in exile.

So, how was he to return home as anything else but the very essence of who he was? As a monarch?

The status under which he would return, he reportedly told Kagame, could not simply be decided upon by just the two of them but rather by the Rwandan people. The then vice president promised to get back to him.

As debate over his return, and possible reinstallation, mounted at home in 1999, the ruling party dismissed whatever impact, if any, he would have on the country.

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“It is not as if the king has a magic wand which he can wave over Rwanda and its problems will vanish,” The EastAfrican quoted Dr Charles Murigande, RPF’s secretary-general at the time, in its July 1, 1999 edition.

“Rule by kings has never been democratic, being confined to only one family or a small lineage of people and we do not believe that the best and most capable people to deal with this country’s problems can come from only one family,” Mr Murigande reportedly added.

Save for a flicker here and there, the matter pretty much died. Kigeli V poured his life into a refugee-oriented charity he had founded shortly upon arrival in the US. His way to America had yet been forced by turbulence.

About the time of RPF’s renewed offensive in 1992, it had become precarious for Kigeli V to continue staying in Kenya where he was living then. He had become an inevitable bargaining chip for Rwanda’s warring sides because of the geopolitical dynamics of the day.

Kigeli V had lived in Nairobi since 1979 after the fall of Idi Amin in Uganda. Amin had taken him in in 1973 after a decade’s stay in Tanzania, and Amin’s ouster made it untenable for him to remain in Kampala.

The US offered the next best safe haven. He died there on Sunday, October 16, in the state of Virginia, where he had lived since June 1992. He was 80 years old.

In a short statement released on Tuesday, October 18, Kigali expressed sadness about his passing and offered to provide “any necessary support” with regard to the final resting place and funeral arrangements.

READ: Rwanda govt to assist in King Kigeli burial if family requests