International Journal of African Historical Studies Vol. 52, No. 1 (2019) 133 Copyright © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of Boston University Punctuated Places: Narrating Space in Burundi By Aidan Russell Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (aidan.russell@graduateinstitute.ch) When Rwanda and Burundi parted ways at independence and dissolved their colonial union of Ruanda-Urundi, Burundi’s Catholic newspaper Ndongozi celebrated this scission as a matter of territorial inevitability. “Burundi was always an independent country,” it declared. 1 Separation constituted an eternal order restored; in times gone by, “whoever crossed the [river] Kanyaru or any other border of Burundi sought only to provoke war, and the Barundi responded.” It rendered the rejected territorial unity of Ruanda-Urundi as neither an abolished status quo nor a viable option for the future, but as an impossible conditional. “Combining Burundi and Rwanda would mean the disappearance of Burundi,” as if the two had never been combined in a single territory. This territorial vision seemed to encapsulate the spirit of the moment. Sovereignty intersected with a settled place, a defined, topographical border, the singular identity of people within it and the threat of movement from without. The border incarnated a necessary, inevitable, and rightful restoration of independence that all knew to be the natural state of affairs. Yet Ndongozi’s invocation of the Kanyaru River manifested the ironies of the territorial imagination at independence. The Kanyaru had indeed been a relatively consistent, if contested physical-political boundary before European rule. 2 But German conquest and subsequent transfer to a Belgian tutelary authority had demoted the Kanyaru boundary to an internal administrative divide. The river marked the extent of each kingdom, but as Ruanda-Urundi the two together constituted a single Territoire. 3 Nor was this entirely unacceptable for all within the territory. Even as late as 1959, some spoke of union as necessary, the foundation upon which to build prosperity and fellowship. When each country realized their independence three years later, the “combination” that Ndongozi treated as a hypothetical future was in fact an immediate past, now rejected and denied; independence was as much an act of partition as it was of restitution. Insisting on the distinction of the river Kanyaru, Ndongozi elided the colonial years of unity, obscured alternative possibilities, made historical memory an eternal certainty, and adopted the settled border to speak for a coherent territory. 1 “Uburundi n’Urwanda,” Ndongozi y’Uburundi (Bujumbura), January 1962. 2 Jan Vansina, La légende du passé: Traditions orales du Burundi (Tervuren: Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale, 1972), 206; Jan Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 157. 3 William Roger Louis, Ruanda-Urundi, 1884–1919 (London: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1979).