Rwanda has no claim to make over the Congolese territory whatsoever!

Rwanda has no claim to make over the Congolese territory whatsoever!

The case of the border between Rwanda and Congo, the Belgians, the Germans and the British settled the matter at the Kivu- Mfumbiro Conference convened at Belgian Foreign Ministry in February 1910, to settle the claims of three European countries over the disputed territory, as Roger Louis (1963) had demonstrated. Britain based her claim of to Mfumbiro on the Anglo-German Treaty of 1890; Belgium claimed all the territory west of the true 30th meridian, the established boundary between Congo and Uganda by the Anglo-Congolese agreement of 1894 (…). Germany and Britain had not agreed about the territory to be considered as Mfumbiro; when it was discovered that Mfumbiro lay west of the true geographical meridian, Congolese claims became involved also (…). In Berlin the British and Germans agreed that in accordance with the old maps and intentions versus mere descriptions of astronomical lines, the Germans were justified in claiming Mfumbiro, and therefore in transferring it to Britain in accordance with the Treaty of 1890. The Belgians argued that the Anglo-German agreement in 1890, the basis of the British position, could not dispose of the territory west of the true 30th meridian; therefore it was clear that Mfumbiro belonged to the Congo, and the British should have received compensation from Germany somewhere else (…). It was not clear, however, whether the territory which the Germans wished to exchange – Ndorwa – was or was not part of Ruanda; after German assurances that Britain would in any case receive ‘an exactly equal area in the Kagera valley if Ndorwa was found to be a part of Ruanda’, an agreement was quickly reached.[i]

A Belgo-German stalemate remained intact though. Germany, in turn could not yield the whole territory west of the true 30th meridian (Ruanda-Urundi) to Belgium… except, perhaps part of the north shore of Lake Kivu and, in the middle of the lake, the large Idjwi Island, which the German were reluctant to give away after attempts to prove an ethnographic connection between the inhabitants of Idjwi and Ruanda and because of the German missionaries there, one of whom had tutored the German Emperor! (…). The Belgians, in their turn, successfully proved that it was an established fact that there was no ethnographic connection whatsoever between the Africans on Idjwi and in Ruanda (after all, it was an Anglo-American explorer, Henri Morton Stanley who collected local chiefs’ signatures of allegiance to King Leopold II which the latter used at the Berlin Conference as the basis for his claim of that territory, so the Belgians should have known better); and that the presence of missionaries could not prejudice territorial rights (…). The final settlement was reached with a compromise after Belgium categorically rejected the partition of the small island of Idjwi to share it with Germany. Idjwi was to be Belgian (on certain commercial conditions) and assurance of security for German missionaries. The crisis had passed (…). Separate protocols between Germany and Belgium, Germany and Britain, and Britain and Belgium were signed on 14 May 1910. Boundary commissions were appointed; after the frontiers were demarcated, the protocol was signed by the boundary commissioners, formally ending the Kivu-Mfumbiro controversy.[ii] Needless to repeat that after Germany lost her colonies (what is today Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania) in compensation to Belgium and Britain after loosing the Second World War (fought over colonies in Africa). Ironically, Belgium ‘got back’ all the territories west of the true 30th meridian and Britain got Ndorwa (part of Tanzania) as initially promised as part of the compensation of the 1890 Anglo-German Treaty.

[iii] Louis, R. (1963). Ruanda-Urindi, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 79 – 91.

[iv] Ibid.,