Bell and bow hunting songs

The Royal Museum for Central Africa and its co-publisher, music label Fonti Musicali, have just released the CD ‘Bell and bow hunting songs in the land of hunters’. The CD tracks are recordings of poems and songs sung by Rwandan hunters. The release is part of a massive research project (collection, transcription and translation of hunting poems and songs from Rwanda) that will lead to the publication of a book in October 2012. Its author, Jean-Baptiste Nkulikiyinka, is a Rwandan researcher at the RMCA.

Traditional hunting in Rwanda

The population of Rwanda is made up of three main groups, the Twa, the Hutu and the Tutsi, who have practiced traditional hunting since time immemorial, although the Twa are most likely to have initiated this activity. Bow hunting was most common in the forests and savannahs of the east, while hunting with dogs – referred to by Rwandans as ‘bell hunting’, a metonym for the bells worn by the hounds – was popular in the marshes, rivers, and valleys in the rest of the land.

Intozo hunting dog. Photo J. Gansemans, 1986, MP.0.0.5539, © MRAC Tervuren.

What motivation prompted hunters to compose these songs? The answer lies in the hunter’s need to retrace his treks and his many experiences, his sensations and the hardships of the forest. They are expressed as lines that are sung, chanted, and declaimed; the words are introduced into the rite and become part of the incantation for a successful hunt, to ward off the negative acts of a watchful and hostile supernatural being, or to win the favours of the spirit of an ancestor who was once a hunter himself during his earthly life.

From region to region, Rwandan musicians will pick the horns of one antelope species over another for acoustic reasons. Photo MP.0.0.1849, © MRAC Tervuren

The author

Jean-Baptiste Nkulikiyinka worked from 1975 to 1999 with the Rwandan departments of culture, youth, and sports. During this time, he interviewed hunters – many of whom are no longer alive – from all over the country, amassing information on hunting practices in Rwanda: different hunting categories, pre- and post-expedition rites, weapons, songs, recitations, declarations, particularities of their language, the involvement of hunting in traditional Rwandan medicine. This was rounded out by the numerous sound recordings and written records held by the RMCA’s Ethnomusicology section.

Book

A scientific work by the same author will be published in October 2012: J.-B. Nkulikiyinka, Les Chants du grelot et de l’arc. Au pays des esprits chasseurs. Textes de chants et de poèmes de chasse réunis, traduits et commentés, Tervuren, Royal Museum for Central Africa, ‘Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities’ series.