Butare

Butare is a colonial creation rather than an old Rwandan settlement. The Belgian colonial rulers established a new town here in the 1920s and named it Astrida, after the Swedish-born Queen Astrid of the Belgians, on a high, cool site in the south. It became an administrative and educational centre: the Groupe Scolaire d'Astrida, founded by the Brothers of Charity in 1929, trained the chiefs and the medical, agricultural and veterinary assistants of the Belgian administration, drawing students from Rwanda and Burundi alike, and gave the town an influence far beyond its size.

Independence changed its position. The National University of Rwanda opened here in 1963, confirming the town as the country's intellectual capital, and the national museum followed, but the transfer of government to Kigali left Astrida — renamed Butare — a provincial town rather than a rival capital. Through the 1970s and 1980s it remained the seat of the university, the cathedral and the national research institute.

During the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, Butare prefecture at first saw few killings: its prefect, Jean-Baptiste Habyalimana, the only Tutsi prefect in the country, refused to authorise them, and for a while it became a sanctuary for Tutsi refugees. He was dismissed on 17 April and later killed, militia were brought in from Kigali, and the killing that followed was severe; the university and the town lost a great part of their staff and population. Reconstruction followed, and Butare is now the capital of Huye District, a name used interchangeably with the old one. In 2013 the country's public institutions were merged into a single University of Rwanda, whose Huye campus is its largest.

Butare's identity is academic. The university and the research institutes give the town bookshops, seminars, choirs and a student population that fills the bars and canteens in term and vanishes in the holidays, and a reputation across Rwanda for being serious, quiet and a little formal. Kinyarwanda is universal; French is still widely understood, alongside English.

The town is also the guardian of a good deal of Rwandan tradition. The ethnographic museum is a leading source on the cultural history of the country and the region, and intore, the old war dance performed by men to an ensemble of seven to nine drums, belongs to the same tradition. The royal palace at Nyanza, a short way north, keeps the ceremonial long-horned inyambo cattle, once one of the symbols of the king's prestige.

Religion is prominent: the cathedral and the seminaries make this one of the centres of Rwandan Catholicism, and Sunday mornings are busy. The national customs hold as everywhere — umuganda on the last Saturday of the month, Kwibuka in April — and the proximity of Murambi means April is felt particularly strongly here. Rwandan crafts such as agaseke baskets and imigongo, the geometric cow-dung painting revived in eastern Rwanda, are sold in town.

About 63,000 people lived in the town at the 2022 census, the seventh-largest in Rwanda, with some 382,000 in the surrounding district, which makes it modest in size but disproportionate in importance. The university, the schools, the research institutes, the hospital and local government are the main employers, and their staff and students shape the town's economy; around them are the market traders, moto drivers, tailors and small workshops found in any Rwandan town of the size.

The hills around Butare are farmed intensively for bananas, beans, sweet potato, cassava and maize, with coffee grown as a cash crop, and the town is a collection point for produce moving north to Kigali and south towards Burundi.

Daily rhythm follows the university and the road. Students and staff walk the avenue between campus and centre, minibuses load and leave for Kigali and Gikongoro all day, and the market is busiest in the morning. Evenings are early and quiet outside term. The town's long-standing concerns are the ones common to provincial Rwanda: land pressure on small plots, employment for graduates, and the cost of housing in a town that grows steadily but slowly compared with the capital.

Eating in Butare is plain, cheap and student-shaped. The midday buffet is the institution: a plate or a weighed helping of rice, beans, cooked green banana, cassava, sweet potato, greens and isombe — cassava leaves pounded and simmered with groundnut — with a spoonful of goat or beef stew, sold in the canteens along the avenue and around the campus.

Evenings mean brochettes, cubes of goat or beef grilled over charcoal and served with grilled plantain and a raw tomato-and-onion relish, at open-fronted bars with Primus or Mützig beer; fried pork is a weekend favourite. Chapati, sambusa, grilled maize and doughnut-like mandazi are sold from stalls and by hawkers near the bus stand, and dried fish brought from the lakes appears in the market and in stews.

The south is good farming country, and the market reflects it — avocado, passion fruit, tree tomato, pineapple, sweet potato and beans in many varieties. Coffee is a cash crop in the district, arabica grown on the surrounding hills, and cafés in town serve Rwandan coffee. Fermented milk, ikivuguto, and banana beer made in the villages are the traditional drinks, the latter rarely found in restaurants but central to ceremonies in the district.