As King Musinga’s reign crumbled under Belgian pressure in the early 1930s, the kingdom’s drums fell silent in a way they never had before. The sophisticated code that carried the unwritten constitution that had long guided Rwanda was being deliberately and systematically taken apart.
Before the colonialists drew their maps, the true power in the Kingdom of Rwanda didn’t sit on the throne. It lived in the memories of a secret society of men who spoke a language only they understood. They were the Abiru, the royal ritualists who served as the kingdom’s living library.
In the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, the history of Rwanda is cataloged in ledgers and reports. But these colonial documents tell only the story the colonizers wrote. The other half, the true, unwritten constitution, was held in the minds of these men.
Imagine a state without a single written law. Its constitution wasn’t on parchment but in the meticulously trained memories of the Abiru. These royal ritualists were the kingdom’s walking archives. The training was brutal. Young men from select families would spend years memorizing the Ubwiru, the sacred code governing royal life.
They learned through song, through poetry, through intricate patterns of ritual. A mistake wasn’t just an error; it was an omen. They carried the entire history of the Nyiginya dynasty in their heads every coronation, every treaty, every royal marriage. The Abiru were like the supreme court, the national archives, and the royal masters of secrecy all rolled into one.
Our understanding of this sophisticated system comes from two distinct streams of preservation. Inside Rwanda, this knowledge was preserved through the urgent work in of Rwandan scholar priest Alexis Kagame in mid-20th century. In his seminal 1943 book Inganji Karinga, an oral history of the Nyiginya dynasty compiled with the permission of King Mutara III Rudahigwa Kagame, recorded the esoteric code as told to him by the last active member of the Abiru working to document their oral traditions before this knowledge was lost.
Meanwhile, the institution itself was carried into exile. When King Kigeli V, the last reigning monarch, was deposed in 1961, his childhood friend and courtier, Boniface Benzinge, followed him. In the United States, Benzinge formally served as the King’s Chancellor and head of the Abiru, the traditional privy councillors. In this role, he became a living vessel of the tradition, preserving its protocols and knowledge not within the kingdom’s hills, but for a royal court in exile, a bittersweet shadow of the once powerful institution.
Alexis Kagame describes the Abiru not as mystics, but as the state’s supreme institutional memory. They memorized the “Ubwiru,” a sacred and arcane code, through years of brutal training. Using a secret dialect of Kinyarwanda, they could discuss matters of state in a language of metaphor and allusion that was impenetrable to outsiders. A poem about a herd of cattle could be a debate on military strategy; a discussion about the harvest might contain coded instructions for a royal succession.
Their power was absolute during the interregnum. When a King died, the kingdom held its breath. The Abiru would retreat into secrecy, possessing the sole knowledge of the royal genealogies and the complex rituals needed to legitimize the next king. They were the ultimate check on power, a balance to the throne that ensured the kingdom’s continuity according to its own ancient laws.
This delicate balance was shattered in the early 20th century. The collision with Belgian colonial administration was, at its core, a clash of information systems. The Europeans demanded written records, fixed genealogies, and transparent chains of command. The oral, coded, and ritual-based power of the Abiru was seen as an obstacle.
The pivotal moment came with the deposition of Mwami Yuhi Musinga in 1931. Historical records show that the Belgians, intent on installing a more compliant ruler in Musinga’s son, Mutara Rudahigwa, sidestepped the traditional succession rituals governed by the Abiru. They replaced a centuries-old culturally embedded process with a bureaucracy they could control. In the words of one academic paper, it was the moment the kingdom’s operating system was forcibly overwritten.
The consequences were profound. The dismantling of the Abiru did not just silence a group of men; it deleted a nation’s foundational code. The monarchy, once restrained by sacred tradition, became a more secular, centralized autocracy. The sophisticated checks and balances that had woven together the King, the army, and the land chiefs unraveled, creating a power vacuum and a model of hyper-centralization that would shape the nation’s turbulent future.
The fall of the monarchy did not mark the end of the Abiru’s story. Instead, their legacy traveled across the ocean, carried by a single man. Boniface Benzinge, childhood friend and courtier to the last reigning Mwami, King Kigeli V, followed the deposed king into exile, ensuring the secret knowledge of the Abiru would not be left behind.
Benzinge’s role was a living relic. When the King eventually settled in the United States in 1992, Benzinge was by his side. Far from the royal drums of Nyanza, he served the exiled King voluntarily as his Chancellor and the head of the Abiru. He was the guardian of a ritual order that had lost its kingdom, a living vessel for a constitution that no longer had a state to govern. From 1973 until the King’s death in Virginia in 2016, Benzinge stood as the last direct link to the Abiru’s ancient office. He was the King’s assistant, translator, and spokesperson, but more profoundly, he was the keeper of a flame that had been extinguished in its homeland.
Today, the search for the Abiru’s legacy is a race against time. Researchers at the Institute of National Museums of Rwanda piece together fragments of the Ubwiru from the memories of elders a half remembered ritual here, a coded expression there. It is a painstaking effort to recover echoes of a lost world.
The silence left by the Abiru’s dismantling is deep. The delicate balance of power that had sustained the kingdom for centuries was shattered, first by colonial intervention and then by exile. The story of the Abiru is not merely one of a lost secret society, but of a nation’s fractured spirit.
Yet the thread of memory was not entirely severed. In Rwanda, the governance protocol was broken, but in exile a fragile lineage persists. As of 2025, Boniface Benzinge is believed to still serve as the head of the royal court, a living vessel for traditions that no longer have a kingdom to govern. He remains the keeper of a flame that was extinguished in its homeland, a solitary figure guarding the echo of a rhythm that once ruled a thousand hills. The story of the Abiru is now a fading echo but it has not yet fallen silent.
