Rwanda has no written records from before the arrival of Europeans in the late 19th century, so its early history has to be constructed largely from oral sources. Alexis Kagame, a Rwandan priest and scholar in the early 20th century, spent much of his life researching and documenting this oral history and this has formed the basis for much of what has been written about Rwandan history. Belgian scholar Jan Vansina later challenged some of Kagame's results with the claim that they represented the royal court's version of events rather than what was historically accurate. Vansina wrote that "almost the whole written historiography merely reproduces the royal ideology as it existed around 1900", and his research, as well as that of later scholars such as David Newbury, challenged much of what had previously been known.[1]
- ^ Vansina 2005, pp. 4–5.