Throughout Africa, contemporary boundaries are deemed ‘artificial’ because they were external impositions breaking apart supposedly homogeneous ethnic units. This article argues that the problem with the colonial borders was not only that they arbitrarily dissected African societies with European interests in mind, but also that they profoundly changed the way in which territoriality and authority functioned in this region, and therefore they affected identity. The presumption that territories could be constructed in which ‘culture’ and ‘political power’ neatly coincided was influenced by European ideas about space and identity, and privileged the perceptions and territorial claims of those ruling the most powerful centres in the nineteenth century. Thus, this article questions assumptions that continue to influence contemporary views of the Lake Kivu region. It shows that local understandings of the relationship between space and identity differed fundamentally from state-centred perspectives, whether in precolonial centralized states or colonial states.

在整个非洲，当代边界被认为是“人造的”边界，因为它们是将强加于众的族群分裂的外部强加。本文认为，殖民地边界的问题不仅在于他们考虑了欧洲利益而任意地割断了非洲社会，而且还深刻地改变了该地区的领土和权威运作方式，从而影响了身份。可以构筑“文化”和“政治力量”恰好重合的领土的假设受到欧洲关于空间和身份的观念的影响，并赋予了那些统治十九世纪最强大中心的人们的观念和领土主张以特权。因此，本文对继续影响基伍湖地区当代景观的假设提出了质疑。它表明，无论是在殖民前的集权国家还是殖民地国家，地方对空间与身份之间关系的理解在根本上与以国家为中心的观点不同。