Twa

The Great Lakes Twa, plural Batwa, are a pygmy hunter-gatherer people and the oldest surviving population of the African Great Lakes, scattered across Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the eastern Congo. For centuries they lived as semi-nomadic forest hunter-gatherers in small egalitarian bands that stored no surplus, and unlike most other pygmy peoples made pottery for their farming neighbors.

From at least the 1300s they came under agricultural peoples: Bantu-speaking Hutu are held to have entered between the 1000s and 1300s and subjugated them, and in the 1400s pastoral Tutsi overlords built the three-order society of the Rwanda kingdom.

They nevertheless kept a distinct place at court, serving Tutsi kings as entertainers and executioners; some held sub-chief titles, one clan was ennobled, and their forest lore and supposed shamanic power made them both admired and feared. They speak the Bantu languages of their neighbors, among them Rwanda and Rundi.