Popular discourses on conflicts in the Great Lakes region argue that many of these conflicts have been caused by “erroneous” borders that cut up communities for European interests. This chapter argues that rather than with where these borders were drawn, the problem is what they did and do. In the second half of the nineteenth century in the Lake Kivu region, communities could not be neatly delineated and matched to clearly circumscribed territory, as relations between territory and identity were different. The divergence between how political communities were perceived was not just between “European” and “African” conceptions but also between those of a centralizing state – the Nyiginya kingdom – and those societies in the “frontier” that had other forms of sociopolitical organization.

Starting from a discussion of the tumultuous context at the turn of the twentieth century, the chapter addresses the imperial conflict between Germany and the Congo Free State, who both claimed Lake Kivu and its hinterland as their imperial possession, in what became known as the “Kivu-Bufumbiro conflict.” The chapter traces the different perspectives over how to understand the sociopolitical context and unsettled spatial organization that emerge from the debates between imperial powers in the context of this conflict The chapter concludes with an examination of the early impact of European border making on local populations, and the ways in which they tried to use the colonial border for their own survival.