Yesterday morning the roads near our lodge were busier than we have seen all year. Buses from Musanze, motorbikes two to a seat, families walking up from the villages in their best clothes, and above it all the usual quiet of Sabyinyo pretending not to notice. The 21st Kwita Izina was held at the foothills of Volcanoes National Park, and for one day Kinigi was the centre of the conservation world.
What is Kwita Izina?
Kwita Izina means “to give a name” in Kinyarwanda. Rwandan families have always named a newborn in front of relatives and neighbours, usually a week or so after the birth. Since 2005, Rwanda has extended the same courtesy to its mountain gorillas.
Every infant born in Volcanoes National Park over the previous twelve months is brought, in absentia, to a stage in Kinigi and given a name by a chosen “namer”: a ranger, a vet, a researcher, a community leader, occasionally someone famous. This year twenty-two infants were named under the theme “Conservation is Life: Sustaining the Future”, which takes the total named since the ceremony began to 460. Roughly 1,100 mountain gorillas now live across the Virunga Massif and Bwindi, up from the low hundreds when Dian Fossey began her work here.
Why Rwanda names its gorillas
It is easy to read Kwita Izina as pageantry. It is a big event, with a stage and Intore dancers and a great deal of ceremony, and it has become one of the most photographed days on Rwanda’s calendar. But the naming itself does real work.
Every habituated gorilla in Volcanoes National Park is monitored, most of them daily. Trackers know the families, the hierarchies, the injuries, the pregnancies. A name is the unit of that knowledge. It is how a vet records a treatment, how a researcher follows a lineage across decades, how a tracker tells a colleague which silverback has moved his group over the saddle towards Bisoke. Fossey named the gorillas she studied for exactly this reason. Kwita Izina took a working practice and made it public.
The names are chosen with care. Most are Kinyarwanda words that describe something about the infant or the circumstances of its birth: the state of the family, the time of year, a hope for its future. When you trek from Sambora and your guide introduces you to a family, every gorilla you meet has a name that was given in this way, on that stage, in this village.
The community in the room
What visitors often miss, watching from the stands, is who the ceremony is really for. The namers get the photographs, but the day is addressed to the people who live along the park boundary.
Ten percent of every gorilla permit sold in Rwanda goes back to the communities around the national parks, funding schools, clinics, water and roads. Kwita Izina is the moment each year when that arrangement is spoken aloud: the gorillas are thriving because the people of Kinigi, Nyange, Shingiro and the other sectors around the park have decided a living forest is worth more than a cleared one. The ceremony thanks them in person. Our own staff, most of whom grew up within sight of the volcanoes, take the day off to attend, and it is not a small thing to them.
Sambora was proud to support this year’s Kwita Izina as a Friend of Conservation. It is a modest title and we mean it modestly: a lodge at the park boundary lives on the health of the forest and the goodwill of the villages around it, and putting something back into the day that celebrates both felt like the least we could do. This year’s celebrations also saw ground broken on a Smart Green Village in Kinigi, part of a wider community resilience project for the villages around the park.
Can you attend Kwita Izina?
Yes. The ceremony is free and open to the public, held on the ceremony grounds at the foot of the volcanoes in Kinigi, a comfortable walk or short drive from the lodge. The seated areas fill early, so arrive in good time. The Rwanda Development Board publishes the date, usually for the first Friday of September, several months ahead; Kwita Izina 2027 will almost certainly follow the same pattern.
Combining Kwita Izina with gorilla trekking
A few practical things we tell guests who want to plan a stay around it:
- Trek the days either side, not the day itself. Park access on ceremony day is largely given over to the official namers, and most visitors treat it as a rest day.
- Book permits early. Gorilla permits for the week around Kwita Izina sell out faster than any other week of the year. Six months ahead is comfortable; nine is safer.
- September is a good month to be here anyway. It sits at the end of the long dry season, which means firm trails, clear mornings and some of the best volcano views of the year. The short rains usually arrive later in the month.
- Tell us early. The lodge is at capacity for Kwita Izina week every year. If this is something you want to build a trip around, say so when you enquire and we will hold the dates.
- Do both. A trek in the morning, the ceremony in the afternoon, and a family named in front of you that you may have met on the trail the day before. There is nowhere else in the world you can do that.
The buses have gone now. The road is quiet again, the stage is coming down, and somewhere above the bamboo line twenty-two small gorillas have names they will never know. That is fine. The names were never for them.
Sambora Field Team Kinigi · Volcanoes National Park
