Gakondo Playing Cards
Gakondo V3 Black (ISINE)
Printed by WJPC
GAKONDO Playing Cards, the world’s first playing cards based on RWANDA’s
cultural heritage and prevailing monarchial legacy. They are more than just playing cards but a requisite tribute to ancestry and legacy of past kings and queens of the kingdom of RWANDA.
In your hand, be it from professional poker games, cards collectors, cardist and just playing with family, you shall be within reach of royalty. A crowning achievement of the GAKONDO playing cards is its refined and informal design, bringing you an opportunity to learn more of RWANDA’s feats and wisdom presented in educative excerpts from history.
The Naming of UMUSENGO and ISINE Editions.
The Kinyarwanda language doesn’t have basic terms for colour. Rather, most if not all, colour terms are nouns of objects with a particular colour derived from existing said objects.
Cows, or to be more precise, cow names, fill out the majority of colour names that exist in the Kinyarwanda language today. This is because cows are undoubtedly an impartial pillar in the Rwandan culture. An instance tributing such a unique position in the culture to cows alone, could be observed in what Rwandans considered to be the definition and embodiment of wealth.
In the olden times, any working person aimed to amass all courage and effort into
presenting the fruit of their labour personified into a beautifully created masterpiece – a cow.
Cows had more value than land itself. They were not only applied into what now has been, for the most part, limited to dowry, but ceremonial rites in various institutions of the kingdom. The more the cows a person had, the more renown and prestige they possessed.
When it came to colours, the astonishment revealed itself in the diversity of cow coats (skins) which, by right, merited the cows to own colour names themselves alone.
Colour terms referred originally to the colour of cows’ coat only. But with time they later dissolved into the general naming of ‘colours.’
In our case, the naming of these deck editions drew inspiration and right from cow names. Namely, UMUSENGO and ISINE cows.
umusengo /umuseengo/ noun
- a ‘brown with white spots’ cow
isine
/isiine/
noun
- a cow that is ‘greyish’ almost ‘blackish’ in colour.
