The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History
Though the genocide of 1994 catapulted Rwanda onto the international stage,English-language historical accounts of the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa—which encompasses Burundi, eastern Congo, Rwanda, western Tanzania, and Uganda—are scarce. Drawing on colonial archives, oral tradition, archeological discoveries, anthropologic and linguistic studies, and his thirty years of scholarship, Jean-Pierre Chrétien offers a major synthesis of the history of the region, one still plagued by...
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The first English-language publication of a major history of the Great Lakes region of Africa. Publishers Weekly A director at France's National Center of Scientific Research, Chr tien brings three decades of scholarship and corresponding expertise to this comprehensive history of a part of Africa-Rwanda, Burundi, the eastern Congo, Uganda, and western Tanzania-that remains a blank slate even to well- informed Americans, even in the context of its ongoing human tragedy: at least 3.3 million dead in ongoing civil and regional wars. Chr tien shows, in economic and elegant prose (as rendered by Straus), that the lake-ful region was long a crossroads of the Congo forest and the plateaus of the Upper Nile and eastern Africa. Contacts and imitations, inventions and adaptations, were normative in cultures lacking the "developed" structures of other African regions. But with them came violence, which in turn, Chr tien demonstrates, fostered central authorities that sought to keep the peoples of this multicultural region from each other's throats as they struggled for position within political systems. The Europeans exacerbated existing tensions, Chr tien argues, less by their patterns of rule than by introducing new means of production and profit-and new means of defining power relationships in quasi-biological terms. This racism in turn metastasized, initially among the Western-educated elites, then generally. Notions of post-colonial independence were articulated in terms of an ethnic fundamentalism intended to restore past glories and mobilize in-groups for the sake of an even grander future-at the expense of "others" whose enmity was described as fixed and eternal. Government-run TV and radio made things worse, Chr tien argues, by supplanting more nuanced traditional cultures and by constantly reiterating a dual message of fear and aggression. Chr tien's conclusion that central Africa's challenge involves abandoning current de facto ethnic-based factional rule in favor of union along broad-gauged regional lines is eminently sensible. Based on the body of his text, however, the prospects for arriving there are grim. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
PrefaceLinguistic Note19Introduction: Writing History in Africa21IAn Ancient Human Settlement and Its Enigmas41IIThe Emergence of Kingship: Power and Religion85IIIThe Formation of Monarchical States139IVColonial Trusteeships and Reconstructions of Tradition201VRegained Independence and the Obsession with Genocide291Conclusion: The Fragments of History347Notes359Bibliography423Appendices473Name Index485Place Index495
\ From the Publisher"Chretien brings three decades of scholarship and corresponding expertise to this comprehensive history..." Publishers Weekly (starred review)\ Zone Books\ "A feast of information and analysis." Gail M. Gerhart Foreign Affairs\ Zone Books\ "Africa enthusiasts will appreciate the maps of the Great Lakes..." Mary H. Meier Boston Globe\ Zone Books\ "...anyone with an ancient interest in African affairs will benefit from this analysis." Kirkus Reviews\ Zone Books\ "Chretien has undertaken the formidable task of tracing the roots of the region's violence..." John Shattuck The New York Times\ Zone Books\ "A feast of information and analysis." Gail M. Gerhart Foreign Affairs\ Zone Books\ "Africa enthusiasts will appreciate the maps of the Great Lakes..." Mary H.\ Meier Boston Globe\ Zone Books\ "...anyone with an ancient interest in African affairs will benefit from this analysis." Kirkus Reviews\ Zone Books\ "Chretien has undertaken the formidable task of tracing the roots of the region's violence..." John Shattuck The New York Times\ Zone Books\ \ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyA director at France's National Center of Scientific Research, Chr tien brings three decades of scholarship and corresponding expertise to this comprehensive history of a part of Africa-Rwanda, Burundi, the eastern Congo, Uganda, and western Tanzania-that remains a blank slate even to well- informed Americans, even in the context of its ongoing human tragedy: at least 3.3 million dead in ongoing civil and regional wars. Chr tien shows, in economic and elegant prose (as rendered by Straus), that the lake-ful region was long a crossroads of the Congo forest and the plateaus of the Upper Nile and eastern Africa. Contacts and imitations, inventions and adaptations, were normative in cultures lacking the "developed" structures of other African regions. But with them came violence, which in turn, Chr tien demonstrates, fostered central authorities that sought to keep the peoples of this multicultural region from each other's throats as they struggled for position within political systems. The Europeans exacerbated existing tensions, Chr tien argues, less by their patterns of rule than by introducing new means of production and profit-and new means of defining power relationships in quasi-biological terms. This racism in turn metastasized, initially among the Western-educated elites, then generally. Notions of post-colonial independence were articulated in terms of an ethnic fundamentalism intended to restore past glories and mobilize in-groups for the sake of an even grander future-at the expense of "others" whose enmity was described as fixed and eternal. Government-run TV and radio made things worse, Chr tien argues, by supplanting more nuanced traditional cultures and by constantly reiterating a dual message of fear and aggression. Chr tien's conclusion that central Africa's challenge involves abandoning current de facto ethnic-based factional rule in favor of union along broad-gauged regional lines is eminently sensible. Based on the body of his text, however, the prospects for arriving there are grim. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ Foreign AffairsWhen Europeans first encountered the highly developed monarchies of East Africa's interlacustrine region in the mid-nineteenth century, they accounted for them by inventing a theory of external causation: the hypothesis of prehistoric invasions by Asiatic "Hamites." In what later became Rwanda and Burundi, missionaries and colonial officials based their system of rule on this theory, bequeathing to postindependence regimes a poisonous ideology of ethnic differentiation. The first half of this scholarly history describes the interrelated precolonial kingdoms of Uganda, northwest Tanzania, and the eastern Congo as well as Rwanda and Burundi, and reviews the archeological, linguistic, environmental, oral, and written sources that refute the Hamitic hypothesis. The second part races through a hundred years of colonial and postcolonial history to depict colonialism's vi0lent legacy, particularly in Rwanda. Although Chretien's argument is not easily accessible to a general audience, determined readers with some background will find a feast of information and analysis that confirms the author's assertion that the region has become a "laboratory" for reflecting on the writing of history.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsAn eminent French historian journeys into the heart of Africa and returns with an unhappy report. The Great Lakes region of east-central Africa was for years "a paradise for colonizers, missionaries, and so-called development experts," writes Chrétien (Centre Nationale de Recherches/Univ. of Paris). Little known to the outside world, it became a byword for an earthly hell when, in the late 20th century, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi all but disintegrated in ethnic genocide, in part the direct result of colonialism and of a racist anthropology that favored some tribes over others: "The preponderance of the Caucasian type has remained deeply marked among the Batutsi," one ethnological report from as late as 1948 reads. "Their elevated height . . . the fineness of their traits, and their intelligent expression all contribute to their being worthy of the title that the explorers gave them: aristocratic Negroes." Chrétien closely examines such colonialist ideas, the misguided practical actions of colonial administration, and their ultimately devastating effects; particularly in Rwanda and Burundi, he notes, Belgian and French rule deliberately cultivated ethnic division just as it "curbed every form of mobility, urbanization, modern association, criticism, and imagination"-as did, he adds, the independent states that followed. Writing more for specialist readers, Chrétien also criticizes the historiography of the region, taking issue with hypothesized "Bantu expansions" and "Hamitic invasions" while investigating what can reliably be said about the rise of kingly states before the European arrival, among other matters. Readers without a grounding in African history may find these discussionsbewildering, but Chrétien brings clarity to the interpretation of recent events, especially when he lays ultimate responsibility for murder at the door of ruling elites that "did not know how to construct or reconstruct real nations from ancient and modern heritages," and that instead were content to produce an ocean of blood. Mainly for scholars, although anyone with an interest in African affairs will benefit from this analysis.\ \
