The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History

by Jean-Pierre Chrétien, Scott Straus

Overview

Although the genocide of 1994 catapulted Rwanda onto the international stage, English-language historical accounts of the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa are still scarce. Drawing on a wide range of sources — colonial archives, oral tradition, archaeological discoveries, studies in anthropology and linguistics, and his thirty years of scholarship — Jean-Pierre Chrétien offers a major synthesis of the history of the region, which encompasses Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Eastern Congo, and Western Tanzania, a region still plagued by extremely violent wars.

The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History first retraces the human settlement and the formation of kingdoms around the sources of the Nile, which were “discovered” by European explorers around 1860. Chrétien then describes these kingdoms’ complex social and political organization and analyzes how the colonizers — German, British, and Belgian — not only transformed and exploited the existing power structures, but also projected their own racial categories onto them.

Finally, the author shows how the independent states of the postcolonial era, in particular Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda, have been trapped by their colonial and precolonial legacies, and especially by the racial rewriting of the latter by the former. Today, argues Chrétien, the Great Lakes region of Africa is crucial for historical research: not only because its history is particularly fascinating but also because the tragedies of its present are very much a function of the political manipulations of its past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781890951351
Publisher:	Zone Books
Publication date:	09/22/2006
Series:	Zone Books
Pages:	504
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jean-Pierre Chrétien is Directeur de Recherches at the Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifique and affiliated with the Centre de Recherches Africaines at the University of Paris.

Scott Straus is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of several books on Africa and violence, including The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda, and is the translator of Jean-Pierre Chretien's The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History. Formerly a Nairobi-based journalist, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 reporting on the war in Congo.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Chretien brings three decades of scholarship and corresponding expertise to this comprehensive history..." Publishers Weekly

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

Editorial Reviews

"Mr. Chrétien’s extraordinary book undertakes the formidable task of tracing the roots of the region’s violence and exposing the ideological myths on which the ancient-hatreds theory rests…a monumental study that marches through two millenniums before approaching central Africa’s contemporary agony."

The New York Times

A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

From the Publisher

Africa enthusiasts will appreciate the maps of the Great Lakes...

—Mary H. Meier, Boston Globe

Reviews

Chretien has undertaken the formidable task of tracing the roots of the region's violence...

The New York Times - John Shattuck

Africa enthusiasts will appreciate the maps of the Great Lakes...

Boston Globe - Mary H. Meier

A feast of information and analysis.

Foreign Affairs - Gail M. Gerhart

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.

Publishers Weekly

When 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.

Foreign Affairs

An 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.

Kirkus Reviews