Review
"...anyone with an ancient interest in African affairs will benefit from this analysis." -- Kirkus Reviews

Book Description
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 Chren offers a major synthesis of the history of the region, one still plagued by extremely violent wars. This translation brings the work of a leading French historian to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

Chren retraces the human settlement and the formation of kingdoms around the sources of the Nile, which were "discovered" by European explorers around 1860. He describes these kingdoms' complex social and political organization and analyzes how German, British, and Belgian colonizers not only transformed and exploited the existing power structures, but also projected their own racial categories onto them. Finally, he shows how the independent states of the postcolonial era, in particular Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda, have been trapped by their colonial and precolonial legacies, especially by the racial rewriting of the latter by the former.

Today, argues Chren, the Great Lakes of Africa is a crucial region for historical research--not only because its history is fascinating but also because the tragedies of its present are very much a function of the political manipulations of its past.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"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. Chretien 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 post-colonial era, in particular Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda, have been trapped by their colonial and pre-colonial legacies, and especially by the racial rewriting of the latter by the former. Today, argues Chretien, the Great Lakes of Africa is a crucial region 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.

SYNOPSIS

The first English-language publication of a major history of the Great Lakes region of Africa.

FROM THE CRITICS

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.

Foreign Affairs

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.

Kirkus Reviews