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 encompassesBurundi, eastern Congo, Rwanda, western Tanzania, and Uganda--are scarce. Drawing on colonialarchives, oral tradition, archeological discoveries, anthropologic and linguistic studies, and histhirty years of scholarship, Jean-Pierre Chretien offers a major synthesis of the history of theregion, one still plagued by extremely violent wars. This translation brings the work of a leadingFrench historian to an English-speaking audience for the first time.Chretien retraces the humansettlement and the formation of kingdoms around the sources of the Nile, which were "discovered" byEuropean explorers around 1860. He describes these kingdoms' complex social and politicalorganization and analyzes how German, British, and Belgian colonizers not only transformed andexploited 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 racialrewriting of the latter by the former.Today, argues Chretien, the Great Lakes of Africa is a crucialregion for historical research--not only because its history is fascinating but also because thetragedies of its present are very much a function of the political manipulations of itspast.

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.