In the spring of 1994 the tiny African nation of Rwanda exploded
onto the international media stage, as internal strife reached
genocidal proportions. But the horror that unfolded before our eyes
had been building steadily for years before it captured the
attention of the world.
In "The Rwanda Crisis," journalist and Africa scholar G?rard
Prunier provides a historical perspective that Western readers need
to understand how and why the brutal massacres of 800,000 Rwandese
came to pass. Prunier shows how the events in Rwanda were part of a
deadly logic, a plan that served central political and economic
interests, rather than a result of ancient tribal hatreds -- a
notion often invoked by the media to dramatize the fighting.
"The Rwanda Crisis" makes great strides in dispelling the racist
cultural myths surrounding the people of Rwanda, views propogated
by European colonialists in the nineteenth century and carved into
"history" by Western influence. Prunier demonstrates how the
struggle for cultural dominance and subjugation among the Hutu and
Tutsi -- the central players in the recent massacres -- was
exploited by racially obsessed Europeans. He shows how Western
colonialists helped to construct a Tutsi identity as a superior
racial type because of their distinctly "non-Negro" features in
order to facilitate greater control over the Rwandese.
Expertly leading readers on a journey through the troubled
history of the country and its surroundings, Prunier moves from the
pre-colonial Kingdom of Rwanda, though German and Belgian colonial
regimes, to the 1973 coup. The book chronicles the developing
refugee crisis in Rwanda and neighboring Uganda in the 1970s and
1980s and offers the most comprehensive account available of the
manipulations of popular sentiment that led to the genocide and the
events that have followed.
In the aftermath of this devastating tragedy, "The Rwanda
Crisis" is the first clear-eyed analysis available to American
readers. From the massacres to the subsequent cholera epidemic and
emerging refugee crisis, Prunier details the horrifying events of
recent years and considers propsects for the future of Rwanda.
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