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