In central Africa, a genocidal war has raged for nearly a decade, costing more than 4 million lives in Rwanda, Burundi and Congo and precipitating the worst humanitarian crisis in more than half a century. Central Africa shares this gruesome recent past with southeastern Europe, where in the 1990s the Balkans were swept by a wave of killing and "ethnic cleansing." In both cases, genocide was widely misunderstood to be the inevitable product of "ancient hatreds."
Jean-Pierre Chretien, a French historian with vast experience in the Great Lakes region of Africa, has undertaken the formidable task of tracing the roots of the region's violence and exposing the ideological myths on which the ancient-hatreds theory rests. In a monumental study that marches through two millenniums before approaching central Africa's contemporary agony, Chretien punctures the sense of inevitability that permeates our thinking about the Rwandan genocide. Along the way, he illuminates the responsibility of a wide range of actors from the colonial period through the present. As warlords continue today to compete for power in a thoroughly ravaged Congo, Chretien helps us understand how this all came about and why it matters that we know.
The story begins with the geography of the central African highlands. Despite its equatorial location, Chretien says, "the region is blessed with good climate, is rich with diverse soils and plants, and has prospered thanks to some strong basic techniques: the association of cattle keeping and agriculture; the diffusion of the banana a millennium ago; and the mastery of iron metallurgy two millennia ago."
In this healthy environment, complex social structures evolved in which the idea of kingship and strong central authority took hold and flourished for more than 300 years before the arrival of colonial powers in the mid-19th century.
The fertile lands around the Great Lakes were settled by indigenous Hutu cultivators, while the more mountainous areas were used for the raising of cattle by Tutsi pastoralists. In the early kingdoms of the region, agricultural and pastoral systems were integrated because they controlled complementary ecological zones and served mutually beneficial economic interests. As Chretien argues convincingly, nowhere at this time could the "social dialectic be reduced" to a Hutu-Tutsi cleavage.
That began to change in the 19th century. As social structures became more complex, the success of the central African kingdoms depended increasingly on territorial expansion through raiding, colonizing and annexing of neighboring lands. At the same time, Tutsi cattle raisers in search of more land began to emerge as a new elite and a driving force behind expansion. The kingdoms of Rwanda and Uganda were particularly expansionist, but were soon thwarted by the arrival of colonial powers. The immediate effect of colonialism was to reorient the stratified and dynamic societies of the Great Lakes around competing poles of collaboration with, and resistance to, the new foreign occupiers.
Since these remote societies had been untouched by the slave trade that ravaged Africa's coastal regions, they presented the Europeans with a range of robust aristocracies and royal courts to win over.
At this crucial point, the issue of race entered the picture. Obsessed by their theories of racial classification, 19th- and early-20th-century Europeans rewrote the history of central Africa. Imposing their own racist projection of superiority on Tutsi "Hamito-Semites" and a corresponding inferiority on Hutu "Bantu Negroes," missionary and colonial historians began to attribute the rise of the Great Lakes kingdoms to the arrival of a superior race of "black Europeans" from the north.
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