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 Chr?tien 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.Chr?tien 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 Chr?tien, 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.

The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History PDF

The list of books you might like