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

Jean-Pierre Chrétien is Directeur de Recherches at the Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifique and affiliated with the Centre de Recherches Africaines at the University of Paris.

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

Publishers Weekly

A director at France's National Center of Scientific Research, Chr tien brings three decades of scholarship and corresponding expertise to this comprehensive history of a part of Africa-Rwanda, Burundi, the eastern Congo, Uganda, and western Tanzania-that remains a blank slate even to well- informed Americans, even in the context of its ongoing human tragedy: at least 3.3 million dead in ongoing civil and regional wars. Chr tien shows, in economic and elegant prose (as rendered by Straus), that the lake-ful region was long a crossroads of the Congo forest and the plateaus of the Upper Nile and eastern Africa. Contacts and imitations, inventions and adaptations, were normative in cultures lacking the "developed" structures of other African regions. But with them came violence, which in turn, Chr tien demonstrates, fostered central authorities that sought to keep the peoples of this multicultural region from each other's throats as they struggled for position within political systems. The Europeans exacerbated existing tensions, Chr tien argues, less by their patterns of rule than by introducing new means of production and profit-and new means of defining power relationships in quasi-biological terms. This racism in turn metastasized, initially among the Western-educated elites, then generally. Notions of post-colonial independence were articulated in terms of an ethnic fundamentalism intended to restore past glories and mobilize in-groups for the sake of an even grander future-at the expense of "others" whose enmity was described as fixed and eternal. Government-run TV and radio made things worse, Chr tien argues, by supplanting more nuanced traditional cultures and by constantly reiterating a dual message of fear and aggression. Chr tien's conclusion that central Africa's challenge involves abandoning current de facto ethnic-based factional rule in favor of union along broad-gauged regional lines is eminently sensible. Based on the body of his text, however, the prospects for arriving there are grim. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.