Though the genocide of 1994 catapulted Rwanda onto the internationalstage, English-language historical accounts of the Great Lakes region of EasternAfrica--which encompasses Burundi, eastern Congo, Rwanda, western Tanzania, andUganda--are scarce. Drawing on colonial archives, oral tradition, archeologicaldiscoveries, anthropologic and linguistic studies, and his thirty years ofscholarship, Jean-Pierre Chr?tien offers a major synthesis of the history of theregion, one still plagued by extremely violent wars. This translation brings thework of a leading French historian to an English-speaking audience for the firsttime.Chr?tien retraces the human settlement and the formation of kingdoms around thesources of the Nile, which were "discovered" by European explorers around 1860. Hedescribes these kingdoms' complex social and political organization and analyzes howGerman, British, and Belgian colonizers not only transformed and exploited theexisting power structures, but also projected their own racial categories onto them.Finally, he shows how the independent states of the postcolonial era, in particularBurundi, Rwanda, and Uganda, have been trapped by their colonial and precoloniallegacies, 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 historicalresearch--not only because its history is fascinating but also because the tragediesof its present are very much a function of the political manipulations of itspast.

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