Remembering Genocides in Central Africa

Remembering Genocides in Central Africa
Author: Rene Lemarchand
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2021-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000332985

Scene of one of the biggest genocides of the last century Rwanda has become a household word, yet bitter disagreements persist as to its causes and consequences. Through a blend of personal memories and historical analysis, and informed by a lifelong experience of research in Central Africa, the author challenges conventional wisdom and suggests a new perspective for making sense of the appalling brutality that has accompanied the region’s post-independence trajectories. All four states adjacent to Rwanda are inhabited by Hutu and Tutsi and thus contained in germ the potential for ethnic conflict, but only in Burundi did this potential reach genocidal proportions when, in 1972, in response to a local insurrection, at least 200,000 Hutu civilians were killed by a predominantly Tutsi army. By widening his analytic lens the author shows the critical importance of the Burundi bloodshed to an understanding of the roots of the Rwanda genocide, and in later years the significance of the mass murder of Hutu civilians by Kagame’s Tutsi army, not just in Rwanda but in the Congo. The regional dimension of ethnic conflict, traceable to Belgian-engineered Hutu revolution in Rwanda in 1959, three years before its independence, is the principal missing piece in the genocidal puzzle of the Great Lakes region of central Africa. But this is by no means the only one. Reassembling the missing pieces within and outside Rwanda is not the least of the merits of this highly readable reassessment of a widely misunderstood human tragedy.

Remembering Genocides in Central Africa

Remembering Genocides in Central Africa
Author: Rene Lemarchand
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-08
Genre: Ethnic conflict
ISBN: 9780367654160

The history of the central African states of Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo has been one of turmoil, violence and inter-ethnic conflict since independence. Rene Lemarchand explores the trajectory of this troubled period.

Forgotten Genocides

Forgotten Genocides
Author: Rene Lemarchand
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2011-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812204387

Unlike the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, or Armenia, scant attention has been paid to the human tragedies analyzed in this book. From German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Burundi, and eastern Congo to Tasmania, Tibet, and Kurdistan, from the mass killings of the Roms by the Nazis to the extermination of the Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey, the mind reels when confronted with the inhuman acts that have been consigned to oblivion. Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory gathers eight essays about genocidal conflicts that are unremembered and, as a consequence, understudied. The contributors, scholars in political science, anthropology, history, and other fields, seek to restore these mass killings to the place they deserve in the public consciousness. Remembrance of long forgotten crimes is not the volume's only purpose—equally significant are the rich quarry of empirical data offered in each chapter, the theoretical insights provided, and the comparative perspectives suggested for the analysis of genocidal phenomena. While each genocide is unique in its circumstances and motives, the essays in this volume explain that deliberate concealment and manipulation of the facts by the perpetrators are more often the rule than the exception, and that memory often tends to distort the past and blame the victims while exonerating the killers. Although the cases discussed here are but a sample of a litany going back to biblical times, Forgotten Genocides offers an important examination of the diversity of contexts out of which repeatedly emerge the same hideous realities.

Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda

Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda
Author: Marie-Eve Desrosiers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2023-01-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009224735

Challenging assumptions regarding the strength and control of authoritarian governments in Rwanda in the decades before the 1994 genocide, Marie-Eve Desrosiers uses original archival data and interviews to highlight the complex relations between authorities, opponents, and society. Through careful, detailed analysis Desrosiers offers a nuanced assessment of the functions and evolution of authoritarianism over time, demonstrating how the governments of Rwanda's first two post-independence Republics (1962–1990) sought and often struggled to cement their rule. Whilst the deeper, lived realities of authoritarianism are generally neglected by multi-cases comparisons at the heart of comparative authoritarian studies, this illuminating survey highlights the essential, yet subtle authoritarian strategies, patterns, and forms of decay that are too often overlooked when addressing authoritarian contexts.

Left to Tell

Left to Tell
Author: Immaculee Ilibagiza
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014-04-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1401944329

Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee’s family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans. Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them. It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculee discovered the power of prayer, eventually shedding her fear of death and forging a profound and lasting relationship with God. She emerged from her bathroom hideout having discovered the meaning of truly unconditional love—a love so strong she was able seek out and forgive her family’s killers. The triumphant story of this remarkable young woman’s journey through the darkness of genocide will inspire anyone whose life has been touched by fear, suffering, and loss.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu
Author: Marietjie Oelofsen
Publisher: African Sun Media
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2024-08-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1991260075

Ubuntu: Interdisciplinary Conversations Across Continents is a collection of work by 17 scholars emerging from the Ubuntu Dialogues Seminar Exchange Fellowship hosted by Stellenbosch University in South Africa and Michigan State University in the US between 2019 and 2022. This collaborative work brings new voices and new ways of interrogating a concept that holds possibilities for living together differently. The contributions problematise the concept in provocative and surprising ways and disrupt narrow and superficial interpretations of Ubuntu. --- The contributors to this book foreground critical issues which are fundamental towards a deeper understanding of the notion of ubuntu. – Dr Sithembele Marawu, University of Fort Hare This book features next generation rising stars from places such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Burundi, and the US, writing about ubuntu, the indigenous southern African term often used to capture African philosophy, especially its moral dimensions. A fresh, kaleidoscopic engagement with ubuntu. – Professor Thaddeus Metz, University of Pretoria

Genocide

Genocide
Author: Adam Jones
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 807
Release: 2023-11-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000958701

Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction is the most wide-ranging textbook on genocide yet published. Designed as a text for undergraduate and graduate students from a range of disciplines, it will also appeal to non-specialists and general readers. Fully updated to reflect the latest thinking in this rapidly developing field, this unique book: Provides an introduction to genocide as both a historical phenomenon and an analytical-legal concept, including the concept of genocidal intent and the dynamism and contingency of genocidal processes. Discusses the role of state-building, imperialism, war, and social revolution in fueling genocide. Supplies a wide range of full-length case studies of genocides worldwide, each with a supplementary study. Explores perspectives on genocide from the social sciences, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science/international relations, and gender studies. Considers the future of genocide, with attention to historical memory and genocide denial; initiatives for truth, justice, and redress; and strategies of intervention and prevention. Highlights of the new edition include: New case studies of the Uyghur genocide in the People’s Republic of China, the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar, and Muslims in India. The historical and archaeological legacy of genocide. New and vivid testimonies of survivors and witnesses to genocide. This significantly revised fourth edition will remain an indispensable text for new generations of genocide study and scholarship. An accompanying website (www.genocidetext.net) features a selection of supplementary materials, teaching aids, and Internet resources.

Master Plans and Minor Acts

Master Plans and Minor Acts
Author: Shakirah E. Hudani
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2024-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226832740

An examination of planning, place, and the politics of repair in post-genocide Rwanda. Master Plans and Minor Acts examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation? Through extended ethnographic and qualitative research in Rwanda in the decades after the genocide of 1994, this book questions how repair after conflict is realized amidst large-scale urban transformation. Bridging African studies, urban studies, and human geography in its scope, this work ties Rwanda’s transformation to contexts of urban change in other post-conflict spaces, bringing to the fore critical questions about the ethics of planning in such complex geographies.

Stalin's Genocides

Stalin's Genocides
Author: Norman M. Naimark
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2010-07-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400836069

The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

Critical Approaches to Genocide

Critical Approaches to Genocide
Author: Hülya Adak
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2023-09-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429665660

The study of genocide has been appropriate in emphasizing the centrality of the Holocaust; yet, other preceding episodes of mass violence are of great significance. Taking a transnational and transhistorical approach, this volume redresses and replaces the silencing of the Armenian Genocide. Scholarship relating to the history of denial, comparative approaches in the deportations and killings of Greeks and Armenians during the First World War, and women’s histories during the genocide and post-genocide proliferated during the centennial of the Armenian Genocide in 2015. Collectively, however, these studies have not been enough to offer a comprehensive account of the historical record, documentation, and interpretation of events during 1915-1916. This study seeks to bridge the gap, by unsettling nationalist narratives and addressing areas such as aesthetics, gender, and sexuality. By bringing forward various dimensions of the human experience, including the political, socioeconomic, cultural, social, gendered, and legal contexts within which such silencing occurred, the essays address the methodological silences and processes of selectivity and exclusion in scholarship on the Armenian Genocide. The interdisciplinary approach makes Critical Approaches to Genocide a useful resource for all students and scholars interested in the Armenian Genocide and memory studies.