The papers that follow were based on presentations to two roundtables on Rwanda organized at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting held in Toronto, on November 6,1994.

At the outset, it is important to note three aspects of those roundtables. First, they were not organized as a comprehensive set of papers; instead, with one or two exceptions, the roundtables were formed of those papers which were submitted independently of each other by individual members of the ASA. I was asked simply to coordinate their presentation and prepare the papers for publication afterward. The result of this was regrettable in one major aspect: there was very little representation of Rwandans on the panels, and therefore also in this collection, although a large number of Rwandans attended the roundtables and participated energetically in the discussions, which together with the paper presentations lasted formally for nearly 6 hours, and informally far into the night.

The image of Rwanda conveyed by the media is that of a society gone amok. How else to explain the collective insanity that led to the butchering of half a million civilians, men, women and children? As much as the scale of the killings, the visual impact of the atrocities numbs the mind and makes the quest for rational motives singularly irrelevant. Tribal savagery suggests itself as the most plausible subtext for the scenes of apocalypse captured by television crews and photojournalists.

Ironically, just as “tribalism” is being reaffirmed by the media as the bane of the continent, Rwanda’s descent into hell makes it a society not unlike others in Europe and Asia where genocide has been intrinsic to their recent historical experience.

Life is filled with tiny ironies; or as the old ones steeped in the tradition of the church would say, “the Lord sometimes moves in mysterious ways.”

More than twenty-five years ago, after completing the two year city college degree, I applied to the BA program in history at Roosevelt University located in downtown Chicago and at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern invited me to take a series of tests. The first set of tests was to determine my intelligence quotient; the second set was designed to measure manual dexterity.

Readers of Issue know better than to accept the images of tribalism and ancient hatreds propagated in much of the American press during the early days and weeks of the genocide in Rwanda. And the media (or at least some journalists) came around eventually to a recognition that far from mindless tribal violence, this was planned and calculated genocide. Still, in North America it is the deaths and brutality that have most mesmerized public attention; there has been too little discussion of the political, social, and economic context in which the genocide occurred.

Your Excellency, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, the President of the United Republic of Tanzania, Cabinet ministers, ambassadors and high commissioners, publishers, representatives of Kodansha Ltd., distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It fills me with great pleasure to be here today to receive the 1994 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa.

From the comfort of American living rooms, the violence that ravaged Rwanda for four months in mid-1994 seemed almost incomprehensible. The daily newspaper reports and nightly television coverage that presented disturbing images of slaughter and destruction failed to provide the necessary background to make sense of the disaster. For most Americans, little option was left than to view the devastation as an expression of some inherent savagery in the Rwandan population.

In this article, I draw upon the example of two Rwandan communities to help explain the nature of the violence that swept Rwanda after the death of President Juvénal Habyarimana. These two communities bear certain similarities: they lie in neighboring communes in Kibuye Prefecture; both are relatively remote; and each community centers around a parish of the Presbyterian Church.

Is there an African Studies establishment in the United States? Of course there is. The academic study of Africa has mushroomed since the end of the Second World War as federal dollars were invested in graduate training programs so that the United States would be able to cope with the challenges posed by the coming to independence of former colonial territories in Africa from 1956 onward. Most of this money went to major research universities. Accordingly, the training in African Studies that evolved at these centers was rooted in the historical development of western academic disciplines, the history of race and power in America, and hegemonic control over the discourse on Africa in America.

Doing Western-type studies of Africa will always be problematic until we are able to wrest control of the paradigm from narrow Western objectives in order to satisfy the fundamental needs of Africa and not of the West. The late Cheikh Anta Diop, the greatest African scholar of the twentieth century, put forth the idea that Western scholars as a whole would find themselves unable to extricate their research from the intellectual interests of the West in order to serve the social and cultural aims of knowledge for Africa. Whether Cheikh Anta Diop was correct or not remains to be seen. However, from what we have already witnessed the most anti-African elements, whether in terms of the research priorities, projects, careers and programmatic orientations, structures, and objectives in the field, continue to have the most awesome hold on studies of Africa. The travesty is that it has lasted for so long.

As the tragic events of Rwanda started unfolding on April 6, 1994, I was in Kigali setting up a Postwar Rehabilitation and Development Program we had developed in collaboration with the Rwandan Ministries of Health and Defense, and ORTPN (the Rwandan Office of Tourism and National Parks). This program, implemented by a local NGO, included four components. The first consisted in the physical rehabilitation of institutions damaged in the war between October 1990 and March 1993, primarily hospitals, health centers and dispensaries in the Prefectures of Byumba and Ruhengeri. The first phase of this component had been completed by March 25, 1994, with funding from the Canadian Government and the EEC. Subsequent phases were intended to be program-oriented and to provide institutional support to these health facilities.

Christopher Waterman quotes a Yoruba popular performer: “Our tradition is a very modern tradition.” The Study of Africa in the U.S. is a very modern tradition in several senses. In the great scale of things, it is very recent. During the presentation of a National Academy of Sciences project on The Population Dynamics of Sub-Saharan Africa last year, it was pointed out that only ten years ago the Academy had postponed work on this topic simply because the data were judged insufficient for a scientific synthesis. And it is a modern tradition in the sense of lively expansion and mutation. Most notably, over those same ten years or so the participants in both academic and non-academic study, and in popular culture, have become far more diverse.

Most press reports would have us believe that the genocide in Rwanda was the result of a “centuries-old” ethnic/tribal hatred. There is no denying that mass murder and genocide took place in Rwanda. It is estimated that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people died in the most appalling way. Those killed were from all ethnic groups, Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa; but the vast majority of those killed were Tutsi. However, it is important to understand the process by which this took place: we must stop and ask if this genocide was inevitable, if it was universal, and if it was the result of ancient irreconcilable hatreds.

The reference to tribal warfare, or even ethnic conflict, implies that there are (at least) two sides fighting, and that all members of society are caught up in the killings. But in this case, the great preponderance of deaths resulted not from “conflict” but from murder.

The utility of postmodern thinking to the study of Africa continues to be a matter of hot debate. Some authors see postmodernism, particularly colonial discourse analysis, as a threat to well established historical methods for studying African societies. Others draw on postmodern insights while warning of its shortcomings, especially the lack of attention to political and economic structures. This brief discussion cannot fully explore such a complicated subject; rather it is intended as a personal view on some of the key issues at hand.

It is 35-40 kilometers from the Burundi border to the town of Butare. Over the entire route, I saw only four people, two on the road and two at a riverbank, about to do their washing. [This, in what was formerly one of the most densely populated areas of the country.] In the fields were unharvested beans and sorghum; banana groves had not been maintained; the coffee trees in flower had not received mulch; the harvest will be mediocre. The paths to each homestead were overrun by weeds. The destroyed homes of Tutsi or other “nuisances” [Hutu opponents to the former regime or those who protected Tutsi] appeared as gaping sores in the countryside.

Having recently returned from a short research trip to Rwanda (from October 15 to October 22), I want to comment on certain serious problems which threaten to weigh heavily on the immediate future of the country. I do not intend to judge the performance of the regime in power after only three months in power; it would be premature to do so, and in any case the administration lacks virtually all financial resources. Instead, I seek here only to share a few observations on the current situation.

Before this trip I believed that the essential problem faced by the country was the threat of renewed warfare by the armed forces of the former government, and their associated militias, now in exile in the neighboring countries. That is still a threat.

In the latter 1940s, a growing number of American intellectuals, including scholars in various academic disciplines, were attracted to the study of Africa by two powerful incentives. First, African nationalism created a new horizon for the advancement of democracy, the twentieth century's preeminent political ideal. Second, many intellectuals were anxious to reconstruct the prevailing theories of society so that they would fairly represent the aspirations and problems of people everywhere on earth. From this perspective, due regard for the contributions of Africa was deemed to be a scientific, as well as a moral, imperative. These goals, democracy and universalism, were embraced and combined by the theorists of modernization.

Mobilizing thousands of Rwandans to slaughter tens of thousands of others required effective organization. Far from the “Failed State” syndrome that appears to plague some parts of Africa, Rwanda was too successful as a state. Extremists used its administrative apparatus, its military, and its party organizations to carry out a “cottage-industry” genocide that reached out to all levels of the population and produced between five hundred thousand and one million victims. Those with state power used their authority to force action from those reluctant to kill. They also offered attractive incentives to people who are very poor, giving license to loot and promising them the land and businesses of the victims. In some cases, local officials even decided ahead of time the disposition of the most attractive items of movable property. Everyone knew who had a refrigerator, a plush sofa, a radio, and assailants were guaranteed their rewards before attacking. But even with the powerful levers of threat and bribe, officials could not have succeeded so well had people not been prepared to hate and fear the Tutsi.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the study of Africa in the United States was a very rare and obscure practice, engaged in almost exclusively by African-American (then called Negro) intellectuals. They published scholarly articles primarily in quite specialized journals, notably Phylon, and their books were never reviewed in the New York Times. As a matter of fact, at this time (that is, before 1945) there weren't even very many books written about African-Americans in the U.S., although the library acquisitions were not quite as rare as those for books about Africa.

Our thesis may be simply stated: There is a specter hanging over African studies: the specter of irrelevance both within and outside the academy. Indeed, African studies, as constructed in the North American academy over the past four decades, is dying.

The past twelve months have witnessed the devastation of Rwanda. More than one half million people were murdered by the Rwandan army and the associated civilian militias, while over two million people fled the country after the death of former President Juvenal Habyarimana. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, which emerged in exile over the past thirty years and now dominates the government in Kigali, faces a dilemma: how does it consolidate its position amongst its core supporters, many of whom grew up in exile and recently returned to Rwanda, while at the same time gain the confidence of the domestic population, many of whom have recently fled? Resolving this dilemma is the central task for the regime, and is critical to the future political and economic development of the country.

In spite of its stated desire to create a broad-based government, the core of RPF support lies on a perilously narrow base, located as much outside of the country as inside. Domestically, the country is in ruins. The exodus of refugees resulted in the collapse of production and of the state.