Timothy Longman

Teaching History after Identity‐Based Conflicts: The Rwanda Experience

[Hutu extremist] organizers of the [Rwandan] genocide, who had themselves grown up with . . . distortions of history, skillfully exploited misconceptions about who the Tutsi were, where they had come from, and what they had done in the past. From these elements, they fueled the fear and hatred that made genocide imaginable. (Des Forges 1999, 31) A country’s history is often a central concern after violent, identity-based conflicts, regardless of where they occur. Why does history take on such significance? As expressed in Alison Des Forges’s explanation of Rwanda in the epigraph, all sides tend to blame cross-group hatred and ensuing conflicts, at least in part, on past injustice. Citizens of countries that have experienced such devastation can often see how political leaders distorted and then exploited national history to incite violence. As countries seek social repair, many believe that a new and more truthful history must be transmitted to the next generation through revised history curricula in schools. In such disparate places as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Germany, Guatemala, Japan, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda, the reteaching of history has been expected to lay the foundation for social reconstruction, a better future, and a lasting peace (Cole and Barsalou 2006; Hodgkin 2006; Cole 2007a, 2007b). In response to the educational challenges countries face after violent conflict, we explored the links between larger political processes and decisions about teaching history. We focus on secondary schools in Rwanda, where we have been working on educational issues since 2001, and ask the questions: How can material for a history curriculum be developed to avoid propaganda? What tensions surface when teachers negotiate an increasingly repressive

The Complex Reasons for Rwanda’s Engagement in Congo

When war broke out in Eastern Congo in August 1998, many observers noted the similarities between the new rebellion and the war that had toppled the regime of Mobutu Sese Sekou only fourteen months earlier.1 Like the first war, the second began with ethnic Congolese Tutsi taking up arms to defend themselves against scapegoating and attacks by government supporters. Both wars began along the Congolese border with Rwanda, in Uvira, Bukavu, and Goma, and quickly spread along two fronts—up the Congo River and along Congo’s northern border and to the south into the mineral-rich provinces of Katanga and Kasai. In both wars, after initially denying involvement in the fighting, the Rwandan government eventually admitted to participation, justifying its intervention on humanitarian and defensive grounds, and, as before, Uganda threw its support behind the rebellion as well.

Genocide and Socio-Political Change: Massacres in Two Rwandan Villages

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 Juvenal 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.

Church Politics and the Genocide in Rwanda

Christian churches were deeply implicated in the 1994 genocide of ethnic Tutsi in Rwanda. Churches were a major site for massacres, and many Christians participated in the slaughter, including church personnel and lay leaders. Church involvement in the genocide can be explained in part because of the historic link between church and state and the acceptance of ethnic discrimination among church officials. In addition, just as political officials chose genocide as a means of reasserting their authority in the face of challenges from a democracy movement and civil war, struggles over power within Rwandas Christian churches led some church leaders to accept the genocide as a means of eliminating challenges to their own authority within the churches.

Placing genocide in context: research priorities for the Rwandan genocide

Prior to 1994, the country of Rwanda was little known outside the limited circle of African studies scholars. A reference in conversation to Rwanda, a small, landlocked country with few natural resources and no strategic importance, was likely to be met with blank stares. The 1994 genocide, however, has bestowed on Rwanda a new notoriety. The extensive press coverage of the genocide and its brutalities, and especially the television coverage of millions of refugees fleeing across the borders, brought Rwanda to the consciousness of much of the world, making it synonymous with violence and disaster. This notoriety has attracted the attention of numerous journalists and other researchers, but unfortunately, not all of the numerous texts on Rwanda that have appeared since the genocide add substantially to one’s understanding of the country and the terrible tragedy that has taken place there. Few of the texts are based on rigorous empirical research. Many of them rely overwhelmingly on secondary sources, peppered with a smattering of impressionistic accounts and a small number of original interviews. Many of the recent rash of publications simply rehash myths and inaccuracies from earlier accounts of Rwanda that have long been disproved, serving more to obfuscate than to clarify the situation. At the same time, some excellent scholarship is slowly appearing. Despite its international obscurity, Rwanda was long a welcoming place for scholars—easy to navigate because of its small size and good roads, with a temperate climate and a government that placed few restrictions on researchers. As a result, a rich body of scholarship on Rwanda has appeared over the last several decades. Among the numerous publications that have appeared on Rwanda since the genocide, a small number follow in this tradition of fine scholarship, drawing on extensive original research. A series of promising empirical studies are currently being carried out, mostly by PhD students. Yet much remains to be explored. The genocide was a complex and catastrophic event that cannot be explained with simplistic accounts. This article will review literature of interest to those seeking to understand the