The Land beyond the Mists: Essays on Identity and Authority in Precolonial Congo and Rwanda (review)

I am usually no fan of collected essays, even when they purport to dredge up important work that appeared decades ago in defunct and hard-to-find outlets, unless of course those essays are translated from another language and thus are made available to a wider and different set of scholars. Yet Newbury's essays should be taken seriously and merit being reprinted in a single collection. Not only do they 'peer through the mists' by providing several entry points into an area whose history has been manipulated as much as, if not more than, its actual political geography, but they also provide sophisticated approaches to understanding the recent troubled trajectory of the Kivu Rift Valley.

Newbury contextualizes the Kivu Rift Valley as a frontier, a meeting place in perpetual flux, flanked in the middle by a ubiquitous and nonetheless porous lacustrine ecosystem - a place where the mobility of people and ideas belied the rigid boundaries that colonization came to enforce not just on the land but also on its history and people. One of the most noticeable threads that run through the collection is Newbury's relentless determination and intellectual adeptness at deconstructing these damaging boundaries and complicating historical narratives that are often replete with dichotomies (Hutu vs Tutsi, et cetera).

The collection comprises twelve essays that spanned three decades (1974-2001) of a passionate intellectual journey that has threaded and meandered through the intricate maze of the Rift Valley's history. It is organized in four different parts, not always following a fixed chronological order. The first section deals with historiographical issues and rests on two chapters: one disputes the fallacies of top-down colonial historiography for which history could only be a reflection of the will of royal courts; the other reviews the historiographical progress made during the first two decades of independence. Indeed, progress there was. In stark contrast to traditional colonial historiography perpetuated by European missionaries, who saw themselves as advancing the colonial mission rather than local knowledge, Congolese and Rwandan researchers made use of several sources, including oral sources, and ended up conferring agency on non-state actors, especially women.

The second part, 'The LakeKivu Arena', includes four essays that focus on Lake Kivu's Ijwi Island. The second largest inland island in Africa, an area long neglected by colonial and nationalist historiographies, Ijwi stood at the nexus of a web of commercial exchanges, social mobility, political tensions and dynastic conflicts that transformed the area up to the nineteenth century. In Part Three, 'The Rwandan Arena', Newbury changes focus and is more preoccupied with the Rwandan kingship, an institution that shaped Rwandan history, and its transformation into a divine kingship during colonization. The section brings together essays that explore the Rwandan royal court, from the construction of social identities through the use of a complex and fluid clan system to the esoteric rituals of kingship legitimation. In fact, Newbury's approach here largely borrows from anthropological theories that view the inner circle of power as a reflection of society at large, that is as emanating from the people, rather than as a self-producing and self-contained cell. The four chapters that make up this section are essential in that they illuminate contemporary claims and constructions that have recently exposed the ethnic fault lines of Rwandan society. WhileNewbury never discusses the 1994 genocide at length, one cannot read these chapters without connecting them to the recent historical and anthropological scholarship of the Rwandan genocide, including works by Prunier, Vidal, De Lame, Hintjens and Newbury himself. The last section of the collection, 'Perceiving History Through the Mists' is a single chapter, the most chronologically recent of the collection, that intervenes on multiple fronts - ecology, settlement, ethnicity, kingship, clientship (ubuhake) and others - through solid and compelling historical and linguistic evidence.

Even though in many respects this collection of essays boasts...