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Foreword
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FOREWORD B of Central Africa, with their seemingly endless equatorial forests, and the open landscapes on the seemingly endless undulating plateaus of East Africa, there lies a dramatic seam, a huge valley filled with a few big lakes, flanked by high mountain chains and marked by a few spectacular volcanoes . The history and cultures of the dense populations that lie athwart this seam and provide the junction between two such different portions of Africa have fascinated and preoccupied David Newbury for almost forty years now, especially those that lie on either side of Lake Kivu. The lake is bordered on its east side by modern Rwanda and on the west by the two Kivu provinces of modern Congo. Unfortunately, anyone with even the most superficial interest in Africa knows that the lands around Lake Kivu have been the cockpit of violence in the middle of Africa since , when the genocide in Rwanda in began, followed by the continuing devastation in Kivu that began two years later. However, this situation did not arise overnight. Rather, it was the outcome of several centuries of historical developments, and anyone who wants to understand the present situation in this region would do well to read this book, as it is the only overall introduction to the history of that region. It was Rwanda that first attracted the Newburys to this region in the s, Catharine as a political scientist and David as a historian, mainly because it had just become painfully evident during the country’s turbulent march to independence in that the relatively large and influential sociological and historical literature concerning the country was based on flawed colonial premises.₁ Yet in colonial times, that same historiography and the conclusions of social anthropologists concerning Rwanda had been held up as the acme of scholarship—as models to be followed anywhere else in the whole region. But before independence , very few scholarly studies had been carried out in the Kivu province, and given the strength of the Rwanda model, many were practically worthless. This was the context that David Newbury found as he started a quest he has pursued ever since, as reflected in this book. His aim was (and still is) not merely to uncover and understand the empirical evidence about what happened over several past centuries, but to apply a rigorous analytic approach to this evidence in order to lay the groundwork for a trustworthy history that is solidly grounded in sociological reality and yields a sophisticated history of everyone’s past, not just that of political leaders. It is the equal of the most sophisticated studies elsewhere M xi M in African history, not only because it is always informed by the existing social science theories but even more because history rests on fundamental concepts that have been carefully scrutinized and probed rather than merely assumed.Thus in his writings, for example, we will not find any thoughtless phrases about “atavistic tribal (ethnic) hatreds” still so beloved by passing journalists. Instead one finds carefully worked out analyses of the construction and the dynamics of social identities. From his ceaseless grappling with the thorny issues so crucial to interpreting the social history of these regions, he has acquired the experience and the skills that have made him one of the best-known and most influential scholars on theory in African history generally. Thus, for example, his article “The Clans of Rwanda” (chapter ) was a bombshell when it appeared in because it proved in an utterly convincing way that even such apparently perennial kinship groupings as clans were anything but static institutions.They were always changing and always reacting to larger political contexts. The book now before you bundles a set of essays that trace Newbury’s intellectual journey from the early days battling against colonial stereotypes to his recent vision of the overall outlines of the historical dynamics in the whole Kivu Rift area during the last few centuries. The chapters deal with a wide array of themes, ranging from surveys of the historical literature, to trade as a link and conduit between cultures, to parallel oral sources, to the politics of war, to the limitations of colonial power, to the mutations of kinship groups, to identities at court and the creation of a despised “other,” to sacral kingship as cultural epitome , to the management of political memory and then to a conclusion that weaves all these themes and more together into a single tapestry showing us a...
