Defeat Is the Only Bad News: Rwanda under Musinga, 1896–1931

Foreword

xi F Alison became interested in the history of the central African polity of Rwanda in the summer of 1963 when she volunteered to teach Rwandan refugees living in what was then still called Tanganyika. Perhaps influenced by her paternal grandparents’ origins in the German-speaking part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that became Czechoslovakia and by her maternal grandparents’ heritage in Scotland, she devoted the rest of her scholarly life to understanding the culture, politics, society , and economy of Rwanda, which features rich oral traditions, fierce court struggles, complex social formations, and a largely agro-pastoral economy. The first fruit of that academic quest was her doctoral dissertation, titled “Defeat Is the Only Bad News,” perhaps in recognition of the strongly pragmatic and achievement-oriented strain of Rwandan political culture that had helped protect the kingdom from the worst ravages of the slave trade but also resulted in tensions that manifested themselves in periodic outbreaks of political and social violence. Instead of quickly revising and publishing that text, Alison devoted the next stage of her career to raising and educating our two children in an integrated public school system, supporting and assisting me in my own efforts to understand the history of Henan province in central China, and conducting further research in 1981–82 on the history of Rwanda prior to the reign of Musinga. She also taught courses on African history at the University at Buffalo and other institutions and published a book chapter on a Rwandan rebellion. At the end of the 1980s, as our kids completed high school and entered college imbued with their mother’s quiet passion for justice, and as my own interpretation of Chinese history matured in part under the influence of Alison’s work on Rwanda, she volunteered her services first as a member of the Board of Africa Watch and then as a consultant to the African Division of Human Rights Watch. She drew on her deep comprehension of Rwandan history to lead an international investigation into the severe human rights abuses in northern Rwanda that presaged the genocide that broke out in 1994. In that catastrophe, elements near the top of state power responded to an invasion by an army of earlier refugees by mobilizing a significant portion of the population to target the Tutsi minority within the country along with their friends and protectors. Alison used her intimate familiarity with the history, language , and politics of Rwanda and her consummate skill in advocating policies at the national and international levels, as well as in the scholarly and public domain, to save as many victims of the cataclysm as possible and to bring to justice those who violated international human rights law, on both sides of the conflict. Although Alison and her colleagues at Human Rights Watch were unable, before her sudden and untimely death, to persuade the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to live up to its United Nations mandate to prosecute crimes of war and crimes against humanity as well as crimes of genocide, the struggle goes on to achieve evenhanded justice in one venue or another for all of the victims of the Rwandan genocide. Even while frequently testifying at national and international tribunals as an expert witness, Alison also found time to write Leave None to Tell the Story, a major report based on her research and that of her colleagues. The book has already been translated and published in French and German and is now scheduled to be published in Kinyawanda. This will bring one of the most comprehensive and respected accounts of the genocide to wider attention among the Rwandan people who have the largest stake, after all, in the proper interpretation of those historical events. That book, along with this one, will stand as two of the most important memorials to Alison’s twin legacies of loving life and seeking justice. It is with great humility as well as pride that I have responded to David Newbury’s kind invitation to write this brief foreword. On behalf of our whole family, I want to thank David for his generous commitment of time and energy to lightly editing the manuscript so as to take account of more recent scholarship while remaining true to Alison’s original purpose and achievement. I am also grateful to Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf for organizing the conference at which David Newbury and Filip Reyntjens, among others, appraised Alison’s scholarship . I hope that these scholars and others will...