I first heard about Rwanda in the 1980s in relation to Dian Fossey’s work with mountain gorillas. The details around this were tragic enough, but obviously what happened in 1994 washed away the events dramatized in Gorillas in the Mist in terms of their scale and magnitude. That period was a time when the idea of “ancient hatreds” leading to internecine conflict was in the air. It was highlighted by the series of wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the Tutsi–Hutu civil wars in Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo. Of the latter the events in 1994 in Rwanda were only the most prominent and well known.
After having read Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa I am relatively conscious of the broader canvas of what occurred in Central and East Africa in the 1990s. Not only was there a conflict between Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda, but a similar dynamic also flared up in Burundi. The tensions are more complex in Congo and Uganda, in large part because there are many ethnic players, and the Hutu role as the antagonists with the Tutsi is divided among many different populations.
In trying to distill the complex ethnography of this region in setting the structural parameters of the landscape into which the violence of the late 20th century emerged many pundits have pointed to the role of the Belgian colonial authorities in crystallizing, sharpening, and perhaps even originating the distinction between Tutsis and Hutus.
