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Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the Great Lakes region of Africa over the past four years. Most of them were innocent civilians massacred by armies or militias or decimated by disease or starvation as they fled from danger. These horrors can be traced to intense struggles over power carried out by leaders-struggles involving the politicization of ethnicity and a perverse dynamic of violence and fear. The conflicts have been based in part on intellectual foundations, on mental maps of history.
It is these competing visions of the past-the politics of history-that I explore here. Such inquiry is of more than academic interest in contemporary Rwanda. The debate about the nature of the country's history is central to the process of political reconstruction; the postgenocide government in Kigali has not only to deal with the trauma of a whole people and society, but it also has to consider how its policies will be interpreted within the context of various conceptions of Rwanda's past.
A key element in politicizing ethnic cleavages in the recent history of Rwanda has been the development and propagation of a corporate view of ethnicity.1 The generalization of blame was dramatically evident in the genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, when hardliners in the Hutudominated government labeled all Tutsi in the country as enemies of the state. The genocide was calculated to exterminate them; the hateful vitriol used against the Tutsi in the press and on radio broadcasts illustrated this thought process.2 A corporate perception of ethnicity was also evident in the recent massacres of Hutu refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) in 1996 and 1997. During and after the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, hundreds of thousands of people (mostly Hutu) fled to neighboring countries-primarily Tanzania and Zaire3-but some also fled to Burundi and Uganda. For the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda that assumed power in July 1994 after the genocide, the refugee camps in Zaire came to be a particularly irritating problem. Fearing reprisals, most of the refugees refused to return home; meanwhile these camps were being used as bases for guerrilla attacks from Zaire against western Rwanda. Among the refugees in the crowded camps along Zaire's eastern border with Rwanda and Burundi were...