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When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, by Mahmood Mamdani. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 364 pp. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-691-05821-0. $16.95 paper. ISBN: 0-691-10280-5.
Readers in the social sciences will want to take seriously this work by Mamdani, a Ugandan political scientist with broad African academic experience, currently serving as director of Columbia University's Institute of African Studies. Mamdani, like each successive author on the Rwandan genocide, benefits from the insights of others, as he offers new perspectives that build on these received ones.
Mamdani's opening focus is on the deeply troubling question that has caught the attention of other scholars: How could tens of thousands of ordinary, previously law-abiding Rwandans have been persuaded to kill their fellow countrymen? His main objective in this is to "make the popular agency in the Rwandan genocide thinkable" (p. 8). The author's understanding of this popular agency is developed through his general knowledge of the Great Lakes region of Africa and its history, as well as numerous research trips to Rwanda in the immediate postwar period, where he conducted extensive interviews with the major players of the conflict. Mamdani's analysis raises questions similar to those posed in his 1996, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and...