Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
The Great Lakes of Africa : Two Thousand Years of History, Paperback / softback Book

The Great Lakes of Africa : Two Thousand Years of History Paperback / softback

Part of the The Great Lakes of Africa series

Paperback / softback

Only a few left - usually despatched within 24 hours

Description

The first English-language publication of a major history of the Great Lakes region of Africa. Though the genocide of 1994 catapulted Rwanda onto the international stage, English-language historical accounts of the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa-which encompasses Burundi, eastern Congo, Rwanda, western Tanzania, and Uganda-are scarce.

Drawing on colonial archives, oral tradition, archeological discoveries, anthropologic and linguistic studies, and his thirty years of scholarship, Jean-Pierre Chretien offers a major synthesis of the history of the region, one still plagued by extremely violent wars.

This translation brings the work of a leading French historian to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

Chretien retraces the human settlement and the formation of kingdoms around the sources of the Nile, which were "discovered" by European explorers around 1860.

He describes these kingdoms' complex social and political organization and analyzes how German, British, and Belgian colonizers not only transformed and exploited the existing power structures, but also projected their own racial categories onto them.

Finally, he shows how the independent states of the postcolonial era, in particular Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda, have been trapped by their colonial and precolonial legacies, especially by the racial rewriting of the latter by the former.

Today, argues Chretien, the Great Lakes of Africa is a crucial region for historical research-not only because its history is fascinating but also because the tragedies of its present are very much a function of the political manipulations of its past.

Information

Save 18%

£25.00

£20.49

Only a few left - usually despatched within 24 hours
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information