Daring, knowledgeable, and wise, Mahmood Mamdani places the terrible massacres of 1994 in historical, regional, theoretical, and moral perspective. His analysis of Hutu and Tutsi as historically-grounded and incessantly changing political identities not only clarifies struggles in the 1990s in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and Congo but also helps identify ways of preventing future bloodshed. - -- Charles Tilly, Sociology, Columbia University
The strengths of the book are clear and admirable... his understanding of the Social Revolution and of Rwanda in the 1980s and 1990s commands attention as an important and provocative reinterpretation of the country's recent history. Anyone from now on who writes on identity in Central Africa - and there will be many - will have to wrestle with the case that Mamdani has made. - -- Jeffrey Herbst * FOREIGN AFFAIRS *
The historical context is crucial to any understanding of what happened and why. Few are better qualified to explain the tensions of post-colonial Africa than Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan political scientist with a sharp perspective on the colonially inspired differences between subject races. His Rwandan case-study provides powerful evidence that the Tutsis came to be crushed between colonist and native, in much the same way as the Asians were in Uganda. -- Richard Synge * THE INDEPENDENT *
... his analysis of Rwandese society, in particular the role of the church in the genocide, is fascinating, and explains much about recent genocide trials of priests and nuns. -- Victoria Brittain * THE GUARDIAN *
