Title: Rwanda Conflict ‘Its roots and regional implications’

Author: Dixon Kamukama

Review by: Angel Musinguzi

For any reader in our contemporary times seeking knowledge on the issues surrounding the long running conflicts in Rwanda, Rwanda Conflict, offers one of the best researched reads on library shelves.

In just 140 pages, the author, Dixon Kamukama, chronicles, in very simple English, the debate on the roots of conflict in Rwanda, the pre-colonial setting, the Nyiginya state machine, colonial relations in Rwanda, seeds of a revolution, the revolution, arrival and life in Uganda, the military invasion and the consequential peace initiative.

In all these sub-section, Rwanda Conflict shows why conflict was inevitable in Rwanda. And to be more specific, in all generations, the socio-economic pressures played to generate feuds here and there. Particularly, the book dwells majorily on how the pastoralist Batutsi, who treasured the cow, often conflicted with their Bahutu and Batwa counterparts, who were traditionally more inclined towards cultivating and gathering respectively. The conflict in precolonial Rwanda, the author shows, was very organic because as the pastoralists roamed the land for pasture, they actually ended up subjugating the other ethnicities. And because land was a limited resource in Rwanda, that explains why over the time several of them migrated to neighbouring communities like Ankore in Uganda, where they could access vast tracts of grazing land.

The story, however, takes a new twist with the advent of the colonialists – the Belgians. Initially, the colonialist takes sides with the monarchs and more prized pastoralists to achieve political mileage as was the case elsewhere in Africa through the divide and rule model. But as independence simmered, the Belgians shift their allegiance strategically to side with the more populous Bahutu in the name of democracy. The first major seeds of inorganic are sowed around this time and by around 1964, an estimated 150,000, mostly Tutsi, had fled to neighbouring countries. Half of that number was said to have headed to Uganda. And many of them were conscripted in the Ugandan army with time.

When Uganda President Yoweri Museveni launched a war against the Obote II regime in the early eighties, many of his fighters were youngsters from mainly western Uganda, Buganda and Rwanda. With his ascension to power in 1986, it was only natural that many Banyarwanda who had fought alongside him would assume positions in the government and army.

But with growing xenophobic tendencies in Uganda, most of these Rwandans serving in the Uganda army felt it was their birth right to repossess what was naturally theirs in Rwanda. Their struggle picks some momentum in the early 1990s and by July 1994, after stopping the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the RPF takes Kigali and silences the guns.

The last part of Rwanda Conflict, chronicles in detail with dates, how Rwanda evolved between 1991 and 1996.

Fountain Publishers Limited particularly deserves credit for rallying behind one of the best historians in Makerere University don Dixon Kamukama to produce such a moving publication on the most intricate subject on Rwanda.