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Managing Transition Anarchies: Rwanda, Burundi, and South Africa in Comparative Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

René Lemarchand
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Extract

Against the backdrop of Africa's recent transitions to multi-party democracy, two countries stand at opposite ends of a spectrum of success and failure that ranges from the apocalyptic to the nearly miraculous. At one extreme, South Africa, the site of what has been described as ‘one of the most extraordinary political transformations of the twentieth century’, where the people ‘have defied the logic of their past, and broken all the rules of social theory, to forge a powerful spirit of unity from a shattered nation’. At the other end of the scale, Rwanda, a synonym for abyssal violence — a name that will go down in history as the epitome of an African Holocaust. Burundi, though spared the agonies of her neighbour, has not fared much better. There a remarkably successful transition was abruptly brought to a halt by an attempted military take-over, setting off an explosion of ethnic violence on a scale consonant with her reputation as a leading candidate for the title of genocidal state.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 1994 , pp. 581 - 604
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

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2 The multi-ethnic archaic kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi were first colonised by Germany and then entrusted to Belgium as Mandates under the League of Nations and as UN Trust Territories after World War II. They both became independent in 1962, Rwanda as a Hutudominated republic, Burundi as a constitutional monarchy. Although sharing a similar ethnic map – with Tutsi pastoralists said to represent approximately 14 per cent of the total population, Hutu agriculturalists 85 per cent, and Pygmoid Twa one per cent – only in Rwanda was Tutsi overrule highly institutionalised. Burundi society was characterised by greater complexity and fluidity, with power gravitating into the hands of a princely oligarchy (the so-called ganwa) whose identity was separate from that of either Hutu or Tutsi. Which helps explain why Burundi acceded to independence as yet untouched by the revolutionary upheavals during 1959–62 that brought the Hutu of Rwanda to power. For further details, see Lemarchand, René, Rwanda and Burundi (London, 1970).Google Scholar

3 In coldly statistical terms, compared to the loss of an estimated one million lives that has accompained Rwanda's descent into hell via genocide, battle-field casualties, cholera, dysentery, famine, and sheer human exhaustion, Burundi's haemorrhage - 50,000 dead evenly distributed between Hutu and Tutsi - seems almost inconsequential. However, it must not be forgotten that the 1972 bloodbath in Burundi took the lives of an estimated 100,000 Hutu, some say 200,000. See Lemarchand, René, Burundi: ethnocide as discourse and practice (New York and Cambridge, 1994), ch. 5, ‘The 1972 Watershed’.Google Scholar

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19 See, for example, Brown, and van Dyk, Bruno (eds.), Exchanges: South African writing in transition (Pietermaritzburg, 1991),Google Scholar and Petersen, Kirsten Holst and Rutherford, Anna (eds.), On Shifting Sands: new art and literature from South Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 1992).Google Scholar

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35 For further details, see Lemarchand, 1994, op. cit.

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