When Victims Become Killers

Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda

Mahmood Mamdani

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780691192345
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691193830
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia africana

An incisive look at the causes and consequences of the Rwandan genocide

"When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population." So a political commissar in the Rwanda Patriotic Front reflected after the 1994 massacre of as many as one million Tutsis in Rwanda. Underlying his statement was the realization that, though ordered by a minority of state functionaries, the slaughter was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, including judges, doctors, priests, and friends. Rejecting easy explanations of the Rwandan genocide as a mysterious evil force that was bizarrely unleashed, When Victims Become Killers situates the tragedy in its proper context. Mahmood Mamdani coaxes to the surface the historical, geographical, and political forces that made it possible for so many Hutus to turn so brutally on their neighbors. In so doing, Mamdani usefully broadens understandings of citizenship and political identity in postcolonial Africa and provides a direction for preventing similar future tragedies.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface to the 2020 Edition
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Thinking about Genocide
• 1. Defining the Crisis of Postcolonial Citizenship: Settler and Native as Political Identities
• 2. The Origins of Hutu and Tutsi
• 3. The Racialization of the Hutu/Tutsi Difference under Colonialism
• 4. The “Social Revolution” of 1959
• 5. The Second Republic: Redefining Tutsi from Race to Ethnicity
• 6. The Politics of Indigeneity in Uganda: Background to the RPF Invasion
• 7. The Civil War and the Genocide
• 8. Tutsi Power in Rwanda and the Citizenship Crisis in Eastern Congo
• Conclusion: Political Reform after Genocide
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index