BRINGING HISTORY BACK IN: PAST, PRESENT, AND CONFLICT IN RWANDA AND THE EASTERN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

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Abstract

This article argues that on the borderland between eastern DRC and Rwanda, the past and its representations have been constantly manipulated. The cataclysmic events in both Rwanda and Congo since the 1990s have widened the gap between partial and politicized historical discourse and careful historical analysis. The failure to pay attention to the multiple layers in the production of historical narratives risks reproducing a politicized social present that ‘naturalizes’ differences and antagonisms between different groups by giving them more time-depth. This is a danger both for insiders and outsiders looking in. The answer is to focus on the historical trajectories that shape historical narratives, and to ‘bring history back in’.

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Autochthony and the Crisis of Citizenship: Democratization, Decentralization, and the Politics of Belonging

Peter Geschiere, Stephen Jackson (2006)

Abstract: The recent upsurge of “autochthony” and similar notions of belonging is certainly not special to Africa. All over the world, processes of intensifying globalization seem to go together with fierce struggles over belonging and exclusion of “strangers.” A central question in the contributions to this special issue concerns the apparent “naturalness” of autochthony in highly different settings. How can similar slogans seem so self-evident and hence have such mobilizing force under very different circumstances? Another recurrent theme is the somewhat surprising “nervousness” of discourses on autochthony. They seem to promise a basic security of being rooted in the soil as a primal form of belonging. Yet in practice, belonging turns out to be always relative: there is always the danger of being unmasked as “not really” belonging, or even of being a “fake” autochthon. A comparative perspective on autochthony—as a particular pregnant form of entrenchment—may help to unravel the paradoxes of the preoccupation with belonging in a globalizing world.