ABSTRACT
Few non-Rwandese commentators would take such a pragmatic position regarding Rwanda. Too few would admit that any attempt to describe or explain the Rwandan genocide of 1994 will encounter multiple perspectives, many of which defy synthesis. As a consequence, it may seem more expedient to essentialise and stabilise the conflict as ‘ethnic/primordial’, ‘political’, ‘economic’, ‘post-colonial’ – in short, to impose a simple equation. Consequently, much of the literature takes one of two forms, either realist, transparent descriptions of the events as a whole, stripped of contingency, or those that focus on a particular aspect, such as the role of the United Nations (Melvern 2000), development aid (Uvin 1998) and so on.2 Analytically, such a division of labour is desirable. But such works are in danger of trying to isolate a golden key that will unlock the mystery of this horrific cataclysm. Even if this is not the intention of the authors, the artificial slice may take on a life of its own. Having been plucked from the whole, this may be the facet that is privileged while the whole is discarded. This raises the question of whether, when people have finished taking the pieces apart, they are willing to concede that, once reassembled, the genocide remains ‘a tangled skein of order and disorder’ (Taylor 1999: 29).
