ABSTRACT
Rwandese themselves legitimately invoke historical narratives to ‘explain’ the cause of the 1994 genocide, but their narratives are not identical. In contrast, among many non-Rwandan commentators there appears to be an assumption that a single, neutral history is attainable and that divergence is a sign of intentional distortion and myth-making (the latter term used pejoratively). Of course, one cannot rule out intentional distortion, but even without this, divergent narratives are inevitable. It has become axiomatic to consider that the past is used selectively to understand the present: that it is a resource and not a progression of neutral facts. At the same time, however, we are aware that history is not just a figment of the historian’s mind (see Peel 1989). There thus remains a substantive difference between the ‘past’ made up of recorded time-and-place specific events and entities – what we may call a chronicle of facts – and the genre of history-writing. There is a difference between the chronicle of facts and the ‘real time’, selective narratives of history (see Lang 1992: 307). ‘History’ is not only concerned with whether (the past) but with how and why. The answers to how and why questions do not inhere in the chronicle itself. Rather, the historian (professional, lay, journalist) is required to integrate disparate entries into the chronicle, to impose an order, to demonstrate where they fit on a line of causality, temporality and logic (see Errington 1979: 239). A narrative is required if a selection of atomised entries extracted from the chronicle is to be integrated and fulfil the canons of cause-and-effect and progressive interconnectedness that are imperative in history-writing as genre. It is by this means that history produces an illusory, but necessary, reality effect. To progress from the chronicle of facts to a meaningful narrative requires interpretation. But in the wake of interpretation comes indeterminacy.
