ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the 'anchoring' cataclysm with which most readers will already be somewhat familiar: the Rwandan genocide. The genocide that consumed the tiny Central African country of Rwanda from April to July 1994 was, in some ways, without precedent. Even when they took it seriously they came up against an extremely complicated history, and they doubted that readers needed to know about it. This meshed neatly with stereotypes of African 'tribal conflict' depicting the killings as reciprocal excesses between atavistic and primitive communities. The authors have seen that in demographic composition, colonial administration, ethnocratic 'capture' of the postcolonial state, and diverse and intertwining eruptions of genocide and mass violence, the countries destinies are difficult to understand independently of each other. When the African Union voted to deploy 5,000 peacekeepers in the country, in late 2015, Nkurunziza declared his government opposed, and the deployment was cancelled.
