Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Ottawa, Canada

In this book the horrible Rwandan genocide is interpreted from an anthropologist's perspective. That's the massacres and everything associated with this hellish conflict is seen from culture tools. But the author, debunking many a Western media reports of African being the only place on earth where all things dark comes from, is quick to point that it is not only Rwanda or for that matter Africa which has seen such despicable developments. Other parts of the world, in fact all the five continents, have experienced a genocide or something close to that before. From Pol Pot's Cambodia to Hitler's Nazi holocaust to Stalin's Kulak to the Turk's Amenian to the Japanese's Manchuria to the Indonesian 'communist' purge to the Indian and Pakistan partitioning.

The author begins by taking a deep look at the political and historical developments of Rwanda, the smallest country in Africa south of the Sahara where much of the country is covered with lakes, swamps, or mountains that are too steep to farm, which he later ties beautifully to the country's social and cultural forces. He is quick to inform us that since the genocide at least six books have appeared on Rwanda, all concentrating on the historical and political factors. His depart from them: it looks at the socio-cultural forces that informed the genocide. Taylor himself has travelled and lived for some time in Rwanda and saw the initial smouldering of the genocide before he was airlifted to his country, the United States, as it developed into full scale war.

Rwanda is one of the few countries in sub-Sahara Africa that came in contact with the Europeans late. And Arab slave traders, who had been straddling places like West and East Africa, could not conduct raids on Rwandan soil because most of Rwanda's central and eastern parts were well organized under centralized rule by a king, locally called, mwami. It is for this reason that Islam, which gained foot in neighbouring countries like Tanzania and Kenya, could not do so in Rwanda. Only about 10-12% of the pre-genocide population was Muslim. European contact came at about the 1880s via the 'scramble for Africa.'

Taylor discusses the intellectual underpinnings of the Rwandan extremist ideologies, which informed the genocide, wrapped around the 'Hamitic hypothesis.' The hypothesis is of European making which provided the extremists, whether Hutu or Tutsi, with a "set of prefabricated notions of rights to the land and as template for ethnic stereotypes." The Rwandans internalized this Hamitic idea via the teaching by the Europeans about how to hate, "becoming the authors of their own repetitive tragedy." And so the Hutu-Tutsi extremists used these stereotypes as needs of the moment. It is terrible how the human being learns negative things so easily and quickly!!! Taylor, therefore, concludes here, logically, that, "In the discourse of the Hutu extremism, Hutu autochthony is opposed to the supposed foreigners of the Tutsi. In the discourse of Tutsi extremism, Tutsi intellectual superiority is opposed to Hutu intellectual inferiority."

It is, therefore, wrong, the author rightly tells us, to blame solely the European colonialists for the Hamitic hypothesis used brutally by both the Hutu and the Tutsi. It is from this point of fact that Taylor moves to the genocide, which followed culturally specific pattern, or paradigms, using symbolic analysis to explain the violent genocide. The understanding of the Rwandan genocide through its cultural symbolic analysis is seen through the country's cultural notions of body, of being and personhood, of good and evil, and notions about orderly and disorderly social life. Taylor employs many cultural theories to explain ethno-nationalist violence, and to understand what these cultural dispositions were, and are, what Rwandan habit was, and is from the viewpoint of Rwandan social actor. And from here attempts to understand the cultural hieroglyphics of torture and violence.

Though the Rwandan genocide manifests continuity with the past thought and action, the author says it has some external influences, which was mindlessly and mechanistically replicated from one generation to another. From Earlier 19th century sacred kingship to now Rwandans systematically improvised, innovated and transformed their thinking and actions to reproduce earlier structures. Taylor says this revealed in the iconography of Hutu extremist literature, which images Taylor discusses in detail in this beautifully written book.

In line with issues of structure, agency and the body, Taylor's primary concerns are sex and violence, or gender and the genocide. He says the Rwandan genocide was basically about reconfiguring gender. Prior to the genocide, Rwandan women had achieved remarkable success compared to other African states. The women did this by confronting head-on patriarchy of the post-colonial Rwandan society. Some men and top government officials of the President Habyarimana circles find this success threatening. One such woman victim was the former Vice President Agathe Uwiringiyimana, a southern Hutu member of the party called Mouvement Democratique Republique (MDR), who died from such gender-genocide fracture. In addition to Agathe, the months following the genocide saw Hutu extremists targetting specifically Tutsi women.

In chapter 3 entitled "The Cosmology of Terror", Taylor rejects certain cultural concepts in relation to norms, beliefs, and attitudes. We see graphically such cosmology of terror in reproduced cartoons, which appeared in Rwandan newspapers of either side of the Hutu-Tutsi divide. Sample: (1) On page 127 there a cartoon from Kangura (February 1994, no. 56, cover) depicting two men, one in traditional Rwandan attire and the other in French suit, with large crowd standing behind them. The ensuing dialogue goes like this:

"The RPF: Bravo Twagira!

Twangiramungu: And you said I'd never get you! Who will you lead without your arms?

Agathe Uwilingiyimana: It's not me who's cut your arms. It's the Arusha accords."

Sample (2): On page 155 a cartoon from Kamarampaka (7 April 1993, no.15, p.14) captioned "Blood and sex. The horrors of war attributed to the RPF", says the Inkotanyi (FPR) at work in Rhengeri. The carton depicts a FPR militiaman having sex with a CDR woman with another FPR officer holding the woman's hands from behind her. Behind them is MRND man stripped naked and tied to a tree with his penis bulging out of his underwear. Around all this is a person buried half way in the ground.

Aside from the gender metaphors employed by the killers, Taylor informs us about others in the Rwandan cultural setting. One such metaphor is Rwandan state seen as a garden, as Hutu extremists enjoined their followers to "cut down the 'weeds,' remove the 'tall trees' (adults) and the 'shoots' (children) also.

Christopher Taylor concludes his work by offering some hypothesis to transcend the violence in Rwanda and Burundi, and he wraps this around multifaceted understanding via historical analysis, gender analysis, and symbolic analysis.