When History Kills

Among those who lived through the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi, there is a widespread belief that the teaching and writing of history directly fueled the ethnic violence that engulfed Rwanda at the end of the twentieth century. In the wake of such a profound moral, intellectual, and social rupture, what would become of the Rwandan historical field and its practitioners? Erin Mosely's groundbreaking new work situates this question within a broader study of how, by whom, and to what ends Rwanda's official historical narratives have been remade since 1994. At its center is the overlooked story of the country's resident academics, whose work has sustained the state's national project to promote unity and reconciliation. Over the past thirty years, these historians have navigated a shifting landscape of pressures and constraints within and beyond Rwanda: a national university culture steeped in regret; archival institutions reoriented toward atrocity documentation at the expense of other priorities and collections; restrictive laws against "divisionism" and "genocide ideology"; and transnational donor-driven initiatives focused increasingly on peace education. Ultimately, Mosely argues that history-making in Rwanda-and in other post-atrocity contexts-should be understood both as a terrain of political contestation and as a space of conviction, resilience, and creativity by individual historians.