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Rwanda: Consequences of a Genocide
Rwanda: Consequences of a Genocide

Author(s): Mihaela Ciobanu
Subject(s): Recent History (1900 till today), Studies in violence and power, Inter-Ethnic Relations, Identity of Collectives
Published by: Timo Schmitz
Keywords: Rwanda; Hutu; Tutsi; genocide;

Summary/Abstract: One of the darkest chapters in the history of mankind concerns the events that happened in Rwanda in the spring of 1994. To shed light on what happened in those terrible hundred days between Tutsi and Hutu, in which 800,000 people died through machetes, the anthropologist Michela Fusaschi in her ethnographic investigation, starts from the problematization of the term "genocide", showing how the consideration of these events was conditioned already by terminological controversies. She notes that the term in question does not find any correspondence in the local dictionary: the ambiguity of the term is evident (and the neologisms that arose to express this concept show it) so that it led to a real debate. Thus, it was necessary to find an adequate expression in the Kinyarwandan language that translated that of genocide.

  • Issue Year: 4/2020
  • Issue No: 01
  • Page Range: 37-48
  • Page Count: 12
  • Language: English