Gérard Prunier is undoubtedly one of the most astute contemporary analysts of Africa’s Great Lakes region, and his new book, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe, is required reading for anyone trying to put Congo’s current crisis into broader historical perspective.
After the Rwandan genocide, Prunier published The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, a meticulously researched account of the genocide that, like his latest work, provided essential background to aid in understanding the intense and simmering context into which the genocide exploded.
Prunier’s new book picks up where his last one left off, with the aftermath of the horrors of Rwanda and the ripple effect the genocide had on the situation in the Great Lakes:
Apartheid crumbled and the Rwanda genocide took place within the same time frame. Both events shook the world; neither was really understood; and both were later semi-forgotten in the wake of September 11. But African history stubbornly went on, and it is in that now disconnected history that the ‘Congolese’ conflict marked a watershed…