Rwanda: discovering a forgotten past

PhD students Jane Humphris and John Giblin of the UCL Institute of Archaeology describe how their research is helping to dispel divisive colonial myths about Rwanda’s history that led to ethnic conflict in the 1990s. In 1994 the genocide in Rwanda killed over 800,000 people. Although several factors contributed to the hostilities, many of them can be attributed to propaganda circulated during colonial times, aimed at causing divides and antipathies among the people, and thus providing a means of control and exploitation by colonial authorities. Today, our ongoing research hopes to deconstruct that presentation and highlight more positive perspectives concerning Rwanda’s past by developing narratives that focus on interaction and shared histories based on archaeological evidence. This initiative is especially important because... [read full story]