finished
A History of Rwanda
principal investigator / project leader
historian, political scientist, lecturer in German, specializies in issues of European integration, totalitarian regimes and transitional justice
Full bio project value: PLN 223,891
funding source: National Science Center
discipline: history
location: Warsaw
duration: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021
Most people have heard about the Rwanda genocide. However, Rwanda’s history as a country goes back to the 19th century. Prior to Belgian colonisation, the current territory of Rwanda had been beyond the reach of European colonialists and had maintained a strong autonomy.
RESEARCH PROJECT
A History of Rwanda
Research Unit
Grant Amount
223 891 PLN
Funding Source
Duration of Research Project: 2016-2019
Most people have heard about the Rwanda genocide. However, Rwanda’s history as a country goes back to the 19th century. Prior to Belgian colonisation, the current territory of Rwanda had been beyond the reach of European colonialists and had maintained a strong autonomy.
Surprisingly, a comprehensive history of Rwanda has not been written until now, partly due to the fact that many historical documents and sources are scattered around the world, for example in Belgium, Germany, Tanzania, Italy and the United States. The project led by Professor Klaus Bachmann remedies this situation by bringing the first comprehensive history of Rwanda, written in English, to readers around the world.
Research objectives
As the result of the History of Rwanda research project, the first comprehensive English-language history of Rwanda will be elaborated, which will be used as the main reference for other researchers, who so far had to refer to either descriptive monographs, which were based on secondary literature, or to archive-based works, which were dedicated to specific events or periods of the Rwandan past.
At the same time, this will be the first work, which contextualized the Rwandan genocide against the background of the country's whole history and which uses the legacy of Jan Czekanowski, a famous Polish ethnologist, who traveled Central Africa before World War I, and whose research results were published in German, Polish, English, but were never used for the elaboration of a history of Rwanda.