Defeat Is the Only Bad News
Rwanda under Musinga, 1896–1931
Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges
Foreword by Roger V. Des Forges
Edited by David Newbury
Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture
Thomas Spear, David Henige, and Michael Schatzberg, Series Editor
“A brilliant, lively, and daring interpretation of Musinga’s governance of Rwanda under foreign control. Documenting the colonial situation that gave rise to a precarious future, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to
understand the tragedy of Rwanda’s recent history.”
—Jan Vansina, author of Oral Tradition as History and Antecedents to Modern Rwanda
A Rwandan proverb says “Defeat is the only bad news.” For
Rwandans living under colonial rule, winning called not only for armed confrontation, but also for a battle of wits—and not only with foreigners, but also with each other. In Defeat Is the Only Bad News, Alison Des Forges recounts the ambitions, strategies, and intrigues of an African royal court under Yuhi Musinga, the Rwandan ruler from 1896 to 1931. These were turbulent years for Rwanda, when first
Germany and then Belgium pursued an aggressive plan of colonization there. At the time of the Europeans’ arrival, Rwanda was also engaged in a succession dispute after the death of one of its most famous kings. Against this backdrop, the Rwandan court became the stage for a drama of Shakespearean proportions, filled with deceit, shrewd
calculation, ruthless betrayal, and sometimes murder.
Historians who study European expansion typically focus on
interactions between colonizers and colonized; they rarely attend to
relations among the different factions inhabiting occupied lands. Des Forges, drawing on oral histories and extensive archival research,
reveals how divisions among different groups in Rwanda shaped their responses to colonial governments, missionaries, and traders. Rwandans, she shows, used European resources to extend their power, even as they sought to preserve the autonomy of the royal court. Europeans, for their part, seized on internal divisions to advance their own goals. Des Forges’s vividly narrated history, meticulously edited and introduced by David Newbury, provides a deep context for understanding the Rwandan civil war a century later.
“The richness of the tale, and the divisions that enliven the narrative, are evidence of Des Forges’s skills as a narrator. In the end, this Shakespearean drama (complete with deceit and murder) is made all the more tragic because of the implications of these events on Rwanda’s recent history are made painfully clear. This is a fantastic work and the loss of such a skilled historian and author Alison Des Forges just compounds the tragedy for this reader even further.”—Kevin Dunn, The International Journal of African Historical Studies Volume 44, Number 2 (2011)
 Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges (1942–2009) was a Yale-trained historian, a leading
activist with Human Rights Watch, and the author of Leave None to Tell the Story.
David Newbury is the Gwendolen Carter Professor of African Studies at Smith College and author of Kings and Clans: A Social
History of the Lake Kivu Rift Valley.
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)
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April 2011
LC: 2010038905 DT
304 pp. 6 x 9
4 illus., 7 maps
"This carefully researched, highly readable, and detailed exploration of a critical period in Rwanda’s history stands as a major contribution to our understanding of court politics
before and after the advent of colonial rule. There is nothing in print in French or in
English comparable to this painstaking
investigation.”
—René Lemarchand, University of Florida
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