Teleological approaches to the history of the troubled Lake Kivu region reify violence, making it appear as ingrained in the past and, therefore, as inevitable in the present. In fact – argues Belgian historian Gillian Mathys in this deeply researched and well-crafted book – ‘[e]ven if violence was part of [the] shared histories of people around the lake […] so too were friendship, kinship ties, and commercial linkages’ (p. 5). The history of these connections provides a possible intellectual antidote to present-day conflicts and lies at the heart of Fractured Pasts.

By ‘provincialising’ the Nyiginya kingdom and the hegemonic claims originating from its court, and by casting the spotlight on the smaller-scale societies and polities to the west of the realm, Mathys convincingly demonstrates the untenability of the so-called ‘greater Rwanda thesis’ and the existence of competing political imaginaries and ‘autonomist tendencies’ (p. 69) in the late precolonial era (to which the dense, but rewarding, first chapter of the book is dedicated). Indeed, human mobility – which the author regards as the most salient feature of the nineteenth-century history of the region – was partly the result of attempts to escape state exactions. But political pressures were not the only force at work, and much movement was dictated by ‘trade, marriage ties, friendship ties, etc.’ (p. 52). In this context, the flexibility of social identities – another deep-rooted hallmark of precolonial Kivutian life – was both a cause and a consequence of the ubiquity of regional mobility.

To be sure, as Mathys argues in the second and third chapters of the book, colonialism worked against these linkages by turning open ‘frontiers’ – where relations between space, power and identity were fluid and negotiable – into more rigid territorial and ethnic ‘borders’. Yet, past practices did not just disappear overnight. On the contrary, they endured, shaping social behaviour throughout the colonial period. The theme of continuity runs through the three chapters (4–6) that make up the third part of Fractured Pasts, where Mathys shows how Belgian efforts at policing unsanctioned movements between Rwanda and Congo were often complicated by ‘the social, economic, and cultural ties binding [people] on both sides of the border’ (p. 159). The very ‘Banyarwanda Scheme’ of 1937–1945 (later redubbed as the Mission d’Immigration des Banyarwanda) was not only an assertion of colonial control that resulted in the resettlement of at least 200,000 Kinyarwanda speakers in North Kivu but was also predicated on ‘nineteenth-century configurations of movement and connections’ and on their enabling ‘ways of “belonging” elsewhere’ (p. 172).

The three chapters (7–9) included in the fourth and final part of the book take the story forward to the independence and postcolonial periods, when the consequences of border-making erupted to the surface in disruptive ways. It was at this point that, for the first time in the history of Lake Kivu, connections came to be ‘seen as problems rather than as the assets they had previously been’ (p. 224) and that colonial-inflected ideas about ‘autochthony’ became tied to access to increasingly scarce land resources – a volatile mix compounded by the arrival of Tutsi refugees fleeing the violence of Rwanda’s so-called ‘Social Revolution’ of 1959–1963. As Zairian elites did nothing to rectify the economic imbalances inherited from colonialism, exclusionary understandings of land rights and identity grew progressively stronger and more entrenched. At the local level at least, much of the violence that has continued to plague North and South Kivu even after the official end of the two Congo Wars (1996–1997; 1998–2003) stems precisely from the fact that perceptions of belonging buttressed by (more or less) spurious historical arguments have been turned into key means to secure access to land. As Mathys implies in her conclusion, a broader awareness of the chronological shallowness of such nativist discourses might just be what is needed to stem the tide of violence and the deadly identity politics that fuels it.

Perhaps out of modesty (Fractured Land is, after all, Mathys’s first book), the author refrains from placing the historical experience of the Kivu in a broader comparative context, but it is clear that her story has meaningful implications for other tense African ‘borderlands’. This, in sum, is an important book that will repay careful study.