Christopher Davey’s The Banyamulenge Soldier contributes recent interview-based research on identity, narrative analysis and violence in the Great Lakes region. His book joins existing scholarship on the ways in which Banyamulenge, a Congolese Tutsi minority community, have experienced historical and ongoing exclusion and violence and have been mobilised as combatants in Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. The book also contributes more broadly to studies that draw from the social construction of identity, social interactionist and narrative conflict theories as explanatory models for violence.
The Banyamulenge are a border community – settled for generations in eastern Congo with physiological features and heritage related to Rwandan Tutsi – who are significant to studies of conflicts in the Great Lakes because targeted violence and denial of full Congolese citizenship have historically pushed Banyamulenge bagabo (men) to join armed groups affiliated with the current governing regime in Rwanda. It is Davey’s contention that Banyamulenge soldiers offer important insights into both the motivations for and perpetuation of the violence that has frequently crossed borders in the Great Lakes region. Davey’s empirical contributions draw from interviews with former recruits, officers and combatants in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) military activities from the Banyamulenge community – some living in Eastern Congo but most of whom are living abroad in exile. Interviews are supplemented by narrative non-fiction and published memoirs by former RPF, Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo, and Banyamulenge officers. What we learn from these interviews and literary sources is the ways in which victim-centred narratives, ideological indoctrination and harrowing experiences of violence have shaped armed mobilisation in the region, ‘giving some the right to hate, without end’ (162).
Indeed, one of Davey’s primary interventions is to situate the 1994 Rwandan genocide as an exceptional episode in a regional ‘continuum of violence’ that exemplifies what his interlocutors call an intambara itagira iherezo (or war without end in Kinyarwanda; 8–9). In doing so, he admirably takes on a veritable third rail in Great Lakes region scholarship, methodically parsing debates on the existence of a ‘double genocide’ in Rwanda and the Congo in Chapter 1. Davey ultimately dismisses double genocide theories as simplistic and polarising, claiming that the proponents of related views tend to ‘zero-sum politics and conspiracy theories’ (29) and miss two critical aspects: the ‘multidirectional’ nature of violence (4–5) in the region that draws from identity-based rationales (31). His aim is not to resort to binary or static ethnic identity ascriptions but rather to understand violence through dynamic social relations of belonging and exclusion. Chapter 2 establishes a history of multidirectional violence through the organisation of armed groups in the region and, together with Chapters 3 and 4, fleshes that history out with the experiences of Banyamulenge soldiers’ recruitment, training, combat, return to Congo and attacks on refugee camps. Chapters 5 and 6 pick back up on the continuum of violence with a focus on the Second Congo War (1998–2003) and more recent escalations of violence in South Kivu (2017–2021). The Conclusion discusses the promises and challenges of achieving justice and peace when groups see themselves as the victims of genocide and commit acts of violence in retribution as a result.
The Banyamulenge Soldier cogently demonstrates the significance of societal exclusion and collective memory to group identity and, in extreme cases, violence. Davey weaves the perspectives of some 44 interlocutors into a sprawling sociological and historical account of regional violence with the aim of understanding ‘the meanings, roles, and uses of violence in the name of protecting Tutsi populations across the Great Lakes’ (29). The dangers of a single narrative, and the role of ideological and exclusionary stories in violent mobilisation, are compelling reasons to do so. There is ample exemplification of the ‘multidirectional’ nature of regional violence in the book. However, readers will need to look elsewhere – in Michael Rothberg’s theory and method of ‘multidirectional memory’ and Davey’s earlier publications – for definitions of ‘multidirectional violence’, its implied temporal, social and geographical dimensions, and applications of the concept more specifically to genocide.
Consistently explored in the chapters is the concept of ‘genocide narrative identity’: an analytic for why people fight, drawn in part from social psychology theories that underscore that groups’ narratives about the past and themselves actively shape conflicts. But despite the rich stories told by Davey’s interlocutors, less attention is paid to their backgrounds to help distinguish and situate them as individuals. They are understood primarily as comprising an important social group, with their stories illustrative of ‘genocide narrative identity’ as a methodological innovation. Analysis would have benefited from more systematic treatment of the key factors that lead from the social construction of identity to violence, including structural and interpersonal aspects of violent subject formation. Considering alternative explanatory theories and challenges to ‘genocide narrative identity’ as the primary motivation for violence would have been welcome as well, including forms of non-conformity and non-participation. While the book offers insights into the complexities of violence, still more remains to unpack in terms of explanatory variables and implications.
Readers of The Banyamulenge Soldier will find a rich trove of narratives to reconstruct rationales for and perceptions of violence in the Great Lakes. The book offers an important counterpoint to histories of the region that focus primarily on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda without expanding to violence that preceded, followed and echoed in neighbouring countries. Davey adds another group of voices to that effort, demonstrating that the effects of violence are not contained to a nation’s borders but are felt in ways both wide and deep.
