A Hill among a Thousand: Transformations and Ruptures in Rural Rwanda

by Danielle de Lame, Helen Arnold (Translation)

Sometimes called “the land of a thousand hills,” Rwanda has witnessed upheavals of massive proportions. Looking at the people of one hill community, Danielle de Lame shows how they coped with unprecedented change during the twilight years of Rwanda’s Second Republic. In an insightful, meticulously researched study focusing on the late 1980s and early 1990s, de Lame situates this rural community, located at the heart of the Kibuye prefecture, within the larger context of Rwandan history and society. In this country without villages, it is the networks of kinship, administration, and commerce that create complex patterns of solidarity and dependency. De Lame reveals these patterns in all their intricacy, and her treatment of the region and its rhythms speaks at the same time to the economics of production, the inequalities of power, and the dynamics of social transformation. The ultimate goal of her work is to restore the individuality of the people she studies, “making them neither executioners nor victims but men and women fashioning their own destiny, day after day.”

Copublished with the Royal Museum for Central Africa
Wisconsin edition not for sale in Europe.

560 pages, Hardcover

First published August 11, 2005