Situating Alison Des Forges: Historiography, Memory, and the Colonial Archive

Before turning to the substantive chapters of Defeat Is the Only Bad News, it is important to foreground the preliminary sections of the text — the Editor’s Preface, the Author’s Preface, the Editor’s Note, and the Editor’s Introduction. These paratextual interventions situate Alison Des Forges’ study within the contested historiography of Rwanda and trace the intellectual and political trajectory of an author whose work spanned scholarship and human rights advocacy. They also illuminate the conditions under which this work was published posthumously, revealing the editorial decisions and historical silences that accompany the transformation of a dissertation into a book. In doing so, these sections underscore how historical knowledge is produced within specific political and intellectual contexts, shaped by the constraints of the colonial archive and the demands of memory, and informed by the commitments of those who, like Des Forges, sought to center African agency in narrating colonial and postcolonial experience.

Editor’s Preface

— By David Newbury.

In the Editor’s Preface, David Newbury frames Defeat Is the Only Bad News within two intertwined contexts: the intellectual legacy of Alison Des Forges and the circumstances of its posthumous publication. He reminds the reader that the text, originally submitted as a Yale doctoral dissertation in the 1970s, was already recognized as a groundbreaking intervention into Rwandan political history under King Yuhi Musinga. Yet Des Forges chose not to publish it as a monograph in her lifetime, redirecting her energies toward human rights advocacy and her later investigations of the 1994 genocide — itself a historical rupture that demanded urgent intellectual and moral engagement.

For Newbury, the decision to publish the dissertation posthumously serves both as an act of recognition and as an intervention in its own right: recognition of the depth and originality of Des Forges’ scholarship, and an intervention to make that scholarship available to a wider public of scholars, students, and readers of African history. He underscores the enduring significance of the study, not only for its detailed reconstruction of Rwandan society under colonial rule but also for its sensitivity to how Rwandan actors negotiated power, legitimacy, and survival amid colonial disruption.

In clarifying his editorial approach, Newbury situates himself as a custodian rather than a co-author. His stated objective was to preserve the integrity of Des Forges’ voice and analytical vision, intervening only to correct typographical errors, update citations where appropriate, and adjust formatting to contemporary standards. The result, he insists, remains unmistakably Des Forges’ own work — in both substance and style — embodying her methodological rigor, her attentiveness to African agency, and her commitment to centering Rwandan perspectives within their own history.

Author’s Preface

—  Written by Des Forges herself in the 1970s.

In the Author’s Preface, written in the 1970s as part of her original dissertation, Alison Des Forges articulates both the intellectual and the personal impulses that informed her study of Rwanda under colonial rule. She opens by acknowledging the Rwandans whose memories and testimonies animated her fieldwork, recognizing that it is through their oral histories that the political and social complexities of Yuhi Musinga’s reign could be reconstructed. For Des Forges, these informants were not simply sources but collaborators, whose knowledge allowed her to challenge the silences and distortions of the colonial archive.

The Preface also outlines the central problematic of her study: how Rwandan actors — and King Musinga in particular — navigated the structures of colonial power, exercising agency rather than succumbing passively to European domination. Against narratives that cast the monarchy as a pliant instrument of indirect rule, she foregrounds the strategic adaptations, negotiations, and resistances that shaped Rwandan responses to German and Belgian colonial administrations as well as to the encroachment of Catholic missionaries.

For Des Forges, the period from 1896 to 1931 represents a pivotal moment of transition in Rwandan history, defined not solely by colonial imposition but by the interplay of external pressures and internal political dynamics. Her analysis thus displaces the notion of colonialism as a one-sided project of domination, instead presenting it as a contested encounter in which Rwandan elites and institutions played an active role in shaping the trajectory of their society under conditions of profound change.

Editor’s Note

The Editor’s Note functions as a succinct yet revealing commentary on the editorial philosophy that shaped the publication of Alison Des Forges’ dissertation. Here, David Newbury situates his role not as co-author but as mediator, committed to preserving the intellectual and analytical integrity of Des Forges’ original text while making it legible and accessible to a contemporary and broader readership. His interventions are presented as pragmatic and restrained, guided by a respect for the author’s voice and argument.

Newbury details the linguistic and orthographic decisions that informed the preparation of the text. He notes the standardization of Rwandan names and terms, as well as the careful application of diacritics to more faithfully reflect Kinyarwanda phonology. These decisions, while seemingly technical, underscore the tension between the demands of scholarly accuracy and the realities of publishing for an Anglophone audience. Similarly, his discussion of translation choices highlights the challenge of rendering Rwandan concepts into English in a way that retains their cultural specificity without sacrificing readability — an inevitable act of negotiation between languages and epistemologies.

Newbury further acknowledges updates to footnotes and citations, explaining that these were adjusted to align with current citation standards and supplemented with explanatory notes where necessary to orient readers unfamiliar with the historical or cultural context. Throughout, he insists that these interventions were kept deliberately minimal and transparent, aimed at clarifying rather than reshaping the text. The Editor’s Note, then, invites readers to recognize that even the act of preserving a historical work entails editorial choices — choices that reflect both a commitment to fidelity and an awareness of the demands imposed by a changing intellectual and institutional context.

Editor’s Introduction

In the Editor’s Introduction, David Newbury locates Alison Des Forges’ work within the broader historiography of Rwanda and the study of African colonialism. He frames her intervention as a critique of prevailing narratives that have too often portrayed the colonial encounter as a unidirectional imposition of European authority. Instead, he highlights how her analysis foregrounds the colonial encounter as a negotiated and contested process, one in which African agency was not extinguished but reconfigured. By centering the reign of King Yuhi Musinga as her focal point, Des Forges is able to illuminate both the continuities of indigenous political institutions and the ways these were transformed under the pressure of colonial rule.

For Newbury, the period of Musinga’s reign (1896–1931) is particularly instructive, marking a pivotal juncture when colonial power consolidated itself while remaining deeply entangled in internal Rwandan dynamics. This was a moment when Rwandan elites and institutions adapted to, resisted, and at times instrumentalized colonial and missionary interventions to pursue their own political agendas. The monarchy, he notes, emerges not as a passive victim of indirect rule but as a contested institution, resilient in some respects, fractured in others — its capacity to mediate between tradition and colonial modernity both tested and transformed.

Central to Newbury’s framing is the argument that colonial indirect rule in Rwanda was not imposed upon a static political order but operated through pre-existing hierarchies that were themselves dynamic and contested. These hierarchies were reshaped from within by Rwandan actors who seized upon the opportunities and navigated the constraints of colonial rule in ways that unsettled both European expectations and traditional power relations. This dialectic between European strategies and African responses constitutes one of the key insights of Des Forges’ analysis, revealing the colonial project as simultaneously coercive and dependent on the very agency it sought to contain.

Newbury also outlines the major thematic threads that run through the book: the transformation of kingship under colonial pressure; the ascendancy of the Catholic Church and its role in undermining royal authority; the hardening and politicization of ethnic categories under colonial administration; and the imposition of coercive reforms that restructured the social and political fabric of Rwandan society. By foregrounding these themes, Newbury frames Des Forges’ study not simply as the history of a monarch, but as a critical examination of the interplay between colonial power and African agency — an interplay that would shape Rwanda’s trajectory deep into the 20th century.