The papers that follow were based on presentations to two roundtables on Rwanda organized at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting held in Toronto, on November 6,1994.

At the outset, it is important to note three aspects of those roundtables. First, they were not organized as a comprehensive set of papers; instead, with one or two exceptions, the roundtables were formed of those papers which were submitted independently of each other by individual members of the ASA. I was asked simply to coordinate their presentation and prepare the papers for publication afterward. The result of this was regrettable in one major aspect: there was very little representation of Rwandans on the panels, and therefore also in this collection, although a large number of Rwandans attended the roundtables and participated energetically in the discussions, which together with the paper presentations lasted formally for nearly 6 hours, and informally far into the night.