The MISR Review No.2

This issue marks a step in that long journey. The bulk of the issue draws on chapters from doctoral thesis successfully defended over the past year. Haydee Bangerezako’ essay, Indirect Writing and the Construction of Burundi’s History, analyzes history writing in the era of colonial indirect rule. Because it borrowed its categories and conceptions from the colonial project, Bangerezako dubs this genre of writing ‘indirect history.’ The essay focuses on the narratives produced by African chiefs reinterpreting the past within the colonial epistemological framework. Bangerezako argues that their work was marked by an internal tension. As they projected colonial ideas onto the past, these writers privileged a dynastic past, embraced the Hamitic hypothesis and presumed male authority, but their oral accounts at the same time challenged these underlying assumptions.