How can we evaluate scholarship that relies on the distortions and political uses of history? How can an author analyse archival testimonies without situating them in broader historical context? These questions came up as I read through Williamson Sinalo's book, Rwanda After Genocide: gender, identity and post-traumatic growth. She uses the concept of ‘post-traumatic growth’ to evaluate the ways in which 42 survivors of Rwanda's 1994 genocide are able to flourish despite their traumatic experiences of violence. The analysis is clearly intended to honour survivors, yet the argument flounders in treacherous waters. Williamson Sinalo fails to engage with the nuances of Rwandan history. In particular, she overlooks the contested nature of much of Rwandan history, presenting a shallow interpretation of the role of ethnicity in shaping the violence of the genocide and the civil war that preceded it. More critically, she fails to understand how elite Hutu or elite Tutsi both deploy ethnic tropes to maintain power and mobilise their co-ethnics, a topic of intense debate in African Studies. The result is a book of theoretical interest, as Williamson Sinalo argues for a post-colonial understanding of individual trauma; but ultimately one that fails to convince the reader, as individual traumas cannot be separated from national ones.

Williamson Sinalo's analysis relies on an interpretation of history that scholars have long argued against, that is, viewing Rwandan history solely through the lens of the 1994 genocide (see, for example, D. Newbury and C. Newbury in the American Historical Review, 2000). Instead of taking a longer view of political history, to analyse themes of state-building, kinship networks and rural life, Willamson Sinalo tells a simple and empirically incorrect historical tale of how the 1994 genocide was a product of colonial rule and ethnic divisions introduced by the Belgians. Not only does this version of history graft neatly onto the official history of the current government, it also denies the agency of Rwandans, both today and in the past. Denying individual agency is against the core tenet of Williamson Sinalo's argument – that Rwandans who survived the genocide have grown in culturally relevant and positive ways.

In eschewing assessment of her interpretation of history, Williamson Sinalo's book relies on a romanticised past in which Rwandans lived peacefully before the arrival of colonial rule (xiii–xvi). This lack of empirical analysis is disappointing as there is so much published on Rwanda's pre-colonial history, in both French and English (for example the collected works of Jan Vansina). Williamson Sinalo's choice is curious, particularly as the available scholarship addresses the motivations to kill (for example the books of Lee Ann Fujii (Killing Neighbors, Cornell University Press, 2009) and Scott Straus (The Order of Genocide, Cornell University Press, 2006), among many others).

I have no doubt that Williamson Sinalo is a well-intentioned and capable researcher who sought to respect the archival testimonies that form the corpus of her data. Still, her book stands as a caution for others, as any interdisciplinary study requires historical analysis that draws on historical sources, to understand and explain individual responses to mass atrocity in context, not just through the lens of a single event, in this case the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In failing to do so, Williamson Sinalo has written a book that complements the view of the country's current ruling elite. This is unfortunate as archival testimony is best utilised when it is grounded in the social world and historical context in which is created.