This superb book by Aidan Russell concerns a neglected place and time. The place is Burundi, whose complex past is buried by those of its larger and better-known neighbours in the Great Lakes region. The time is ‘the long 1960s’, beginning in 1959 with the emergence of democratic competition, when multiple possibilities for what the post-colonial future might look like were in play, and culminating in genocide in 1972, when ‘the future horizons of possibility closed’ (9).

Meticulously documented in wide-ranging archival research and interviews, the study centres on the communes of Kabarore and Busiga along the Burundi–Rwanda border. Drawing on linguistic anthropology and a deft knowledge of Kirundi, Russell is particularly concerned with the tensional character of the language of truth and its political function. In tracking concepts of ukuri (truth) and ibuhuha (rumour) and their cognates, he weaves a story of post-colonial openings and closures which powerfully demonstrate how ‘the language of truth [can be] turned as much to violence and destruction as to hope and possibility’ (28).

The first part of the book focuses on the emergence of the party system in the last years of colonial rule. It is preceded by a survey of the development of the Burundian monarchical state from 1796, which introduces the complexities of the pre-colonial Burundian political system, the amorphousness and historicity of ethnic identities, and the development of the antagonism between the Bezi and Batare Ganwa factions which played out in the respective independence programmes of Uprona and the Parti Démocratique Chrétien (PDC). The second part of the book deals with the tumultuous first years of the post-colony after Bezi Prince Louis Rwagasore's assassination. These were years of Uprona factionalism, rapid changes of government and intense interpersonal rivalry. They also saw deteriorating relations with Rwanda, the diffusion of Casablanca-Monrovia Pan-Africanist programmes and the ideological schisms of the Cold War into domestic politics, and the development of a republican movement which culminated in abolition in 1966 and the emergence of Michel Micombero as Burundi's first president. Russell also sheds light on some little-known events neglected in state-centred narrations, such as in the excellent commentary on the Mparamirundi rebellion of 1961 in the borderland.

This was Burundi's ‘time of politics’ (9), in the felicitous words of one interviewee, and politics was a ‘world of talk’ (71). From the stirrings of decolonial sentiments and the opening of the horizon of possibilities, the pursuit of political power was accompanied by discursive struggles over ukuri. Micombero's new republic proclaimed that it had no room for abanyabihuha (people of rumours), denounced politiques bw'insaku (the politics of malevolent gossip), and aimed at the development of republican-citizens of ukuri n'ubutungane (truth and justice) who would engage in ‘vigilance’ in defence of ubumwe (unity). But alongside attempts to impose totalistic truths there existed the more pluralistic sphere of ibuhuha which constituted ‘the most vital space of democratic contest’ (76). Rumour ‘pricked an alertness in power and informed popular thoughts of alternative possibilities’ (165).

The book concludes with an extensive account of the 1972 genocide, ikiza. Because of the emphasis on the possibilities of the early post-colony, the discussion avoids framing the genocide as the inevitable endpoint of the ‘leapfrogging legacy’ of colonial rule or as a link in Burundi's historical ‘chain of violence’ (270). It also demonstrates the horrifying ‘truth-making’ effect of genocide. As Russell puts it: ‘If the previous decade of decolonisation constituted the search for what power and community would mean after empire, here people for the first time thought they knew the heart of a new order’ (263).

Overall, this is a landmark study for scholars of Burundi and the Great Lakes region. It should, however, be read much more widely as an empirical study in the ‘futures past’, to use Koselleck's term, of the decolonisation movements of the 1960s, and as a theoretically sophisticated framing of the relationship between languages of truth and power.