Dr. René Lemarchand is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and African Studies at the University of Florida. Dr. Lemarchand was born in France in 1932 and first came to the US as a Fulbright scholar at Southwestern College (now known as Rhodes College) in 1951. In 1954 he enrolled in UCLA’s Political Science PhD program, working under Dr. James S. Coleman, widely considered to have played a pioneering role in promoting African studies in Political Science. Lemarchand credits James Coleman with awakening his interest in the use of political science as a tool to better understand and explain the range of phenomena sweeping across the continent on the eve of different nations’ independence.
In December 1959, Lemarchand arrived in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the former Belgian Congo. No sooner did the country reach independence in June 1960 than the army went on rampage, causing a major exodus of scores of Europeans. After his wife was evacuated he stayed on to collect data for his doctoral dissertation. While doing fieldwork in eastern Congo in September1960, he traveled to Rwanda and Burundi and was struck by the contrast between the rising tide of violence sweeping across the first, and the relative calm in the other. Retrospectively we realize that the anti-Tutsi violence that erupted in Rwanda in 1959-60 would have major repercussions in Burundi in 1972, when some 200,000 Hutu civilians were massacred by a predominantly Tutsi army. In the tragic game of mirrors that has accompanied ethnic hatreds within and between the two states each community bears a direct responsibility for the atrocities endured by the other. This is why, according to Lemarchand, the 1994 genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda cannot be explained without taking into account the genocide of Hutu in Burundi in 1972.
Lemarchand defended his dissertation in 1963 and came to UF, serving as the first Director for the Center of African Studies. He held that position for two years, and then turned his attention to his book, Rwanda and Burundi, which was published in 1970 and would win the 1971 Melville J. Herskovits Award from the African Studies Association. Lemarchand continued to teach at UF until 1992, when he left to serve as USAID Regional Director for Governance and Democracy for West Africa. He officially retired from UF in 1994. While working for USAID he was based first in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire for 4 years and then Accra, Ghana for 2 years until retiring in 1998. From 1998 to 2004 he served as visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, Smith College, Brown University, Concordia University in Montreal, and in Europe at the universities of Helsinki, Bordeaux, Copenhagen and Antwerp. He now resides in Gainesville, FL and remains active within the academic community by attending conferences, giving talks at other universities, and attending events on UF’s campus.