Abstract This article reflects on how scholars have engaged with the past and with notions of authority in the African Great Lakes. A dominant ‘presentist’ perspective on the region mobilizes historical knowledge in an uncritical fashion, reducing authority to a set of historical clichés and building on a familiar focus on crises and the state. Bridging history and political science, we propose two concepts to analyse histories of political authority to unsettle presentist biases: trajectories and transactions. To illustrate the contribution these alternative lenses make, we present two historical vignettes. First, we revisit the 1973 coup in Rwanda as an ambiguous trajectory of authority-making and unmaking. Then, we consider languages of praise and petitioning in Burundi in the 1960s, to show how authority is lived, manifested and challenged through local transactional relations.

中文翻译：

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非洲五大湖的权威历史：轨迹和交易

摘要 本文反映了学者们如何处理过去以及非洲五大湖地区的权威观念。对该地区占主导地位的“当前主义”观点以不加批判的方式调动历史知识，将权威降低为一系列历史陈词滥调，并建立在对危机和国家的熟悉关注之上。将历史和政治科学联系起来，我们提出了两个概念来分析政治权威的历史以消除当前主义偏见：轨迹和交易。为了说明这些替代镜头的贡献，我们展示了两个历史小插曲。首先，我们重新审视 1973 年卢旺达政变，将其视为建立和取消权威的模糊轨迹。然后，我们考虑 1960 年代布隆迪的赞美和请愿语言，以展示权威是如何生活的，