David Newbury is Gwendolen Carter Professor of African Studies at Smith College, Massachusetts. His work has focused on pre-colonial societal transformation in the Kivus, the Rift Valley, the Rwandan famine of the late 1920s, and the transformation of a hunter-gatherer society in the eastern DRC into an agricultural economy. He is author of Land Beyond the Mists: Essays in identity and authority in precolonial Congo and Rwanda (2009).