NO ONE doubts the scale of the war in Congo. Ten African countries dispatched troops there in 1998. Two, Uganda and Rwanda, were trying to overthrow their former puppet, President Laurent Kabila, the others ostensibly seeking to prop him up. Although Madeleine Albright, then America's secretary of state, called it Africa's “first world war”, the armies did little fighting. The horrific death toll—as many as 5m—was caused, as so often in Africa, by people fleeing their homes and dying of hunger and disease.

And what of the reaction of the rest of the world? The Kosovo war, which occurred at the same time, affected 3m people of whom 10,000 died. Outside powers appealed for $471m to help the victims and NATO eventually sent 30,000 troops to hold the ring. In Congo 86m people were affected. The United Nations asked for $314m. No troops were sent (though the UN now has over 18,000 personnel there). Kosovo is at peace, but the war in eastern Congo, which began in 1993, has never ended.

Most of central Africa was colonised by the French or the Belgians, and René Lemarchand and Gérard Prunier are France's two leading experts. Both have written their latest contributions in English, perhaps because, as Mr Lemarchand puts it at the start of “The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa”, this region “matters”. It matters because it is the great core of Africa, its breadth nearly the distance between London and Moscow. It matters because its nine neighbours are all affected by its upheavals and because parts of it are stuffed with valuable minerals. And it matters because the war that engulfs it is brutal, unending and often overlooked.

Both these books are written to disprove fashionable hypotheses about the war and its causes. Mr Prunier, elaborate, anecdotal and discursive, enjoys demolishing the idea that the war is a conspiracy of English-speaking countries to prise Congo away from the French sphere of influence. He points out that despite the intervention of Congo's neighbours in 1998, this was never a world war. In fact the invading armies soon settled down to do business and dig minerals. Rwanda and Uganda suddenly became significant diamond and gold exporters. Mr Lemarchand, tighter, more academic but equally passionate, convincingly argues that, although natural resources may prolong wars, they do not start them. The cause of the war, he says, was social and political exclusion. This is still not being remedied by any of the belligerents—or the foreign donors whose millions enable the local leaders to maintain the state of war.

Throughout this region the basis of the exclusion is the division between Hutu and Tutsi. Technically the same people—they speak the same language and belong to the same culture—their differences, occupational and physical, were deepened and manipulated by the German and Belgian colonists. After independence, governments in Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, backed by Europe and America, rewrote the histories of these divisions and cynically used them to stay in power.

The current pseudo-democratic regime in Rwanda does not represent a substantial break with the past in this. Backed by Britain and America, President Paul Kagame manipulates the Hutu-Tutsi divide more subtly than his predecessors, but just as fatally. Neither author believes that Rwanda's interventions in eastern Congo can be justified in terms of preventing genocide, particularly since the war there has killed nearly five times the number who were murdered in Rwanda in 1994.

Rather, Mr Prunier points out, the genocide in Rwanda acted as an incendiary bomb, setting fire to disputes that go back generations. Both these books help disentangle the fiendishly complicated histories of national and tribal identities, real and invented. Neither has a simple answer nor an optimistic view of the future.