Remediation in Rwanda. Kristin Conner Doughty

Figure 1. Murambi genocide memorial interior, July 2004; some of the text on the panels inside the memorial is given at the end of this chapter (photo by author).

      The exhibit eventually opened in May 2011, seven years after I saw it the first time. For the doors to stay closed for so long while the exhibit was virtually complete points to a broader set of issues that characterized the treatment of Rwandan history and memory at that time, which I explore in this chapter. According to hushed conversations I had with many people working on the site, though funding or logistical issues may have been the voiced justifications for delay, the main reason the exhibit stayed closed over the years was concern about the written history included inside. This underscores the sensitivity and contestation around Rwanda’s history, as well as the consolidation and control of a particular version of Rwanda’s past and how it is situated within a broader professionalized politics of memory. Murambi’s closed doors provide an apt illustration of how, as the late Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot put it, “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences” (1995:27), and the closed doors lead us to question the content, production, and stakes of those silences.

      Trouillot’s influential book, Silencing the Past, thus provides the title and orientation for this chapter, as I heed Trouillot’s call to “focus on the process of historical production,” specifically through “examin(ing) in detail the concrete production of specific narratives” in order to “discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others” (1995:22–25). Silence is a theme that figures heavily in contemporary scholarship on Rwanda,³ and I return to it in more detail at the individual and interpersonal level in subsequent chapters. Here, I use Murambi’s shuttered exhibit as indicative of the present-absences in storytelling about Rwanda’s past, lacunae that were produced through deliberate, active choices made on behalf of the governing regime and people working under its surveillance.

      This chapter unfolds in three parts. First, I present a brief overview of history for the reader unfamiliar with Rwanda, compiled from others’ rich historiography, with specific attention to the points of debate.⁴ I remain ever-cognizant here that, as Trouillot underscored, “facts are never meaningless: indeed, they become facts only because they matter in some sense, however minimal.… Facts are not created equal: the production of traces is always also the creation of silences” (1995:29). I emphasize the contestation in order to remind us that the “facts” I present are caught up in webs of debate with implications in the present.

      Second, in order to reveal the interplay of traces and silences, and to lay bare how facts about Rwanda’s past matter, I juxtapose this overview with the dominant version of history the government used from 2004 through 2008, which was part of the “total environment” (Abramowitz 2014) of postgenocide transformation created by the policy of unity and reconciliation. I provide ethnographic examples from the ten-year commemoration, including from the Murambi site and from the text of President Kagame’s official commemoration speech on April 7, 2004. The government narrative of history dominated the public sphere from 2004 through 2008, intended equally for resocializing Rwandans and for the benefit of the international community. During my fieldwork, this narrative was propagated in regular feature articles in pro-government newspapers, in radio broadcasts reaching across the country, and in official government documents. It was taught in schools, narrated at public events locally and nationally, and served as the core of genocide memorialization and ingando “solidarity camps” attended by released prisoners, returning refugees, and students. It was ubiquitous, equally strong in its broadcast in rural and urban areas across regions in Rwanda. (In subsequent chapters I explore how people narrated the past in the ways that dovetailed and diverged from the master narrative.)

      In the final section of the chapter, I analyze the implications of the inclusions and exclusions in the dominant narrative for understanding the politics of belonging in postgenocide Rwanda, and what is rendered thinkable versus unthinkable. I thus follow Trouillot in my approach throughout the chapter in “determining not what history is … but how history works (1995:25, emphasis mine). Specifically, I explicitly link my analysis and deconstruction of the official narrative to the harmony legal models at the core of my book in order to show what they render possible versus what they make “unthinkable” (Trouillot 1995:27). I show, for example, how historians’ critique of the idea of precolonial unity should render even more suspect the use of culture to justify harmony in grassroots legal models. I show how the legal models emerged from the master narrative and contributed to the formalization of genocide citizenship, even as people used the models to negotiate belonging and contest implications within the master narrative. This chapter thus serves as part of my argument that in postgenocide Rwanda, people’s understanding of the past mattered to how they framed belonging in the present, at intimate levels as well as more broadly in terms of citizenship. Further, it is central to my assertion that contemporary Rwanda is marked both by continuities with, and ruptures from, its past.

      Overall, I intend this chapter to contribute to the rich literature that critiques the official postgenocide master narrative of history and politics of memory for their oversimplifications, erasures, and instrumentality.⁵ This is particularly important for at least two reasons. First, Rwanda has proven a particularly troubling example of the interplay of political power and violence with collective memory—the concept that when we remember we do so as members of social groups, and that our understandings of the past legitimate social orders in the present (Connerton 1989; Halbwachs 1980). Scholars of Rwanda and the Great Lakes region of Africa more widely have specifically shown how people’s “mental maps of history” (C. Newbury 1998:7) or “mythico-histories” (Malkki 1995) order and reorder particular social and political categories in the region, and have created imagined communities of fear and hatred (Lemarchand 2009:57, 70). Evidence shows how Rwandan political leaders have used competing interpretations of Rwanda’s particularly contentious history as a central tool in solidifying, polarizing, and mobilizing group identities toward violent conflict in the latter half of the twentieth century, including the genocide.

      Second, political elites in Rwanda have long controlled and centralized the production of history to justify their own rule, while obscuring their role in doing so (D. Newbury 2009; Vansina 2004). Historian Jan Vansina has argued that the royal court in Rwanda used “historical remembrance” as the “ultimate legitimation” of its rule as far back as 1780, and by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the royal court was an “institution in charge of controlling the production of history and its representation … an institution of such a wide reach and such a degree of subtlety” that researchers and Rwandans alike became “caught in its cognitive glue” (2004:5, 90–95).⁶ A decade after the genocide, many outsiders and Rwandans similarly found themselves caught in the “cognitive glue” of the regime’s version of history (Des Forges 1995; Pottier 2002; Reyntjens 2005), while there was “ample evidence that the regime continue[d] to manipulate the historical record for the sake of an official memory” (Lemarchand 2009:105), providing “disinformation” about both the distant past and the period from 1990 through the present (Pottier 2002; Reyntjens 2009:57–58). Denaturalizing Rwanda’s dominant narrative is crucial, thus, to keep us attuned to how contemporary versions of the past are actively produced in discursive, embodied, and material ways, and how they legitimate particular forms of belonging, exclusion, rights, and access in the present.

      Historical Context and Points of Debate

      For hundreds of years, ancestors of the people who came to be called Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda lived side by side. They spoke the same language (Kinyarwanda), shared the same traditional religion, participated in the same economic networks, and intermarried to varying degrees. Precolonial Rwanda is most simply understood as a monarchy, ruled by Tutsi kings and chiefs. Lineages and patron-client ties figured heavily in social and political organization.

      The nature of social harmony, stratification, and power has been heavily debated, characterized by the Hutu-power narrative as feudal exploitation and by the postgenocide government as harmonious. Much of this debate centers around the characterization of ubuhake, a controversial form