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Week Ten Notes: Infrapolitics & Protest
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Reading Notes
Reading One: The Everyday Resistance of Rwandan Peasants to Post-Genocide
Reconciliation
SOURCE: Susan Thomson, Whispering Truth to Power: The Everyday Resistance of Rwandan Peasants to
PostGenocide Reconciliation, African Affairs, 110/440 (2011), 439-456.
SUMMARY:
Introduction
● The Policy of National Unity and Reconciliation has been the backbone of the Rwandan
government’s reconstruction strategy following the 1994 genocide in which civilian Hutu
killed at least 500,000 Tutsi.
● On paper, it is a set of mechanisms that ‘aim to promote unity between Tutsi and Hutu in creating
one Rwanda for all Rwandans’.
● In practice, it disguises the government’s efforts to control its population while working to
consolidate the political power of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
● This article analyses the everyday acts of resistance of a cross-section of peasant Rwandans to
their government’s post-genocide policy of national unity and reconciliation.
○ Demonstrating unpopularity among individuals at the lowest part of Rwanda's
socio-economic hierarchy
○ The significance of peasants’ everyday resistance lies in part in the fact that the RPF
stakes its moral legitimacy to rule on the success of the very policy that in reality fails the
majority of the population.
○ Examination of three types of everyday resistance – staying on the sidelines, irreverent
compliance, and withdrawn muteness – that some peasant Rwandans employ as they
engage, avoid, or subvert the state-led requirements of this policy
○ Author’s purpose is to illustrate the many ways in which government policy produces
merely the appearance – and not the reality – of national unity and reconciliation, and
therefore fails to provide the grounds for legitimate rule.
Restoring peace or forcing reconciliation?
Many would argue that there is much evidence At the same time, some have criticized Rwanda’s
that points to Rwanda’s admirable recovery from reconstruction and reconciliation process.
the events of 1994.
The post-genocide state, strong and centralized The RPF seeks to dominate all levels of
under the leadership of the RPF, has made sociopolitical life, from the lowest levels of
significant gains in ‘restoring peace, unity, and administration to the office of the President.
reconciliation to all corners of the country’ it has
facilitated rapid reconstruction; and, unlike most
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African nations, is able to exercise its territorial The government maintains a tight rein on
control exceedingly well. political expression and, in 2003, banned any
public manifestation of ‘ethnic divisionism’
The institutions of the state have been rebuilt and (between Tutsi and Hutu), ‘promoting genocide
infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and airports ideology’ (against Tutsi), or ‘preaching genocide
have been restored and in some areas upgraded. negationism’ (that is, questioning that only Tutsi
died in 1994).
Rwanda is a leader on the African continent in
terms of service delivery in education and health. These laws are vaguely worded and arbitrarily
It is consistently cited by international donors as a applied to anyone who makes public statements
country with low levels of corruption and with that the government perceives as critical.
institutional accountability.
The government also targets journalists as the
The recovery of the economy is outstanding. Not purveyors of divisionist opinion and strictly
only has urban poverty decreased as national controls civil society organizations and other
income rises, but the economy continues to grow forms of associational life.
at an average of 5% per year.
While Human Rights Watch and other
international human rights and advocacy groups
highlight the government’s lack of commitment to
basic human rights such as the right to life and to
free expression, President Paul Kagame stresses
the importance of state intervention to maintain
the ethnic unity that he claims to be the basis of
present and future security in Rwanda.
Such dramatically different perceptions and claims about post-genocide Rwanda raise the question of
what everyday life there is really like.
Has Rwandan society rebuilt itself as effectively as the government claims, or has rapid economic
development come at the expense of political liberties?
● Rwandan elites – educated, gainfully employed, and residents in urban areas – tend to benefit
most from the post-genocide policies of the RPF.
● Those who benefit least are the rural poor – the majority of the population – who are subject to
RPF-empowered local leaders and who must perform the government-prescribed rituals of
national unity and reconciliation regardless of their lived realities.
Situating the policy of national unity and reconciliation
The policy of national unity and reconciliation is an ambitious social engineering project aimed at
forging a unified Rwandan identity while fostering reconciliation between genocide survivors and
perpetrators.
● It aims to re-educate the population on the ethnic unity that existed before colonialism, at a time
when Tutsi and Hutu lived in ‘peaceful harmony and worked together for the good of the nation’.
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● In romanticizing the historical past and presuming that all Hutu need to be re-educated, the
policy relies on two broad simplifications:
○ all Tutsi (whether they were in Rwanda during the genocide or not) are innocent victims
or ‘survivors’.
○ all Hutu (whether they participated in the genocide or not) are guilty perpetrators.
➔ This simplistic dichotomy, Rwanda’s ‘national unity and reconciliation’ can only be
maintained through the extensive policing of public speech.
● Rwandans can only speak publicly about ethnicity in state-sanctioned settings like the ingando
camps and the neo-traditional gacaca trials, and during genocide mourning week.
The government promotes national unity and reconciliation in numerous ways. It encourages collective
memory of the genocide through memorial sites and mass graves that show the end result of ethnic
division.
● Annual commemorations are held during national mourning week (7 to 14 April) to remind
Rwandans of the ‘pernicious effects of ethnic divisionism’.
● The government also adopted new national symbols (flag, anthem, and emblem) in 2001 because
the existing ones ‘symbolized the genocide and encouraged an ideology of genocide and
divisionism’
● The government changed place names at all administrative levels (from villages to provinces) to
‘protect survivors from remembering where their relatives died’
● In addition, the revised 2003 constitution criminalized public references to ethnic identity
(article 33) as well as ‘ethnic divisionism’ and ‘trivializing the genocide’
● The RPF uses the apparatus of the state to try to ensure that survivors forgive and forget what
happened to them during the genocide, and that perpetrators try to tell the truth about what they
did.
● For Rwandans who try to step outside the roles prescribed for them in service to national unity
and reconciliation, the reaction from the government and its agents is quick and relentless:
imprisonment without charge, disappearance, intimidation, and even death.
○ This means that survivors (read former Tutsi) and génocidaires (read former Hutu) have
been cast into the essentialist categories of victim and killer, and as such have become
the protagonists in the fiction of national unity
○ Génocidaire for ‘Hutu’: excludes from public life those Hutu who were victims or
bystanders, or who will not confess to their real or imagined crimes.
○ Hutu can in fact participate only as génocidaires – not as victims of the genocide, of the
1990–4 civil war, or of the RPF-led revenge attacks between 1994 and 1996.
Ingando Re-education Camps & Gacaca courts
● The ingando re-education camps are central to the government’s efforts to control the populace.
Released (Hutu) prisoners must graduate before they are allowed to return to their home
communities. These men are required to attend ingando for periods ranging from several weeks
to several months in order to study government policies, Rwandan history, and unity and
reconciliation.
○ The author attended an ingando camp for a week in August 2006 → The re-education
witnessed failed to promote a sense of national unity and reconciliation among Hutu
