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Sunday is a day reserved for prayer and for visiting family and friends. Jeanne had never visited me

before. I knew her well since she had participated in my research project, which sought to understand

the effects of the postgenocide government’s policy of national unity and reconciliation on ordinary

peasant Rwandans living in the southwest of the country. I often received visitors on Sunday and

continued to do so even after the government halted my project in late August 2006, stating that it

“was against national unity and reconciliation” and “was not the kind of research they needed” (field

notes 2006).

Given government scrutiny of my project and the precarious social position of most of my

participants in the postgenocide order, I was rather surprised when people continued to drop by to

show their support for the research and me. My astonishment was a reflection of my own state of mind

—the postgenocide government was exercising its muscle, and I was its target. My visitors understood

my feelings of powerlessness; some reveled in our mutual condition. I had “become one of them,” and

this newly acquired status was rooted in my detailed knowledge of the individual life stories of the

thirty-seven peasant Rwandans who participated in my research. It was the sharing of secrets that

structured my interaction with ordinary Rwandans, and many visitors subtly reminded me not to

reveal anything that they had shared with me to the authorities.2 Most acknowledged my “troubles”

with the government and assured me that its interference was actually a good thing. As Martin, a Tutsi

survivor of the 1994 genocide, stated prosaically just a week before I left the country: “My

government knows what it will like and not like. You now know what it is like to fear because of

them. It’s good for you because now you know even better what we feel when the [local government

official] comes to visit or when [President] Kagame issues an order that affects our life.” Martin was

referring to President Paul Kagame’s July 2006 directive that all kiosks—the makeshift shops where

ordinary peasant Rwandans buy their staple goods—be shut down. The directive was devastating not

only to the economic lives of the owners of these kiosks but also for people who because of it had to

travel further to market centers for their sugar, oil, and other basics, paying higher prices and losing

the opportunity to socialize over a beer or tea.

Jeanne was initially reluctant to participate in the research, but as time passed she recognized that I

was serious about listening to her life story. As our relationship progressed, she became adamant that

her story be shared so that people “outside Rwanda” could learn about her everyday struggles and

perhaps “storms like the war against Hutu and genocide against Tutsi” could be stopped and her

surviving children would not suffer as she had. Jeanne came to be one of the most outspoken of the

individuals who participated in my research. Ordinary people who have “nothing left to lose” have

always spoken their truth to power; what is important is to know the “ways of doing it without

provoking a reaction from the government” (interviews 2006). Before the genocide, ordinary people

did so under the cover of madness, and these individuals are known as abasazi (plural, meaning

“foolish”). They used their “madness” to give the impression that they were mentally unstable to

justify their willingness to say “what regular people can’t attempt” (interviews 2006). Since the

ibyihebe (plural, literally “fearless”). On our previous meeting, in June 2006, Jeanne had hugged me

for a long time, perhaps five minutes, and when she broke our embrace she said,


I am glad you have come into my life. You gave me a safe space to share my

inner thoughts. It is not always safe in the new Rwanda to share what you really

think. I had that with some people before the war. But Rwandese, we need

secrets, we don’t share easily. But with you, I shared, and my heart feels lighter.

You understand because you want peace for all of us, even poor people like me. I

am stronger because I met you, because we shared.

But our time is now over. I can’t see you anymore because people know that

our official time together is now over. I want you to know you will always be my

friend in here [taps her chest], but you must go and not greet me if we meet, and

do not visit. I sometimes told you more than I should have but I wanted to and

you can tell my story in your book. But it is best for my family and I if you

never come back here again. (Field notes 2006)

knowledge of power relations in postgenocide Rwanda. As an “unimportant person” (meaning “a

powerless subordinate”) in Rwandan society, Jeanne likely wanted to distance herself from an (white-

skinned, relatively wealthy, and foreign) “important person” like me, lest our continued relationship

result in jealous neighbors or the renewed attention of the local official who would sometimes pop in

during our interviews to inquire about “how things were going.” So when she appeared at my gate a

few months later, I assumed she had come to withdraw her consent to share her story in my book. To

the contrary, and like many of my participants who heard the news of my “problems” with the

government, she had come to rightly remind me that my “troubles” were far less severe than those that

people like her experienced every day.

I also interpreted Jeanne’s visit as an act of resistance, given the attendant risks of possibly

encountering the handler the government had assigned to keep tabs on me or, perhaps worse, the

member of the Local Defense Forces (LDF) who lived across the street and who was likely keeping an

eye on me as well.3 Before the government stopped my research, we greeted each other politely,

sometimes even engaging in small talk about the security situation in our neighborhood. I still saw my

LDF neighbor almost every day, but he no longer said hello—perhaps an insult in a society that prides

itself on the formality of greeting other people, or perhaps he felt it best to no longer fraternize with

me, as he was likely reporting back on whom I was with and what I was doing. His continued presence

around my residence was not lost on many of my participants who came for a visit, as some joked

about it with me. One individual summed up our shared condition with a proverb—the cracked pot

laughs at the broken one (ikimuga giseka urujyo)—and further joked that all that was missing from my

Rwanda experience was to be thrown in cachot (detention).

Jeanne’s visit constituted an appropriate ending to a period of fieldwork that was fraught with

challenges, most notably government interference in the research process (Thomson 2009a, 2013).

During our visit, she spoke of how she valued our relationship and how she was “glad” to have been

part of my project since the government stopped it. As a forty-seven-year-old Tutsi widow of the

genocide, she did not expect that anything would change in Rwanda in her lifetime, but perhaps the

“disturbance” I caused the government would “make them wake up to the hardships” of many peasant

government reminds us often that we are poor and that we need their help. We

see new [local authorities] often. Kigali [the seat of government] changes them

just as we are getting used to them, to their rules and ideas. They come in to our

community, and we respect them. We do this because that is our culture. As

peasants, we have no say in governance. Those who speak out can really get into

problems. That is what happened to you. You made it easy for us to speak about

our problems, and the [government] officials got really nervous and decided to

stop your work.

This is the problem we suffer when the officials tell us about national unity

and reconciliation. We can’t speak out about our hardships. No [ shakes head].

We must go to gacaca [neotraditional justice courts], and we must do what we

are told, say what we are educated to say. We go to umuganda [community

work], and we listen to their speeches. But they didn’t grow up in our

communities. They come from Kigali and don’t understand what is necessary for

us to live in peace. Some of them speak only a little Kinyarwanda [the language

spoken by the majority of Rwandans]. The one who helped stop your work has

only been our [appointed government] official these last six months.4 He never

asks us what we need. You understand that we peasants have few choices until

the government says we do. That makes you a problem that must go away.

I am glad to be part of your research and I came to tell you in person that you

are doing a good thing. If the government has noticed you among all the white

researchers we see in [Huye] town, then I need to come and tell you to keep

working and do your best when you get back to Canada. (Field notes 2006)

continued consent. Her words also made me realize that the ordinary peasant Rwandans who had

participated in my research and later visited me at my residence not only understood its purpose and

goals but also knew that I would protect their life stories, despite the less than ideal conditions of my

hasty departure. Jeanne understood the risks inherent in coming to visit me, but she came anyway and

shared that I “made it easy” for the Rwandans I consulted to talk about their hopes, fears, and

frustrations with the postgenocide social order.

Jeanne’s narrative also speaks to a key finding of the research—ethnicity is not the most salient

aspect of individual identity; levels of poverty as well as one’s location in Rwanda’s rigid and

stratified socioeconomic structure before and since the 1994 genocide shape everyday life. When she

speaks of “us,” Jeanne does not mean other Tutsi but instead means others in her socioeconomic class.

As a widow, she occupies a position in the postgenocide order that is exceedingly weak. Jeanne is poor

and landless, without sufficient income to feed or clothe her children, let alone provide for their health

care or schooling. Jeanne self-describes as “destitute” (umutindi), one of six categories of

socioeconomic status that stratify Rwandan society (these are analyzed more fully in chapter 5).

Vulnerable folks like Jeanne are near the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy, second only to those

who are “most vulnerable” or living in abject poverty (the abatindi nyakujya), who must beg to

survive as they often lack the family and kin networks that could offer them support (MINECOFIN

autonomy to shape their own lives and livelihoods. They lack sufficient emotional or physical

protection from the government, which in turn makes it difficult for them to anticipate, adapt to,

resist, and recover from state-led interventions in their daily lives. In other words, individuals’

interactions with the rules, regulations, and rituals of the postgenocide order are reactive, as

government practices of surveillance and coercion essentially erase their ability to voice their

discontent with its postgenocide policies and practices.

For Rwandans at the lowest levels of the socioeconomic hierarchy, their ethnic identity matters

most when they are required to participate in state-led initiatives of national unity and reconciliation.

National unity and reconciliation are the backbone of the government’s reconstruction strategy and the

defining features of state power in postgenocide Rwanda as it structures the interactions of individual

Rwandans with the state as well as with one another. On paper, there is a set of mechanisms that “aims

to promote unity between Tutsi and Hutu in creating one Rwanda for all Rwandans” (NURC 2000, 4).

In practice, it disguises the government’s efforts to control its population by using the language of

ethnic unity and social inclusion while working to consolidate the political and ecomomic power of

the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). From the perspective of the peasant Rwandans I consulted,

it is a heavy-handed approach to postgenocide reconciliation that operates to create the necessary

sociopolitical space for the government to engage in ambitious social reengineering aimed at “wiping

the slate utterly clean and beginning from zero” (Scott 1998, 94). As is demonstrated in chapters 4 and

5, the policy of national unity and reconciliation is built on a bedrock of structural violence and

economic inequality that places the burden of postgenocide reconstruction and reconciliation squarely

on the shoulders of Rwanda’s poor and largely rural population (Uvin 1998, 100–103; Zraly 2010).5

Broadly, the analysis that follows reveals the system of power that structure the lives of ordinary

peasant Rwandans like Jeanne and the thirty-six other poor, rural Rwandans I consulted in 2006 and

whose life stories form its backbone. By “ordinary Rwandans” I do not mean those individuals who

hold formal political power as a member of the political elite or those individuals engaged as agents

of the state (e.g., police officers, civil servants, military personnel, local authorities). Instead, I

conceptualize “ordinary Rwandans” as the nonelite and largely peasant citizenry, many of whom are

subsistence farmers and/or day laborers. Postgenocide Rwanda represents a context where political

power is firmly held by the state in a system where sociopolitical domination is commonplace and

accepted by ruler and ruled alike. When the power of the state is exercised at the local level, it takes

the form of directives from “on high” (the regime in Kigali) and of strict monitoring of the ability and

willingness of local officials to “implement government orders effectively and efficiently” (interview

with MINALOC official 2006). RPF-appointed local leaders in turn keep an eye on the activities and

speech of individuals within their bailiwick. Individual compliance with the demands of the policy of

national unity is paramount. Individuals are constantly and consistently reminded by appointed local

officials of the need to “unify and reconcile” in order to consolidate present and future security. The

density of the Rwandan state saturates everyday life with its strong administrative, surveillance, and

information-gathering systems, resulting in minute individual forms of resistance when confronted

with its various practices of control and coercion (Longman 1998; Pottier 2002; Purdeková 2012b).

Peasant Rwandans like Jeanne are subject to the exercise of power granted to appointed local leaders

and must perform the prescribed rituals of national unity and reconciliation, regardless of their private

realities.

More narrowly, this is a study of the individual lived experiences with state power of ordinary

peasant Rwandans living in the southwest of the country— how does it make them feel and what does





it make them say or do? Drawing on Weber (1946) and following Wedeen (2003, 680), the analysis

distinguishes between the terms “state” and “regime.” By “state” I mean the common set of public

institutions capable of distributing goods and services and controlling violence within a defined,

internationally recognized territory. By “regime” I mean the political order of a particular

administration, in this case “the regime of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)” as opposed to “the

state of the RPF.” This distinction allows for a critique of the various mechanisms of the Rwandan

state in pursuit of the twin goals of national unity and reconciliation as implemented by the RPF and

its agents. In understanding and explaining the everyday practices of national unity and reconciliation

from the perspective of ordinary Rwandans, I analyze their minute and subtle resistance to its many

demands to illustrate the ways in which the policy goes against their interests as peasants.6

The analysis that follows examines the practices of national unity and reconciliation through an

examination of three types of everyday resistance— staying on the sidelines, irreverent compliance,

and withdrawn muteness—that some ordinary peasant Rwandans attempt. I examine some of the

subversive and strategic ways in which Rwandans whisper their truth to the power of the postgenocide

regime. I employ the concept of everyday resistance to identify and analyze the system of power to

which ordinary Rwandans are subject to illustrate how individuals are positioned in relation to state

power and how this positioning affects their life chances in the postgenocide order. I do not

conceptualize individual acts of resistance as half of the unambiguous binary of domination versus

resistance, which sees domination as a relatively static and institutionalized form of state power and

resistance as organized opposition to it. Instead, I identify and analyze the everyday acts of resistance

of ordinary peasant Rwandans—from silence and secrets to lying and foot-dragging—to show the

many ways in which the policy of national unity and reconciliation represents an oppressive form of

power in their lives through its various practices.


The Practices of the Rwandan State


My research is explicitly concerned with how the system of power that constitutes “the state” plays

out in the lives of those subject to its disciplinary “technologies” that produce the power relations in

which people are caught up (Foucault 1977, 202). My approach is thus not rooted in traditional

political science approaches of statism or systems analysis that understand “the state” as an a priori

conceptual or empirical object of analysis (cf. Abrams 1988; Jessop 1990; Mitchell 1991; Scott 1998).

Instead of understanding the state as a unitary actor that controls how its institutions function, my

analytical concern is to identify patterns of domination and control by mapping its constitutive

practices and mechanisms in order to assess its impact on and reach into the lives of ordinary peasant

Rwandans. Following Das (2004, 226), I study the ways in which the institutions and practices of the

state “are brought into everyday life by the representation and performance of its rules” through the

individual acts of resistance of ordinary Rwandans. As such, the analysis is focused on dissecting the

power of the Rwandan state in identifying the often reinforcing and sometimes contradictory

mechanisms of the policy of national unity and reconciliation at the level of the ordinary citizen

(analyzed more fully in chapter 4). The complex relation between the practices of national unity and

reconciliation and the strategic efforts of the RPF regime to ensure that Rwandans fulfill its many

demands is the central theme that winds through the pages that follow.

Mine is a “state-in-society” approach (Migdal 2001) that analyzes the multiple ways in which the

state employs disciplinary tactics to make Rwandans behave in ways they might not themselves

1977; Scott 1985). I am concerned with how state actors establish and maintain their power and

authority in ways that serve to legitimate oppressive forms of rule while shaping people’s behavior to

conform and obey the myriad requirements of national unity and reconciliation—in other words, its

everyday practices that serve to reinforce the image of “the state” as a discrete and relatively

autonomous social institution that is constituted through everyday social practices as an aspect of the

power relations that legitimate its preeminence in society (Migdal 2001, 18; Mitchell 1991, 78). As

such, I analyze the Rwandan “state” as the product of Rwanda’s hierarchical, status-conscious

bureaucracy in which political leaders see their right to rule as natural, structured by historical

patterns of domination that lead “politicians [to] treat . . . citizens as objects they can manipulate at

whim to serve their parochial interests” (Habimana 2011, 354). The postgenocide Rwandan state