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agreed site rather than walk). This gave me a certain cachet as it became evident to many people that I was ready and willing to travel considerable distances on foot over steep hills, on hot, humid days and during the rainy season. Some of the most revealing conversations took place in the hills surrounding the valley where I lived and walked every evening after dinner. During these walks I always met a broad cross-section of ordinary peasant Rwandans, some of whom were participating in the life history aspect of the research. When I ran into participants outside the formal interview setting, I did not greet them unless they greeted me first. This was out of respect for them, as questions about how and why we knew each other would inevitably arise. Sometimes, I was met with shouted greetings, such as “So nice to see you out here [in the hills],” “I forgot to tell you this when we met last time,” or “Now you can come and meet my sister that I told you about.” I did not pay any of my participants for the time spent interviewing, although I did provide soda and tea, and sometimes we would share a meal if appropriate, although when that did happen, I was the one being hosted by my participants. There was an in-kind payment for every participant as I provided FRw 2,500 (approximately US$7 in 2006) phone cards for use at public phone booths in the event that a traumatic event manifested during or after any interview (per my partnership agreement with my Partner B organization). Some individuals required more than one phone card, and others did not use them at all. One person returned the card to me after our last formal interview. Participants often asked me for money for school fees, one asked for a dowry, and a few times people asked for funds for funeral expenses or to buy livestock, but I always respectfully declined, stating that I had to save my resources to raise my own two children. Eventually, people began to see that I was “the one with the notebook” and that, although a white foreigner, all I had to offer were my time and some kindness. The only time I offered any form of payment was when the child of one of my participants fell into a pit latrine during our interview and required medical care. I gave FRw 1,500 (approximately
facility, twelve miles away. Participants and I built mutual trust and confidence over time, and they came more readily with some than with others, but I was mindful to treat everyone the same: with humility and respect. I knew from prior experience that Rwandans would speak their minds when they felt secure and comfortable. I was sensitive to the reality that learning about the lived experiences of a cross section of Rwandans would require that I leave some topics untouched and that I listen empathically to what individuals deemed important and demonstrate my trustworthiness by not prying where my presence was not wanted. I never pressed anyone to speak about anything he or she did not want to discuss. The close relationships that developed were a reaction to my interest in people’s understanding of and feelings about different events and changes in their lives, particularly since the genocide. I was interested only in what individuals were willing to share. The research also had therapeutic effects for many individuals. In fact, many people thought that if I was a researcher and so interested in their lives as few before had been, then I must by definition be a therapist. Most individuals were aware of the role of therapists since the genocide because the postgenocide government had organized posttraumatic stress counseling units for survivors of the genocide and for individuals who needed emotional support following their participation in the gacaca courts (Bagilishya 2000; Ndayambajwe 2001). “Therapist” was a role I could not escape, and many individuals asked me during the long walks to and from interview sites if their behaviour was “normal” or confided in me their troubles and heartaches. This was an added layer of stress for me as I spent most of my days listening to the narratives of individuals who had survived the genocide, who had been raped or tortured, or who had witnessed killings or had killed. While this was personally difficult as I often took on the pain and suffering that individuals shared with me, the therapist image also meant that the combination of my empathy and respect made me privy to significant and intimate details of people’s lives that would have perhaps been unobtainable otherwise. In anticipation of the trauma that I expected people to exhibit during the research, I set up two safeguards. Prior to beginning fieldwork, in October and November 2005, I spent six weeks in Rwanda at a trauma counselor training session, organized by one of my local partner organizations, and lived in a homestead that a local women’s group had built to provide a safe home for widows of the genocide who were too traumatized, too poor, or too old to return to their home communities. During my interviews in 2006, trained trauma counselors from one of my Partner B organizations were available to each of my participants, either in person or by telephone. Interpretation All this material about the feelings and perceptions of ordinary peasant Rwandans about their lives before, during, and after the genocide leaves the problem of translating the “raw” material into a workable and academic document that is clearly intended for audiences far removed from the everyday lives of participants. Moreover, individual lived experiences are embedded in social and cultural forces that can constrain some and enable others (Scott 1991). What standard of “truth” and “validity” can possibly be attributed to information generated by the life history interview method and triangulated with participant observation, Foucauldian genealogy, and historical analysis? Ultimately, the veracity will be determined by the reader, not the text, which is why I made the decision to quote the narratives of ordinary Rwandans at length. As Kellehear writes, interpretative research “is a
‘reading’ of the world, and the task is always on persuasion rather than proving” (1993, 25). It is the work of the author to ensure the logical coherence of the argument being advanced, as well as the cogency of the supporting evidence and of the historical contextualization of the narratives presented (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012, 78–89). My commitment is to voicing ordinary Rwandans as active subjects, so it should come as no surprise that I embrace the contradictions, exaggerations, and perhaps outright fabrications that the life history method entails. Seeing Rwandans as “agents” means situating them within the complex and ambiguous arena that makes up political and cultural relations in postgenocide Rwanda. My task is to piece together and to make sense of the multiple and often contradictory presentations of self that constitute the life worlds of thirty-seven peasant Rwandans. I have not verified the narratives that were generated through the life history method except to ascertain the commitment of the individual speaker to his or her own life story. Instead, I acknowledge that the individual narratives are historically situated and enmeshed in relationships of power. In addition, I understand that each narrative is shaped by each person’s selective and often self-interested memory. Some elements of what was narrated to me may actually constitute something that happed to a friend or relative of the speaker. I do not try to distinguish what is actual lived experience and what is lived-through-someone-else experience. For example, in my interviews with survivor women, it was common to learn early in our relationship that a sister or neighbor had been raped during the genocide. Sometimes, later on, the individual reported that she had been raped during the war and that it was important to her that I know it was she, and not, for example, her sister who had been attacked. Instead, I seek to ascertain and understand the interconnections between who sees what as important, when and how. My role as the author is central, and a core assumption driving my use of the life history method is that the material gathered is mutually constituted. Together, the researcher and the researched bring the life history stories to life—the text is coproduced. Central to this coproduction is the idea that memory is important and the idea that the individuals living in the present sometimes develop a historical amnesia, particularly in a country like Rwanda, where a plurality of histories exists, each corresponding to a political agenda of its own. History in this sense is hidden from memory, although it can be recaptured through the life history method, with its ability to frame, construct, and define what is seen or obscured by individuals in the course of their everyday lives. In this way, life history is an entryway through which both researcher/author and reader may begin to understand a political system other than their own. The purpose is to contextualize and situate the lived experiences and memories of individuals within the literature, to add a nuanced layer of knowledge, rather than to correct or revise the existing material—literature is a tool for fieldwork. The life history narrative exists somewhere between history and memory, as it is spoken interaction that creates memory from the perspective of the present; the life history is, after all, that which is made real through being spoken about. As Feldman notes: “The event is not what happens. The event is that which can be narrated” (1991, 14, quoted in Ross 2003, 77). Memories are recalled for reasons that are important to the individual, which perhaps explains in part why each of my participants started our research relationship with his or her own experience of the genocide. It is still an event from which individuals are emerging and that continues to shape the range of options available to them and the ways in which they choose or choose not to engage those options (Roth and Salas 2001). In many cases, particularly around processes of national unity and reconciliation, ordinary Rwandans are circumspect in their engagement with state agents. Yet, through the material gathered through the life history method, individuals reveal sites of political and social struggle about what is “real” to them and its meanings. The life history method also reveals that personal interpretations of the past are founded on experiences of the present, and the two are often in
“deep and ambiguous conflict with the official interpretative devices of a culture” (Steedman 1987, 6). My task thus is to sift through and analyze these narratives while keeping in mind the broader political and social context in which they were shared. Chapter 4 marks the beginning of this analysis, in deconstructing the various mechanisms of the system of power that is the Rwandan “state.” Before moving on, however, historical background is necessary to situate the broader sociopolitical context in which ordinary peasant Rwandans currently live. 2
The Historical Role of the State in Everyday Life
killed and to reconcile with those who are not like us. We can decide who to forgive and with whom to reconcile. Things happened here during the genocide. But things [violence] happened before and things have happened more and more since the gacaca courts started sending people to prison. Before 1994, we heard about this problem or that problem in Kigali when the burgomaster [mayor] would come and tell us there were problems. When politics eventually comes to our door like it did during the genocide, we have problems because the government always likes to pretend that we [poor] will do what they tell us to do.
The government gives orders to show us they are in charge. Before the genocide, I was a Hutu who lived in the same community as Tutsi, and we shared sometimes. But mostly within families, not with people we didn’t know. Or if someone got wronged, we ignored that family too. But now it is different. Everyone is different since the genocide. Some of us lived, some of us died. Some are still living, but they say they are dead inside. We hardly share at all now because we don’t know whom to trust to keep our safety. Now, I am a former Hutu because the new government says that we have to get unified. I never thought about being a Hutu before, but now I wonder why they want to wipe that idea out of our heads. We were unified before; we were poor then and we are poor now. But now our problems include forgiving and reconciling with people we don’t even know or talking about things we never saw. [Because I am a former Hutu,] they [the government] expect me to go and “tell my truth.” As a Hutu [man] who was just in prison, I just want to keep quiet. I would say something [to the local official], but I have kids and I want them to grow up without interference so it is best that I just keep quiet about my frustrations. I have seen what happens to others who speak out. I just want to live in peace without interference. (Interview with Tharcisse, a destitute Hutu man, 2006)
shows political acumen. He was accused of acts of genocide in his home community in 2001. He spent almost two years in prison and was released for lack of evidence in 2003. His struggle to reestablish the semblance of a normal life has been compounded by constant reminders from RPF-appointed local officials to reconcile with his neighbors. His is a “small statement of dissent” (Scott 1990, 192), as he and others in his marginal social position are hardly able to openly challenge the postgenocide order of national unity and reconciliation. Instead, he shows us the ways that the power of the Rwandan state, through its appointed agents, enters into the everyday lives of ordinary peasant Rwandans as he questions the state-imposed need to “forgive,” “reconcile,” and “get unified.” The excerpt also highlights the intersection of ethnicity and socioeconomic location, the two factors that structure Rwandans’ experiences of lived violence as the state decides who is targeted and for what reason. Immediately before and during the genocide (1990–94), the Rwandan state, led by the Habyarimana regime, targeted ethnic Tutsi and politically moderate ethnic Hutu (broadly meaning elite Hutu who did not support the plan for killing the Tutsi). Since the genocide, whether or not individuals are targeted by “the state” has depended on where they were during the genocide and what acts of violence they are perceived to have committed. For example, Hutu men like Tharcisse have been targeted for their presumed participation in the 1994 genocide. Tutsi who returned after the genocide, many of whom occupy appointed local government positions, view Tutsi survivors of the genocide as suspect; their rationale is that they must have colluded with Hutu in order to survive. The structural violence that individuals have experienced since the genocide is less obvious because the current regime has eliminated references to ethnicity from public life.1 Individuals are no longer Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa but instead are simply Rwandans. How individuals perceive their own identity matters less—both historically and today—than does the power of the state to shape individual realities through the careful and strategic use of competing historical interpretations of ethnicity and statehood. The broader point is that violence of some kind forms a definitive backdrop to the everyday lives of ordinary Rwandans, as is demonstrated more fully in the next chapter. What changes is the type and intensity of violence depending on one’s social location and ethnic identity, as categorized by the state.
Figure 4. A survivor of the political violence of 1959, 1963, and the 1994 genocide walks to tend to the field of his “patron” (shebuja) in northern Rwanda, August 2006. (photo by Frank V. McMillan, © 2006)
This chapter places the power of the Rwandan state to categorize everyday life in historical perspective. The purpose is to illustrate that there is nothing new or different about the structural forms of violence that ordinary peasant Rwandans have experienced since the genocide. The policy of national unity and reconciliation represents a continuation of both the various forms of oppression experienced by ordinary Rwandans at the hands of state agents and the imposition of ethnic identities by the state on their everyday lives. As such, this chapter introduces the reader to the sociopolitical structures of Rwandan society to highlight the historical forms of elite relations with nonelites. It introduces the historical foundation of contemporary forms of sociopolitical exclusion by identifying traditional patron-client forms of oppression, concluding with an analysis of the ways in which these practices were used in the postcolonial period by the then political leadership of presidents Grégoire Kayibanda (1962–73) and Juvénal Habyarimana (1973–94). Finally, it examines the processes through which contrasting interpretations of ethnicity and statehood have been manipulated by successive regimes in Rwanda to justify and maintain policies of exclusion, the most recent manifestation of which is the policy of national unity and reconciliation. Such an approach matters because elite characterizations of ethnicity and the contours of the state “can be traced to intense struggles over power carried out by leaders—struggles involving the politicization of ethnicity and a perverse dynamic of violence and fear” (C. Newbury 1998, 7).
The Strategic Roots of National Unity and Reconciliation 
The government’s policy of national unity and reconciliation is grounded in a specific interpretation of more than two centuries of history. According to “historical” documents produced by the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC), Rwandan society was essentially unified before the arrival of colonial powers and the Catholic Church.2 Precolonial social categories did not matter because the three groups were unified by language, religion, loyalty to the Tutsi king, clan lineages, and socioeconomic interdependence. Conflict between groups was rare, and when it did arise it was rooted in regional or clan identities, not ethnic ones. Also implicit in this interpretation of social unity are precolonial class distinctions, with Tutsi being the richest and therefore the most important: “Ethnic groups are . . . characterized by wealth or poverty; they were not based on blood. One could shift from being a Twa or a Hutu and become a Tutsi if he got rich, if he became poor while he was a Tutsi, he was called a Hutu or Twa” (NURC 2000, 19). The RPF’s strategic interpretation of “official” history is that it was colonial rule, first by the Germans, then by the Belgians, that divided Rwandan society and transformed the categories of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa into ethnic categories. The policy of national unity and reconciliation posits that the ethnic divisions imposed on Rwanda by colonial rule are the primary cause of the 1994 genocide: until the arrival of the white man, who “threw down the seeds of ethnic division that caused the [1994] genocide,” the categories of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa had limited social importance, being occupational differences rather than status-based ones (NURC 2004, 11). According to the policy of national unity, the postcolonial Hutu-led governments of Kayibanda and Habyarimana used ethnicity as a tactic to divide Rwandans. These regimes taught that “all Tutsi were foreign invaders who always subjugated and exploited the labour of the Hutu majority” (NURC 2004, 22). It was these false teachings that created the hatred of “all Hutu for all Tutsi” (President Kagame, quoted in Jha and Yadav 2004, 67, my emphasis). This false history also “dehumanized Tutsi,” which resulted in a “widely-held belief that minority Tutsi were less deserving of basic rights than the majority Hutu” (Kimonyo 2000, 107). The official narrative of national unity and reconciliation also sees the 1994 genocide as rooted in bad governance and weak leadership, which manipulated ethnic identities to hold onto state power (NURC 2004, 5–6). The postcolonial regimes encouraged an obedient and tractable population, which allowed an ideology of genocide “to take hold in the minds of Hutu” (Office of the President 1999, 54). To counteract the ingrained teachings of the postcolonial regimes, the current government teaches an ideology of national unity and reconciliation through a variety of social and political mechanisms (discussed at length in chapter 4). Significant state resources are dedicated to ensuring that the population understands the importance of unity. The postgenocide government has established mandatory solidarity camps known as ingando to “reeducate” the population. Politicians, church leaders, ex-combatants, released prisoners, gacaca judges, and incoming university students attend ingando for periods ranging from several days to several months. Ingando lecturers, all of whom are RPF loyalists, teach participants the official interpretation of history presented in the policy of national unity and reconciliation (NURC 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2007d, 2007e; field notes 2006). The government also encourages a collective memory of the genocide through memorial sites and mass Directory: wp-content -> blogs.dir blogs.dir -> 3rd EurasiaTrajeco Conference blogs.dir -> Tsl 3378 – Pronunciation and tesl professor Paula Golombek blogs.dir -> Electrical engineering degree technical elective requirement blogs.dir -> The Security Organs of the Russian Federation a brief History 1991-2005 blogs.dir -> Aurelia aubert blogs.dir -> Task: Choose a play in which an important theme is effectively highlighted by one specific scene or incident blogs.dir -> Press release Huawei Releases LampSit 0 for Indoor mbb blogs.dir -> Dues Increase & State of the Union blogs.dir -> Civil Division General Information Booklet blogs.dir -> Away in the basement Download 3.15 Mb. Share with your friends:
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