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Chapter 1

Silencing the Past: Producing History and the Politics of Memory

Like many outsiders visiting or living in Rwanda—expatriate aid workers, researchers, tourists—I visited the Murambi genocide memorial early in my time there, in July 2004, as I was conducting several months of fieldwork on the politics of commemoration at the ten-year anniversary of the genocide. Murambi is located three kilometers outside the town of Gikongoro in the southwest of Rwanda. It was the site of a massacre in which tens of thousands of Tutsi men, women, and children were killed while seeking refuge in April 1994 at a technical school that was under construction. Murambi was (and still is) one of the most publicized genocide memorials in Rwanda, in large part because more than eight hundred corpses have been disinterred and remain preserved in chalky white limestone, carefully resting on low tables in room after room of the original school.

What made my visit different from the visits of most others who went to Murambi between 2004 and 2011 is that I was invited to come inside the two-story administrative building, which was added in 1998, to see the exhibit a few weeks before it was due to be formally opened. I had ridden to Murambi that morning with a Rwandan staff member of Aegis Trust, the British NGO that just three months earlier, in April 2004, had successfully opened the national genocide memorial in the Gisozi section of Kigali. Aegis also had a contract to turn Murambi into one of the Ministry of Memory’s seven designated national genocide memorials, and there were plans to have an official opening later that month.¹ The day I visited the Murambi site it was buzzing with activity, as dozens of people worked outside and inside, finishing reexcavating a mass grave from which bodies had been disinterred years before, smoothing cement on the collective burial site, erecting a flagpole, laying carpet, adjusting lights, washing windows, painting walls and fences. A landscape architect walked around on his own, surveying the site. My Aegis colleague first accompanied me on a tour, in which the primary guide—an elderly man whom I saw on later visits, with a pronounced divot on his skull where, as he explained, he had narrowly missed being killed by a bullet during the massacre at Murambi—opened doors to room after room filled with ghostly bodies of those killed by the massacre.² My colleague then suggested I go inside on my own to look at the exhibit, which was almost complete, while he did further consultations.

Inside, after I recovered (as much as one can) from the emotional and sensory assault of the seemingly endless corpses, I saw confirmation that the work on the memorial was indeed nearly complete. I recognized the floor-to-ceiling panels that lined the walls (Figure 1) as very similar to those at the Gisozi genocide memorial in Kigali. They told the story of Rwanda’s history in virtually the same way, with a combination of enlarged photographs and images interspersed with text in three languages (English, French, and Kinyarwanda). The final sections emphasized the history specifically of what had occurred on this site (see the text in the box at the end of this chapter). One wall prominently featured a six-minute video including interviews with survivors and some of the alleged perpetrators of the Murambi massacre. A survivor’s narrative was prominently displayed on another wall. My host later told me that, as the text indicated, officials planned to “scientifically preserve” (cryogenically freeze, another Aegis staff told me) three corpses in the interior room, and to reinter the remaining corpses outside, pursuant to the wishes of many survivors to provide proper burial for victims.

At the close of the day, as we returned to Kigali, my host invited me to return to Murambi to attend the official opening a few weeks later. For the next several months, as I continued to follow up with him, he or his colleagues repeatedly told me that the official opening had been postponed, for this or that simple reason. When I returned to the States, the interior space remained unopened. In later years as I returned to Rwanda and at times visited Murambi, the interior remained closed, except to allow visitors to enter, sign a guest book, and make a donation. I was told by a variety of guides that there was “nothing inside,” or it was “not open yet,” or it would “open sometime soon.” Behind the main building in the original rooms of the technical school, the excavated bodies remained in their places on wooden slats. Meanwhile, changes to the exterior spaces reflected the ongoing professionalization of the site, consistent with a global lexicon of memorialization, including additional signage, and an aesthetically haunting display of victims’ clothes strung on lines in an open-ended school room. Evidence of the unraveling of diplomatic ties between Rwanda and France surfaced, including two new signs marking “Place of French Flag during Operation Turquoise” and “French soldiers were playing volley here” atop a knoll that guides repeatedly emphasized was the location of the original mass grave.

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 of cattle clientship. Ubuhake was a contract between individuals in which the patron (shebuja) gave one or two head of cattle to the client (umugaragu) in usufruct but maintained ownership of the cattle and assured his client of protection. The client had to help his patron whenever needed, and the relationship was hereditary (Maquet 1961:129–142; Vansina 2004:47). The institution had a powerful political role in incorporating Rwandans in a dense network of social ties, yet it was a network that resulted in a social integration based on inequality, in which Hutu had access to cattle and protection, while Tutsi maintained ultimate control over cattle, the symbol of political, economic, and social power (Maquet 1961; Reyntjens 1987:72–73). Anti-Tutsi propaganda in newspapers, radio, and schools from 1959 through 1994 cast ubuhake as a historically deep form of domination and exploitation of all Hutu by all Tutsi in the precolonial and colonial periods. Much scholarship has, however, now shown that while there was indeed deep inequality in precolonial Rwanda, precolonial kings were not simply autocrats who ruled as they pleased (Vansina 2004:66, 85), and patronclient institutions did not merely involve exploitation of subordinate Hutu (C. Newbury 1988:90; Vansina 2004:33).⁷

Similarly, the peopling of Rwanda—when the peoples referred to as Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa arrived in the territory now called Rwanda—has been long contested. The dominant view was that Tutsi arrived in the region centuries after Hutu, but the details and implications of this view remain contentious. Did it mean Tutsi were destined to rule, or that they were foreigners who should not be allowed to do so? Did it mean Hutu were autochthonous and therefore had rights to govern? There remains debate about the precise amount and origins of biological difference and what the differences mean for interpreting human migrations (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994; Excoffier et al. 1987; Mamdani 2001:43–50), but Vansina’s recent analysis suggests that what physical differences existed must go back millennia, not centuries, as posited in the migration histories (Vansina 2004:37–38, 198).

Current scholarship argues that the categories of Hutu and Tutsi were primarily socioeconomic, referring to elites or to control over wealth (particularly cattle) and power (C. Newbury 1988:11–12). As far back as the seventeenth century, the term Tutsi “referred mostly to a social class among herders, a political elite,” while the term Hutu applied to everyone else, including poor Tutsi and foreigners (Vansina 2004:37, 134–135).⁸ The boundaries of the ethnic categories had some flexibility, so people could move across statuses over generations as their families gained or lost wealth (D. Newbury 1998:84–86, 2009; Twagilimana 2003:55). Further, ethnicity was only one form of identity, and other forms, such as region, class, lineage (a corporate descent group), and clan (a social descent group), were often more significant (d’Hertefelt 1971; C. Newbury 1978:17, 1988; D. Newbury 1998:83, 2009). The term for ethnic group, ubwoko, also translates as clan. Each clan was made up of people from all three putative “ethnicities,” and clans changed over time, operating as strategic alliances between lineages (C. Newbury 1988:96, 1980b; Vansina 2004:34–35, 198).

Colonial rule arrived in Rwanda when the first German colonial officer arrived in 1897. Two decades of German rule influenced primarily the royal court without interfering substantially in internal affairs. When Belgians took over Rwanda during World War I, in 1916, they extended their influence deeper than that of the Germans, such that Belgian rule had more extensive social and economic impacts. The colonial state contributed to formalizing and legitimizing the Hutu-Tutsi distinction, reifying formerly fluid boundaries, in its efforts to make more legible the existing complex ethnic configurations (Lemarchand 2009:9; Scott 1998). As part of the standardization of the administration in the late 1920s, the Belgians introduced identity cards that marked ethnicity (Des Forges 1995; Twagilimana 2003:55). The reification of ethnic groups was linked to European ideas of biological race, and it took an essentialized and hierarchical view of Hutu and Tutsi, which contemporary scholarship has completely debunked. It built on the Hamitic Hypothesis, put forth by explorer John Hanning Speke in 1863. Speke proposed that a race of tall, sharp-featured people who had Caucasian origins and were superior to the native Negro had introduced the cultures and civilizations of Central Africa.⁹ Anthropologists converted Speke’s conjectures into scientific truths with regard to African peoples in ensuing years (e.g., Seligman 1930; Westermann 1949 [1934]).¹⁰

Through the twentieth century, scholars writing on Rwanda continued to emphasize that there were three separate groups in Rwanda (Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa), and continued to imply that their current form had existed relatively unchanged since Tutsi arrived in the tenth century (D. Newbury and C. Newbury 2000:836; Twagilimana 2003:53). For example, anthropologist Jacques Maquet described Rwandans’ prevailing stereotypes of each other in the 1950s as follows: “Tutsi were said to be intelligent (in the sense of astute in political intrigues), capable of command, refined, courageous, and cruel; Hutu, hardworking, not very clever, extrovert, irascible, unmannerly, obedient, physically strong” (Maquet 1961:164).¹¹ Explanatory models privileging biology were perhaps particularly seductive and enduring in the absence of other clear markers of difference between the groups.¹² Even as belief in the scientific validity of race began to weaken and scholars moved from biological toward other sociocultural means of identifying groups, Hutu and Tutsi did not fit easily into typical definitions of ethnic groups as marked by distinctive cultural features, such as language or religion, used to define boundaries in opposition to other collective identities (Eller 1999; Tambiah 1989; Weber 1968:389). While occupation varied, what cultural differences existed were minimal—for example, preferences in diet—and the groups had intermarried for centuries.

Further, the colonial period dramatically increased the political salience of ethnicity, while undermining the political autonomy of lineage groups and their role as a form of belonging, and changing the relations between the groups Hutu and Tutsi for the worse (Lemarchand 1970; Longman 2010a; C. Newbury 1988; Reyntjens 1985). Both the Germans and the Belgians, accompanied by the Catholic Church, ruled indirectly through the Tutsi kings and chiefs and discriminated against Hutu. Tutsi elites had preferential access to education and to administrative and church positions, because colonial leaders believed Tutsi were superior and excluded Hutu. Further, Rwandan political leaders used these outside ideas in their own efforts to articulate agendas and mobilize followers, with divisive consequences. The growing power of the colonial state privileged Tutsi’s access to power while incorporating Rwanda into the world economy, which dramatically increased the advantages and disadvantages of being Tutsi versus being Hutu. While Tutsi chiefs had political power and were in a position to accumulate wealth through taxes, rural dwellers, who were predominantly Hutu, faced new demands, particularly under the Belgians, including increased taxes, compulsory cultivation of certain crops, and forced labor. Clientship institutions, particularly ubuhake, became less reciprocal and voluntary—in conditions of growing economic insecurity, people’s “choice” to enter into clientship was a form of indirect or direct coercion—and more rigid and exploitative, as they extended to less powerful people and became aligned with administrative demands (C. Newbury 1988:137–140). Overall, the condition of rural Hutu worsened, as they bore the brunt of the increasingly onerous forms of exploitation and discrimination (C. Newbury 1988:178–179; Reyntjens 1985:135–142). Yet not all the Tutsi were elites, even during the colonial period when virtually all elites were Tutsi (Codere 1973:70; D. Newbury and C. Newbury 2000:839).

The transition from colonial rule to independence is another period of Rwandan history that has been highly contested, described either as a democratic revolution framed around legitimate grievances where the majority took power from the minority or as precursor to genocide. By the 1950s, when Tutsi elites began calls for independence, Hutu activists became increasingly vocal, arguing that the elite Tutsi ruled in an oppressive and dominating manner, both under the precolonial feudal system and under Belgian rule, and benefited unfairly from the colonial administration. Hutu activists sought to address poverty, inequality, insecure access to land, inadequate access to education, and youth issues, and they argued for democracy and majority rule (Lemarchand 1970; C. Newbury 1988; Reyntjens 1985). They were successful in large part because they responded to and channeled widespread legitimate rural discontent generated by Hutu’s shared structural position of oppression (C. Newbury 1978, 1980, 1988).

The United Nations set a date for independence, which Lemarchand (1970) argues propelled revolution and violence, because Hutu parties wanted to ensure they, not the Tutsi monarchy, held power before the deadline. The Belgian authorities and the Catholic Church switched their support to these newly established Hutu revolutionaries. The ensuing revolution was “powerfully assisted if not engineered by the Belgian authorities” (Lemarchand 2009:31). In 1959, the reigning king (Umwami Rudahigwa) died. In September 1959, Hutu parties won an overwhelming majority in legislative elections and decisively rejected the monarchy via referendum. On July 1, 1962, Rwanda regained formal independence from European rule.

The Hutu Revolution (1959–1962) was directed not against the Belgian colonial administration but against Tutsi, who faced intimidation and communal violence (Codere 1962; Lemarchand 1970; C. Newbury 1988:195; Reyntjens 1985:267–269). In November 1959, in response to a nonfatal Tutsi attack on a Hutu subchief, a group of Hutu attacked and killed four Tutsi notables. Widespread violent incidents against Tutsi spread across the country in a matter of days, sparing only three districts, though the attacks were initially limited mainly to burning and looting (C. Newbury 1988:194–195). Anti-Tutsi violence flared periodically and became more deliberate and marked with more bloodshed between November 1959 and the September 1961 elections (Lemarchand 1970).

The First Republic, from 1962 to 1973, was led by President Gregoire Kayibanda and his coalition of Hutu from the south. In 1963, exiled Tutsis invaded unsuccessfully from Burundi. In 1973, Juvénal Habyarimana seized the presidency in a popularly backed military coup, and he led the Second Republic from 1973 to 1994, with a northern Hutu power base. Scholars agree that after the transition in power at independence, Hutu leaders in the First and Second Republics did not reverse the oppressive leadership style of Rwabugiri and colonial authorities but continued to rule authoritatively, to centralize power in a small ethnic and regionally determined elite, to be intolerant of opposition, and to discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, now against Tutsi (Jefremovas 2002:124–125; Lemarchand 1970, 2009; Reyntjens 1985:521). Hutu revolutionaries in 1959–1962 and the Hutu-power government in the 1990s operated by similar logics, especially in terms of the marginalization of moderates, dynamics of fear, and winner-take-all politics (C. Newbury 1998).

The First and Second Republics created a political situation that excluded Tutsi from power and periodically victimized innocent Tutsi. In addition to the attacks between 1959 and 1961, after the failed Tutsi armed incursion in 1963 from Burundi, Tutsi political leaders were eliminated and between ten thousand and fourteen thousand Tutsi were killed, while thousands more were forced into exile (De Lame 2005:59; Reyntjens 1985:460–467). Beginning in 1973, there was another wave of violence when Habyarimana targeted Tutsi students and school staff in pogroms. Over time, this discrimination and violence created an extensive Tutsi diaspora community who became stateless but had legitimate claims to live in Rwanda. Between 1959 and 1963, two hundred thousand Tutsi were forced into exile: seventy thousand to Uganda, twenty-five thousand to the DRC (formerly Zaire), and fifty thousand to Burundi (Lemarchand 2009:31). By the 1980s, between four hundred thousand and six hundred thousand refugees were estimated to be living in neighboring countries, many the children of Tutsi who had fled earlier waves of violence (C. Newbury 1995:13). These refugees suffered as second-class citizens, unable to integrate into their host country, while the Habyarimana government claimed that due to demographic pressures, they could not return to Rwanda (C. Newbury 1995:13; Prunier 2009:13–16). For example, in 1982, thousands of Rwandan refugees in Uganda were forced to leave by President Milton Obote, but upon their arrival in Rwanda, they were refused the right to repatriate and were kept again in refugee camps until they were eventually returned to Uganda.

In 1990, a group of armed exiles, mostly Tutsi, successfully organized and invaded Rwanda as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), fighting to overthrow Habyarimana’s government. Civil war ensued for the next three years. Anti-Tutsi violence intensified after the RPF invasion in 1990, when there were frequent retaliatory killings against Tutsi, as the Hutu government identified all Tutsi as RPF accomplices, who they feared were attempting to reestablish Tutsi hegemony. These massacres have been seen as “practice” for genocide (Lemarchand 2009:84; D. Newbury 1998:78).

Within Rwanda during the Second Republic, while elites consolidated power and there were advancements in public works, urban development, public health, and enrichment of a middle class, at the same time, poverty and inequality grew for rural Rwandans, both Hutu and Tutsi, often in relation to land access (Ansoms and Marysse 2005; De Lame 2005:63–64, 246; C. Newbury 1995; D. Newbury 1998; Reyntjens 1985:523). By the late 1980s, in the lead-up to genocide, tensions were exacerbated by the dynamics of the global political economy. Global coffee prices collapsed in 1989, and the International Monetary Fund implemented structural adjustment programs, including devaluing Rwanda’s currency in 1990 and requiring Rwandans to “cost-share,” which included paying higher fees for public services such as primary school, health care, and water. These factors both resulted in sharply deteriorating economic conditions and increased poverty for the vast majority of Rwandans (C. Newbury 1995; D. Newbury 1998:89). These economic constraints, combined with the disconnect between rural people and elites, which meant rural people were not meaningfully connected to the changing political situation, contributed to social tension and fear, especially among male youth, who were particularly vulnerable to recruitment by militias (C. Newbury and D. Newbury 1999: 91–92; D. Newbury 1998).

During this period, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, outside powers that controlled the flow of economic resources to Rwanda pushed the democratization process and legitimization of multipartyism (De Lame 2005:65). This reorganized structures of power and forced Habyarimana to open political space to others, which angered powerful members of his own regime and contributed to elites trying to eliminate challengers and reassert their hold on social, economic, and political dominance (Longman 1995; C. Newbury and D. Newbury 1999; D. Newbury 1998:80, 89). In 1991, Rwanda legitimized a multiparty system, which intensified the contest for political power. In 1993, with the support of the major Western powers, Tanzania brokered peace talks between the Rwandan government and the RPF that resulted in a power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha Accords.

Scholars have shown that during the early 1990s the organizational planning and conditions for genocide were put in place, countering interpretations dominant in the Western media that the violence was the unfortunate escalation of a civil war or a spontaneous eruption of hatred among people who were inherently violent (Des Forges 1999; Lemarchand 1995; Longman 1995; Mamdani 2001; C. Newbury 1995; D. Newbury 1995; Prunier 1995). They have shown that the genocide resulted not from a failed state but rather, from an unduly strong one, where state apparatuses—political organizations, military, and the administration—were used to commit genocide (Des Forges 1995; Lemarchand 2009:85). Organization involved distinct sets of actors, including Habyarimana’s core group, the Presidential Guard, rural organizers at the commune level, and civilian militias called Interahamwe, “those who stand together.” The genocide ideology of hatred targeting Tutsi was key to these efforts and was well established by 1992 (Des Forges 1995). Planning intensified after the signing of the Arusha Accords in 1993, when hardline elements within the Rwandan government and other Hutu extremists exploited ethnically based ideologies to mobilize the population as a strategy for maintaining power and simultaneously stepped up efforts to organize, indoctrinate, and arm segments of their supporters. Consistent with the dominant narrative, scholars have pointed to the role of the media and schools in fomenting ethnic division in the lead up to the genocide, particularly by propagating racist anti-Tutsi writings, cartoons, and songs, often based on the Hamitic ideology (Chrétien 1995; Des Forges 1995; King 2014; Lemarchand 2009). The international development aid system supported the processes that underlay the genocide by, for example, financing the processes of social exclusion, perpetuating humiliating practices, and ignoring growing racialization (Uvin 1998:224–238). The international arms trade in the wake of the end of the Cold War made it possible for the government to provide weapons for the newly developed militias (D. Newbury 1998:90). International actors knew about, but did not try to stop, growing anti-Tutsi massacres in the 1990s, and France even assisted the Habyarimana regime’s military efforts against the RPF (Kroslak 2007; Lemarchand 2009:84).

On April 6, 1994, as President Habyarimana was flying home from finalizing details of the Arusha Accords, his plane was shot down above the Kigali airport. This plane crash, blamed by the Hutu government on Tutsi rebels, triggered a coordinated attempt by Hutu extremists to eliminate the Tutsi population. Within hours, a campaign of violence ignited in the capital and began to spread through the country. The Tutsi-led RPF broke the Arusha cease-fire and relaunched a military campaign, resuming its civil war against the Hutu regime. The country was thrown into confusion. The violence was carried out by highly organized state armies, as well as the coordinated and trained Interahamwe militias, which were groups of armed youth indoctrinated in the Hutu-power ideology who killed and openly terrorized the population. Though a U.N. peacekeeping force had twenty-five thousand troops on the ground, they were quickly withdrawn, along with foreign nationals. Adding to the confusion of the period, the vast majority of Hutu took to the roads, fleeing the violence and the approach of the RPF.

The details of the violence were horrifying, intimate, and unimaginable.¹³ People targeted by the genocidal regime, whether Tutsi or Hutu opposition, had little chance of survival. Soldiers and police officers encouraged or coerced civilian involvement and forced civilians to “kill or be killed.” Tutsi and those trying to protect them were massacred en masse in churches, schools, and public buildings where they gathered seeking safety, and were sought out in their homes and hunted while fleeing. Many of the people who killed their fellow Rwandans—often intimately, with machetes—had grown up together, went to the same churches and schools, and even intermarried and were related. Women of childbearing age were targeted, especially as objects of rape, sexual humiliation, and sexual mutilation (D. Newbury 1998). Identity cards—introduced by the Belgians but maintained by the First and Second Republics—were used by killers to determine victims’ ethnicity. While the genocide spread nationwide, violence did not play out uniformly across the country; some politicians fought to avoid escalation of violence, and many individuals sought to save neighbors (Des Forges 1999; Janzen 2000; Jefremovas 1995; Longman 1995; Nduwayo 2002; D. Newbury 1998:80–82). In areas where peasants were relatively cohesive and empowered, they were less susceptible to ethnic appeals, and therefore violence had to be imported from outside (Des Forges 1999; Longman 1995). Many people protected others with whom they felt bonds of kin, neighborhood, religion, or humanity.

Researchers have shown clearly the egregiousness of the international community’s failure to act, detailing the ways the U.N. Security Council and key actors such as the United States hesitated and did not intervene in ways that could have saved lives (Dallaire 2003; Power 2002; Prunier 1995). Members of the French government are widely understood, within Rwanda and outside, to have supported the genocidal regime and to have led a controversial intervention (Operation Turquoise) that resulted in aiding the escape of thousands of perpetrators (Kroslak 2007).

Debate remains on many points over the genocide: why people joined the killers, and how to understand the link between elite propaganda and individual actions; what the scale and meaning of Hutu casualties were; what the scale of participation was—how many Hutu participated versus how many tried to save neighbors, and how wide the web of collective guilt should be cast; and whether the RPF fighters were heroes or aggressors (Davenport and Stam 2009; Fujii 2009; Straus 2006; Vidal 1998). Those who call this period a civil war and negate the existence of genocide, equating all the killing during this period, are in disagreement with prevailing opinion and scholarship—and, since 2008, in contravention of Rwanda’s genocide ideology law.

Further, the quantification of genocide victims remains highly contested. In the immediate wake of the genocide, scholars quoted a figure of approximately five hundred thousand victims, but consensus emerged at around eight hundred thousand victims within several years (e.g., Lemarchand 1995, 2009). In April 2004, on the eve of the ten-year anniversary commemorations, the government announced the tally was 937,000 victims, whom they claimed were predominantly Tutsi, and it said that with gacaca ongoing, more victims would likely be identified (Kazoora 2004). This official number rose to more than one million (Kagire 2009). Most scholars believe that both official figures are inflated, and that these numbers must include Hutu, including those killed by the RPF or the newly named Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) during and after the genocide. Davenport and Stam controversially claim that a majority of the victims were most likely Hutu, and that the events should be considered a politicide rather than a genocide (Davenport and Stam 2009).

The genocide is understood to have ended on July 4, 1994, when the RPF captured Kigali. The RPF put in place a government generally based on one that was mandated by the Arusha Accords, and it tried to govern in a situation marked by massive death and destruction, devastated infrastructure, and displaced population. The late 1990s continued to be marked by instability and violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi returnees quickly began to cross the borders from Burundi and Uganda, while hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees left the country for refugee camps in the DRC. Hutu insurgents living in these refugee camps launched periodic attacks into Rwanda, and RPA responded with attacks against them, under General Kagame. In 1996, the RPA was involved militarily in the DRC, both to clear the refugee camps in efforts to eliminate the rebel threat and to help overthrow President Mobutu, widely considered a dictator, and install Lauren-Désiré Kabila. In 1997, internal civil war resumed as rebel insurgents—former Interahamwe and members of Habyarimana’s army—continued their guerrilla warfare across Rwanda, and the RPA retaliated. Again in 1998, the RPA entered the DRC to quell ongoing threats from Hutu Interahamwe. Rwanda made repeated forays into the DRC between 1998 and 2002 before officially withdrawing in 2002 because of the Pretoria Accords (Lemarchand 2009:26–27), but Reyntjens claims the RPA continued to maintain a clandestine presence (Reyntjens 2005:36). The official period of political governance transition ended in 2003 with Paul Kagame’s election as president.

The Postgenocide Government’s Master Narrative of History and Its Implications

The official Hutu-power narrative, propagated by the architects of the genocide to mobilize people and justify the violence, contended that the history of Rwanda was one of conquest by “foreign” Tutsi cattle herders who, through economic and military means, gradually imposed centuries of oppression and exploitation on the Hutu (Eltringham 2004; Malkki 1995; Rutembesa 2002; Semujanga 2003; Twagilimana 2003). This narrative goes on to assert that in the 1959 social revolution, the Hutu reversed this feudal situation and acquired their rightful place. They continued to defend their right to majority rule against domineering, power-hungry Tutsi who wished to reestablish hegemony and oppression, evidenced by continued Tutsi-led violent incursions into Rwanda.

The official postgenocide narrative was a renegotiation of the Hutu-power narrative, with altered evaluations and different implications for future action. It stated that the Abanyarwanda (inhabitants of Rwanda) were a single ethnic group, and that divisions were created by the colonial leaders. As the national genocide memorial, which opened in April 2004, explained in its text, “We had lived in peace for many centuries, but now [with colonial rule] the divide between us had begun.” The dominant narrative contended that the violence of 1959, when Hutu came to power, marked the beginning of the genocide. Having lived side by side with Hutu for centuries in a relationship of mutual respect and even friendship, Tutsi then were oppressed and persecuted under the First and Second Republics for decades building up to 1994. In 1994, according to this narrative, the Rwandan Patriotic Front reversed the trend of Tutsi persecution by defeating the genocidal regime and establishing a government that restored order, including implementing such policies as abolishing ethnicity and promoting national unity.

The official postgenocide master narrative was buttressed by the genocide memorials across the countryside, which served as lieux de mémoire (Nora 1989), ritualized spaces in which people actively produced memory. The careful planning of genocide and the international community’s failure to prevent it were manifest in the enormity of the death toll at any given memorial, often marked in hand-lettered signs—twenty-five thousand victims (Kibeho), 11,400 victims (Kibuye Parish), ten thousand victims (Kibuye stadium), 250,000 victims (Kigali genocide memorial). The scattered limbs and disconnected pelvises, the bullet wounds or machete cuts on skulls, the rosaries clutched in shriveled corpses’ fingers, and the devastated physical structures of the churches or schools in which these were found materially represented victims’ desperation and dehumanization. Victims’ innocence was manifest in the corpses of toddlers, the skulls of children, the baby shoes, and leg braces found within the remains of the buildings. The ubiquity of sites across the landscape and the lost lives they immortalized underscore the narrative’s emphasis on the heroism of the RPF in bringing an end to the terror.

At the same time that the postgenocide authorities were beginning to consolidate a new narrative of history in the wake of the genocide, Trouillot (1995) published his call to examine power in the production of history. This exhortation remains crucial today, particularly in light of the growing critiques against President Kagame and his government, and his reputation as a shrewd information manager. Scholars who have worked in the region for decades conclude that Kagame and the RPF reproduced, rather than corrected, the pattern of politics characterizing colonial and postcolonial rule in the region, including regional and ethnic discrimination, exclusion, corruption, and disregard for the population’s needs (Brauman et al. 2000; Jefremovas 2002; Lemarchand 2009; Prunier 2009; Reyntjens 2005). While the government initially appeared inclusive, within a year there was widespread Hutu flight from government, and Hutu became victims of harassment, imprisonment, and physical elimination by the RPA (Brauman et al. 2000; Reyntjens 1995; Reyntjens 2009:23–34). These patterns were particularly evident in the lead-up to the 2003 elections, when opposition leaders were arrested or mysteriously killed, newspapers were closed, and civil society was constricted (Reyntjens and Vandeginste 2005). Filip Reyntjens and René Lemarchand, longstanding scholars of Rwanda, both call Kagame’s regime a “dictatorship” (Lemarchand 2009; Reyntjens 2005).

As an empirical example illustrating the themes within the government master narrative, I use portions of the text of President Kagame’s speech at the official event marking the ten-year anniversary of the genocide, on April 7, 2004 at Amahoro Stadium in Kigali. President Kagame’s presentation, which I transcribed from an audio recording I made when I attended the commemoration event, was part of a three-hour ceremony that launched the national week of mourning, which included similar speeches, testimonials, and burials of victims throughout the country. Kagame delivered this speech to a stadium crowded with Rwandans, most of whom had been bused there and who had waited for hours in the sun for the event to begin (Figure 2). His speech was preceded by the formal arrival of an impressive array of international dignitaries who attested to the global significance of the occasion, including sitting presidents of Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Congo, and Mozambique, the vice president of Burundi, the prime ministers of Ethiopia and Tanzania, and high-level dignitaries from Belgium, England, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Togo, and Mali, as well as official representatives of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the European Union, and the United Nations. (French representatives were notably absent.) Several of the guests provided short speeches as well, bracketed by the arrival of a Rwandan military delegation, the playing of the new Rwandan national anthem, mourning songs, and survivor testimonials. Kagame began his speech in Kinyarwanda, then indicated that since his key auditors were his international guests, he would shift to English. The speech was televised and broadcast worldwide.

Figure 2. Amahoro Stadium, waiting for President Kagame’s speech, April 7, 2004 (photo by author).

Analyzing what Rwanda’s postgenocide dominant narrative selectively emphasized alongside what it left out denaturalizes the government’s assumptions about belonging and legitimacy of authority, and illuminates how this narrative justified ongoing configurations of power, alliances, and exclusion in the present. As I explore further in subsequent chapters, when this dominant narrative became institutionalized through grassroots legal forums, it rendered certain actions criminal and others invisible, and it contributed to the formation of “genocide citizenship,” in which people’s access to the benefits of citizenship were shaped by their perceived position with respect to the violence of the 1990s, defined in a particular way. Furthermore, it justified law-based (punitive) harmony as crucial to Rwanda’s future.

Discrediting the International Community

Kagame’s speech clearly was directed at an international audience, and it heavily emphasized the negative role played by outsiders in Rwanda for more than a century. For example, he explained, “In many ways the genocide in Rwanda stems from the colonial period when the Colonialists and those who called themselves evangelists sowed the seeds of hate and division. This is evident from the 1959 massacres and subsequent ones which had become the order of the day in Rwanda and in which the international community had become habitual bystanders. These massacres culminated in the 1994 genocide.”

Placing blame on foreigners, akin to the increasingly derisive references to the French at Murambi, was a continuous theme in the master narrative. Doing so morally discredited the West over generations based on its role in sowing division and tolerating violence in Rwanda, beginning with the arrival of the Germans in 1897, continuing with the political upheavals and violence at independence, through the lead-up to genocide, and culminating in the world’s inaction and even support of the genocidal regime. This served to frame Rwandans as twice victims: first of the genocidal regime and second of Western countries, based on insidious racism. In a notable example, Kagame said in his 2004 speech, “All these powerful nations regarded one million lives as valueless, as another statistic, and could be dispensed with. And of course some claimed that the dying people were not in their national strategic interests. But if the death of a million people was not a concern to them, then what is? I hate to think that this may be due to the color of the skin of these Rwandans who died or other Africans who might die in the future. Ten years after the powerful nations eventually called the mass killings by their proper name, genocide, they have not demonstrated proportional responsibility where it belongs.” Comments like these positioned Rwanda in solidarity with the African continent and the non-European developing world more globally.

Further, placing blame on foreigners exonerated Rwandans (particularly Tutsi) for certain forms of oppression and division in the past and the present. It was a counter-hegemonic move to neutralize international critiques of the RPF in the past or present and justify the government’s ongoing efforts to chart its own fate, consistent with the widespread use of culture to justify mediation in harmony legal models. Also, it allowed the postgenocide government to assert that the international community had a moral obligation to provide ongoing support, but on the RPF’s own terms.

Indeed, as I discussed earlier in the chapter, the international community carries a share of the blame. For good reason, between 2004 and 2008, the Hamitic Hypothesis was mentioned in newspaper articles, narrated by taxi drivers and tour guides, included as part of Rwanda’s official colonial history in the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center (Smith 2004:9), and referenced in virtually every academic and popular history of Rwanda.¹⁴ For more than a century, Europeans had argued that Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa constituted distinctly separate racial or ethnic groups.¹⁵ In the 1950s, the ideas at the core of the Hamitic myth were at the center of the Hutu Revolution, when leaders claimed Hutu autochthony and therefore rights to govern, while Tutsi were cast as foreign and innately domineering (Lemarchand 2009:58). In the 1990s, the same ideas played a central role in anti-Tutsi propaganda in the lead-up to genocide (Chrétien 1995:139–208). As I outlined earlier, scholars have further shown that the international community played a role in the escalating tensions and violence in Rwanda between the 1950s and 1990s and did not do enough to stop the genocide.

But placing blame on colonial leaders—and by extension on the West in the present—overlooks the problems in place under Rwandan leadership. Specifically, it erases how the reign of King Rwabugiri (1867–1897),¹⁶ who ruled immediately prior to the arrival of colonial leadership, marked a crisis of social health and spurred the formation of resistance or liberation movements directed against the monarchy, as well as examples of anti-Tutsi violence (Botte 1985a,1985b; Feierman 1995; Vansina 2004:137–138). Under Rwabugiri, internal factional rivalry among elite families fueled competition and further territorial expansion that increased insecurity and impoverishment for the bulk of the population, herders as well as farmers (D. Newbury 2009; Vansina 2004:126–139,163). The “nearly permanent recourse to violence” created social instability and led to social disaggregation (Vansina 2004:164–195). Catharine Newbury and Jan Vansina point specifically to the role of uburetwa, a form of mandatory unpaid labor performed for a chief as payment for occupation of the land, as “poisoning” interethnic relations because it was imposed only on farmers, not herders (C. Newbury 1980, 1988; Vansina 2004:134–139). To do uburetwa symbolized low status and powerlessness, and it was “difficult to exaggerate” its “exploitative character” (C. Newbury 1988:141). Uburetwa began under Rwabugiri, and although it would become even more inflexible and humiliating under colonialism, its damaging effects were well entrenched in the late nineteenth century (C. Newbury 1980; Vansina 2004:135–139, 192).¹⁷ Uburetwa remained relevant to understanding the meaning of exchange of labor in postgenocide Rwanda, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3.

In addition to silencing the existence of precolonial problems, placing blame primarily on the West overlooks how the system of “dual colonial rule” meant colonialism’s negative effects were attributable not only to Europeans but also to Rwandan elites (C. Newbury 1988:53; Reyntjens 1985:161–170). While Belgian policies increased chiefs’ power and provided incentives and rationalizations, through entry into the world economy, for them to take advantage of the rural population, it was the Rwandan chiefs themselves who determined how to meet, resist, or further exacerbate these demands, how much to privilege their own advancement at the expense of others, and how colonialism influenced the transformation of clientship ties (C. Newbury 1988:117–150). Many Tutsi chiefs ruled exploitatively, wielding power arbitrarily (Lemarchand 1970:35–40; Reyntjens 1985). Rwandan leaders, including Tutsi chiefs, were complicit in accepting and propagating the racial model of human diversity that Europeans brought to Central Africa. Framing the Hutu Revolution at independence as the result of colonially introduced ethnicity and as the early expression of genocidal ideology overlooks the long-term evolution of rural grievances underlying the transformations of 1959–1962, and the fact that the revolution addressed the political exclusion of the Hutu peasants who composed 80 percent of the population (Lemarchand 2009:31; C. Newbury 1978, 1980, 1988:178–179, 207–208).

Placing blame on the West during the genocide also allows the RPF to claim the moral high ground and solidify its “genocide credit” (Lemarchand 2009; Reyntjens 2005; Vidal 2001). For example, Kagame emphasized the moral purity of the RPF in his 2004 speech, saying, “I also have to thank the soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. In the fight many gave their lives in the cause of freedom and liberation. I know that every soldier in the RPF knew that the cost was likely to be high but the cause of freedom and liberation was one worth fighting for. We were fighting a difficult and determined enemy who was supported by powerful forces. We were fighting two wars at once. Our soldiers fought by day and rescued victims by night until they halted the genocide. Thank you to all of you.” He continued later, “And I say it, from the lessons we have drawn from our pasts, we will be very eager, and we are committed, to fight for our rights and fight for the rights for others who are targeted like the people of Rwanda were targeted during the genocide.” This attention to the moral virtue of the RPF erases accusations against Kagame and his RPF soldiers of committing atrocities during the genocide, specifically human rights abuses and reprisal killings against innocent Hutu civilians as the RPF pushed through Rwanda to Kigali.¹⁸ High-ranking Rwandan and international military personnel have argued that Kagame’s goals as head of the RPF were first and foremost to gain political control of Rwanda, and only secondarily to halt the genocide, with full awareness of the cost this would bring to Tutsi (Dallaire 2003:515; Prunier 2009:15; Ruzibiza 2005:10). Scholars argue that the RPF (now the RPA) continued to perpetuate violence and human rights abuses in the years after the genocide. By 1995, RPA soldiers conducted reprisal killings and created domestic insecurity, while Hutu were imprisoned summarily on genocide accusations (Reyntjens 1995). While Kagame claimed that only three hundred people were killed during the closing of a refugee camp in Kibeho in southern Rwanda in 1995, other reports claim as many as five thousand innocent people were killed (Lemarchand 2009:73; Prunier 2009:37–42). Some reports claim that in 1997 at least sixteen thousand innocent Hutu civilians in the north were killed when the RPA responded to incursions by Hutu rebels into Rwanda (Reyntjens 2009:175–176). Drawing attention to these RPF/RPA abuses should not be confused with supporting the double genocide theory or its implication that the RPF/RPA counterattacks exonerate genocide perpetrators; rather, it is recognition of the multiple forms and sources of violence during the 1990s (Prunier 2009:12–13).

Emphasizing National over Regional Dynamics

Kagame’s ten-year commemoration speech, consistent with the dominant narrative, emphasized the national dynamics of the genocide rather than situating it within a broader set of regional ethnopolitical struggles. Even as he gestured towards regional African cooperation, it was in the context of reiterating the right of a national leader to resolve internal issues. Kagame orated, “It is very important that the African countries get together, we sort out our national problems, our internal situations to do with good governance, to do with democracy, to do with socio-economic development and work together and protect each other and defend each other for nobody owes us anything as was shown in the case of Rwanda.” Kagame’s national focus sidelined how regional dynamics helped explain and legitimize (though not justify) some of the anti-Tutsi sentiment and the ease with which people could be mobilized by fear to violence. By extension, the national focus ignored how postgenocide governmental actions within and outside Rwanda could have similar ongoing effects on regional instability today. Erasure of regional dynamics in the dominant narrative allowed the RPF to prioritize national resocialization policies rather than macro-political and economic factors. It also continued to locate the solution at the national level, rather than opening the door to international or regional solutions that might promote corrective action in Rwanda’s foreign and domestic policies.

Focusing on ethnicity within natural national borders—which were not coterminous with the Rwandan kingdom over the previous three centuries¹⁹—disregarded the broader entanglement of regional and international sociopolitical dynamics, particularly the waves of violence and genocide against Hutu in Burundi and ongoing war in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa (Autesserre 2010; Lemarchand 2009; Prunier 2009; Reyntjens 2009). These regional dynamics contributed to the pregenocide situation—and arguably to postgenocide dynamics as well—by enflaming fears of ethnic violence, adding fodder for political manipulation, and creating massive movements of refugee populations who were particularly receptive to ethnic-based ideologies (Lemarchand 2009:20; Malkki 1995; C. Newbury and D. Newbury 1999).

Specifically, the dominant narrative ignored the 1972 killings of Hutu by Tutsi in Burundi, massacres that sank into “near oblivion” in broader global memory (Lemarchand 2009:71). In the wake of an aborted Hutu-instigated uprising that caused the death of hundreds or perhaps thousands of Tutsi civilians in Burundi, the ensuing (Tutsi) government-backed repression from April to November 1972 resulted in the deaths of one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand Hutu, specifically primary and secondary school children, university students, teachers, and civil servants (Lemarchand 2009:71). This helps contextualize the anti-Tutsi backlash in Rwanda that paved the way for Habyarimana’s coup in 1973 (Lemarchand 2009).

Ignoring the 1972 events, as well as the October 1993 assassination of the Hutu president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, at the hands of the all-Tutsi army, erased the idea that there was any legitimacy to Hutu fears of power sharing or of Tutsi-generated violence. Ndadaye was the first Hutu president in the history of Burundi, and his election brought to a close twenty-eight years of Tutsi hegemony. His assassination three months after he took office unleashed violence in Burundi on both sides, with Hutu civilians killing up to twenty thousand Tutsi in October and November 1993, and the Tutsi army killing as many Hutu in retaliation. Further, the violence caused some two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand Hutu to seek refuge in Rwanda in 1993 and 1994 (Lemarchand 2009; C. Newbury and D. Newbury 1999:85). In the context of the uneasy truce between the RPF and the Habyarimana government, these events contributed to the Rwandan Hutu-power regime’s anti-Tutsi propaganda and were part of the undoing of any compromise contained in the Arusha Accords.

The national focus of the RPF’s master narrative obscured Rwanda’s problematic role in neighboring countries, only publicizing international interventions when they were consistent with the dominant narrative—for example, claiming that incursions into the DRC were solely driven by efforts to oust génocidaires who remained intent on killing Tutsi, not by desire to control mineral resources or expand territorial sovereignty (Lemarchand 2009:17–19). Yet, Kagame faced accusations of atrocities—crimes against humanity and even possibly genocide—for events in the mid-to-late 1990s in Rwanda and in the DRC where Rwanda “exported” its war (Prunier 2009; Reyntjens 2009). Scholars, human rights activists, and a 2010 U.N. report accused Kagame and his army (the RPA) of the deaths of as many as two hundred thousand civilian refugees during the destruction of refugee camps in the DRC in October 1996, as part of a broader Rwandan desire to overthrow Mobutu and support Kabila (Brauman et al. 2000; Lemarchand 2009:26; Pillay 2010; Prunier 2009; Reyntjens 2009:80–102). Overlooking the fact that four times as many people died in the eastern DRC between 1998 and 2006 as in the genocide, in a war in which Rwanda was heavily involved (Lemarchand 2009:5), maintained the uniqueness of the Rwandan situation to strengthen the RPF’s genocide credit.

Masking Past and Present Divisions

The dominant master narrative emphasized externally produced ethnicity, and how a rogue political regime misused it, to the exclusion of recognizing other kinds of social identities, divisions, and misuses of political power in the past and present. In his speech, President Kagame explained:

Genocide in Rwanda was not an uncontrollable outburst of rage by people consumed by ancient tribal hatreds as has been suggested by some western anthropologists and sociologists and even espoused by some in African scholarship. It was deliberate, calculated, premeditated, and cold blooded as a result of a distorted ideology that preached death and extermination of a section of Rwandan society.… We know that they [killers] were responding to the vicious campaign of hate by the architects of the genocide, men and women who held the highest offices in the land. This elite, which had for a long time misappropriated and controlled the government army, radio and television stations, was most instrumental in fomenting ethnic division and hatred, a strategy they subsequently transformed into genocide.