even if I did not participate in those case sessions myself, and I sat with them through sidebar conversations about gacaca and other legal disputes, while cooking over a wood fire, drinking tea, sharing meals, or walking slowly, fingers interlaced, through hard-packed paths. These engagements with Rwandans outside legal spaces allowed me to recognize with confidence how the discussions I saw within legal forums were connected with daily life more widely.
One of the greatest ethnographic challenges in Rwanda is remaining open and even neutral, walking a tightrope among people carrying harrowing experiences that are often shaped by very different perspectives. For me, the most important measure of legitimacy of the findings I present in these pages lies in whether, and how, the Rwandans who blessed me with their time and trust recognize that I was listening and hearing. Perhaps from this comes the greatest claim to accuracy in the narratives and arguments within this book: if they can see themselves and one another in these stories and recognize how they are engaged in a fragile, iterative, hopefully commensurable process to rebuild.
Outline of the Book
Chapters 1 and 2 provide background and framing, setting the stage for the ethnographic argument in the subsequent chapters. I begin Chapter 1 by examining the production of history and politics of memory in postgenocide Rwanda. I illustrate the dominant version of history the government used from 2004 to 2008 through a speech provided by President Kagame at the ten-year anniversary of the genocide, in order to show how the government framed belonging and justified current configurations of power, connections, and exclusion. Specifically, I argue that the dominant narrative’s lacunae served to discredit the international community, emphasize national rather than regional dynamics, and mask divisions, which rendered thinkable the use of grassroots harmony models and mass prosecutions for genocide crimes. In Chapter 2, I situate the postgenocide legal forums in historical context, showing how contemporary trends toward local legal forums and inequality in law have echoes in earlier periods in Rwanda. I argue that analyzing Rwanda’s postgenocide legal forums as harmony legal models overcomes three persistent dichotomies within transitional justice discourse: it allows us to overcome a reification of transitional justice to see how disputes about ordinary concerns and political violence are intertwined; it corrects an elusive focus on pure customary law as distinct from universal legal principles by attending to the importance of contextualization; and it foregrounds how harmony and punishment are inextricable in these institutions.
In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, I focus on how people maneuvered within the architecture of social repair of gacaca courts, comite y’abunzi, and the legal aid clinic, respectively. In each chapter, I explore how people experienced mediation efforts combined with punishment across these different forums. In Chapter 3, I show how gacaca sessions were deeply contextualized, and thus served as spaces in which people could reconstruct moral orders, debating the meaning of collective belonging and negotiating the micropolitics of reconciliation in relation to genocide citizenship and material loyalty. I suggest that the contentious conversations in gacaca sessions brought to the fore some of the disagreements and divisions lurking behind Rwandans’ superficial public agreements, and illustrated the widespread disagreement with the simplified notions of causality, guilt, and innocence in the master narrative.
In Chapter 4 I shift to an examination of comite y’abunzi as a harmony legal model in which law-backed mediation combined harmony and punishment. I show how, as with gacaca, comite y’abunzi sessions entailed contextualized conversations in which people negotiated the micropolitics of reconciliation, specifically in relation to family and community. Cases before comite y’abunzi were both within families and between families and often centered on land, and thus they were intimately intertwined with the economics of memory and negotiating the meaning of exchange in relation to social networks. These cases in particular show the overlaps between genocide-related disputes and quotidian disputes in the aftermath of genocide, complicating assumptions about among whom and about what “reconciliation” needed to occur in postgenocide Rwanda.
I turn to the legal aid clinic in Chapter 5, examining how harmony and punishment combined in similar and different ways in a legal forum based not on customary law but on universal legal principles. I show how clients at the legal aid clinic were frequently directed to mediation as in the other forums, and consider how the contextualization again allowed for people to use these mediation efforts as spaces to contest the meaning of family, community, and justice. Cases before the legal aid clinic bring to light tensions between legalization and mediation, and they show how mediation was situated within a broader system of dispute resolution. These cases further show the limitations of focusing exclusively on genocide crimes versus ordinary disputes, or on customary-style law as distinct from Western-style law.
In Chapter 6, I focus on the mediators at the heart of these legal forums, showing how they served as intermediaries between professional representatives of government and their neighbors. Lay judges’ deep insider status illustrates the deep contextualization of these harmony models. Attention to lay judges reveals the textured ways the government-through-community approach unfolded. I claim that lay judges showed a side of state power that was improvisational and ambiguous, which is crucial to moving beyond coercion to understand how people experienced variations in state power in Rwanda. In the Conclusion, I briefly offer three cautions for transitional justice and peace-building practice: to relinquish the search for a pure cultural solution; to recognize that while coercion and instrumentality may be increased by legal forums they are not uniquely created by them; and to recognize that reconciliation processes may indeed be inherently violent and fraught.
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
