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
