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
