2005:15, 105, 305), and they were at the heart of debates in legal forums, as I describe further in the social-history overview in Chapter 1 and in the discussion of gacaca in Chapter 3.
I also draw attention throughout to the ways gender roles, relations, and ideologies were sites of contestation and renegotiation through law-backed mediation.31 Rwandans, particularly in rural areas, were heavily influenced by normative ideas of gender both before and after the genocide (Burnet 2012; De Lame 2005; Jefremovas 1991; Taylor 1992). In her recent ethnography that provides the most sustained ethnographic analysis of gender dynamics in contemporary Rwanda, Burnet argues: “Women are viewed positively when they are reserved, submissive, modest, silent, and maternal, when they maintain a ‘respectable’ household, and when they raise ‘wise’ children. They are viewed negatively when they gossip, are loud and overly emotional, or have a dirty house or rude children. By contrast, men should be self-assured, dominant, logical, brave, and physically strong” (Burnet 2012:44). These assumptions about gender roles permeate the examples throughout the book, captured also in the categories of “virtuous wives, “timid virgins,” and, more pejoratively, “loose women,” which Villia Jefremovas (1991) described in pregenocide Rwanda. The cases I explore throughout the book show how people brokering compromises in grassroots legal forums tended to adhere to these essentialist or naturalized roles for women (as wives, mothers, or conflict avoiders), a framing that could circumscribe possibilities for individual women, even while it sometimes helped them to achieve specific legal rights.
Specifically, I draw attention to how people negotiated the socially embedded, relational nature of their rights, which is a feature of African customary law more widely (Weeks 2013). Rwandan women’s lives were shaped by patrilineal kinship norms in which unmarried girls, married women, and widows derived their social identities as well as their rights to access to resources from the men to whom they were related (Burnet 2012:43). In the postgenocide context, even as efforts were made to improve women’s rights and individual security—including changes in national law to assure ownership rights for women, increased legal protections, and more representation by women in government decision-making bodies—women remained vulnerable, especially in rural areas, in part because of persisting normative assumptions that women’s access to resources were linked to unequal relationships to particular men, especially in a context of widespread death and dislocation. As Burnet explains, “Women’s economic lives were circumscribed by contemporary interpretations of patrilineal inheritance systems whereby women remained economically harnessed to economic units controlled by male relatives” (2012:76). Yet, while the relational nature of women’s rights could render women more vulnerable, it also increased space for negotiation, as women debated prevailing assumptions about care and obligation within these social categories. Burnet argues that it is precisely women’s role as the “primary social mediators between households, kin groups, and community” (2012:13) that gave them some space to help transform Rwandan society.
Finally, I show one of the ways legal forums shaped conceptions of ethnicity in postgenocide Rwanda, by creating what I call “genocide citizenship.” I build on work by contemporary anthropologists who explore how ethnic logics persist in Rwanda today, as ethnicity remains one among many salient factors of Rwandans’ identity, intertwined with other forms of identification, such as class, gender, age, and region (Eltringham 2011; Hintjens 2008). I supplement their focus on ethnicity in everyday life, including among youth (McLean Hilker 2009, 2011, 2012), educated urban residents (Eramian 2014a, 2014b), women (Burnet 2009), and members of the diaspora (Eltringham 2004) by showing how ethnicity shapes, and is shaped by, discussions in legal forums. As I discuss more fully in Chapter 3, I argue that within the postgenocide context marked by the official erasure of ethnicity, legal forums perhaps paradoxically solidified social categories linked to one’s position with respect to the genocide, which were formalized by the state and carried access to state-backed resources (hence serving as a form of genocide citizenship).
Overall, this book adds to contemporary anthropological scholarship on Rwanda by providing detail on how people maneuvered within the legal architecture of social repair that was such a pronounced part of Rwanda’s postgenocide reconstruction efforts, showing how law-backed mediation shaped the meanings of institutions and practices such as exchange, gender, and ethnicity in other social fields. Analyzing mediation practices, specifically how they combine calls for unity with punishment in legal forums, allows us to attend to the processes through which rule of law is produced and naturalized in a “moral economy of justice” (Clarke 2009), and to how legal categories create and acknowledge specific categories of guilty and innocent personhood (Kelly 2011; Niezen 2010), while also attending to how people “search for normal” (Abramowitz 2014) and reestablish collective belonging across, within, and containing deep divides following violence (Bolten 2012b; Finnstrom 2010; Hromadžić 2015; Ring 2006; Schuetze 2010; Theidon 2006). Participants expressed their knowledge of not only the fictions of justice (Clarke 2009) but also the fictions of harmonious community, showing that people are always contesting what it means, and their place within it. Conversations in legal forums shed light on the contested cracks at the core of official ideas about justice and unity.
Consider the following excerpt from a later portion of Alphonse’s trial. An older woman I call Grace stepped forward to testify, indicating she would speak as umuhohotewe, one who was victimized (a privileged designation distinct from abatangabuhamya, those who testify as witnesses). Grace explained that during the genocide Alphonse had taken her children to protect them but then had demanded money from her to pay the killers to spare their lives. She asked to be reimbursed for the cash, approximately $6. Alphonse responded to her charges by admitting to receiving the money and describing how he had taken it to a local authority in order to procure false Hutu identity papers for the children. As Grace renewed her demands, one of the inyangamugayo, whom I call Faustin, himself a genocide survivor, chided her that she should be grateful that her children had survived. Rather than pressing Alphonse for money, Faustin continued, Grace should recognize he had done her a favor. People in the assembled crowd laughed aloud at Grace’s claim and at Faustin’s gentle remonstrance.
In this example like many others, the inyangamugayo had to actively intervene to advocate compromise. Yet, the inyangamugayo pressuring Grace had experienced the same violence as she had, had also lost family members, and currently lived in an equivalent position of poverty. These shared structural and experiential dimensions do not erase coercive potential, of course, but they suggest to me there is limited utility to an analysis that reduces every interaction to coercion or that distrusts any performance of unity and forgiveness as disingenuous. Similarly, even as some participants suggested Alphonse’s confession was coerced, other participants implied that he may have been the one exerting pressure on others, such as Grace. I fear that focusing analysis on measuring coercion risks reproducing the hierarchy of suffering contained in the government’s dominant narrative of the genocide, which silences and delegitimizes particular forms of experience (Burnet 2012; Doughty 2008; Lemarchand 2009).
Likewise, in the comite y’abunzi example with Beata and Joselyne, while we can and should ask how coercion shaped the women’s participation, we need to move beyond coercion to explore the complex dynamics around why Joselyne would come to a legal forum to address Beata’s accusations that she engaged in sexual acts with passing men, or to examine what was at stake in the kinds of logics and language that mediators used to reason with the participants. Similarly, the employment dispute between the watchman and the nuns before the legal aid clinic does not seem to be adequately captured as a “crime of exploitation,” which Harri Englund writes of in connection with legal aid as mediation in Malawi (2006:123–169). More generally, Rwandans routinely told me that they perceived the call for compromise within comite y’abunzi and the legal aid clinic as relatively benign, because individuals, not the state, served as plaintiffs and there was no armed police presence. People in structural positions that tended to render them vulnerable through gacaca sometimes felt the abunzi or the legal aid clinic staff could,
