the people likely to feel coerced were those with comparatively high economic, social, and political capital.
Overall, I suggest that it behooves us to move beyond the broad brush of coercive harmony, to attend equally to the fraught and iterative processes through which people varyingly took on and contested the self-regulating practices of mediation. My attention to coercion and negotiation may seem part of a theoretically dated discussion of structure and agency, yet these themes remain a central conundrum in contemporary scholarship on Rwanda (Burnet 2012; Clark 2010; Straus and Waldorf 2011; Thomson 2013), and in Rwanda itself, thanks to the strongly centralized, and increasingly authoritarian, state. Ultimately, I see acts of agency in Rwandans’ use of grassroots legal forums, wanting to ensure I do not reduce Rwandans who participate in these forums to automatons, even as I recognize the deeply controlling and threatening nature of the state, and the way state power penetrates people’s ordinary lives, as Thomson (2013) has richly described. Instead, I ask, how do people contest meanings of gender, guilt and innocence with respect to the genocide (“genocide citizenship”), access to resources, family, and ethnicity within postgenocide Rwanda’s architecture of social repair? Examples throughout this book raise complex questions about why, when, and how people advocate for and against unity, and what, ultimately, is at stake in the debate over the legitimacy of mediation principles. The ethnographic chapters that make up the body of the book explore these contested negotiations in order to examine how people attempted to remake moral communities within frameworks of mediation.
Notes on Fieldwork and Field Sites
This book is based on eighteen months of ethnographic research I carried out in Rwanda between 2002 and 2008, including participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, conducted in Kinyarwanda, French, and English. I attended fifty-six gacaca sessions during an extended stay from July 2007 through July 2008, as well as fourteen mediation committee sessions and twelve legal aid clinic sessions. I supplemented attendance at gacaca sessions with repeated semistructured interviews with a cross-section of people in each area, including more than thirty gacaca judges, mediators, local authorities, and religious leaders. These numbers do not include the countless informal conversations I had with residents. For broader context, I conducted research in Kigali and at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), including more than eighty interviews with NGO and ICTR staff and members of government in Kigali. I have changed all names in the text.
In order to work with the intended target of grassroots courts—most specifically the rural population, abaturage—and recognizing the importance of interacting with rural Rwandans rather than political and economic elites in the capital (De Lame 2005; Ingelaere 2010b:54; D. Newbury and C. Newbury 2000; Thomson 2010), I worked primarily in two field sites in southern Rwanda, one rural and one a midsize town, supplemented by periodic gacaca sessions in the neighborhood of Nyamirambo in Kigali. People in Ndora and Nyanza lived lives broadly representative of Rwanda’s predominantly rural population—people in these sites participated in the same legal forums that were implemented nationwide, and they were broadly representative of national trends in economic activity (primarily agriculture), educational level (primary school), and religious activity (predominantly Christian). That is, their daily lives were recognizable to most rural Rwandans, and the problems they faced were familiar, in their reliance on agriculture, their targeting by government programs, and their recovery from genocide. Thus, my findings can be seen as suggestive beyond specific hillsides, even though, given the salience of regional variations in Rwanda (Burnet 2010; De Lame 2005; C. Newbury 1988) and how local dynamics of history and violence shaped the specific hurdles faced in rebuilding, I do not suggest my findings were uncritically identical for all areas of Rwanda.
South Province
The South Province is one of five provinces constituting Rwanda. The genocide plan faced initial resistance in the South Province in 1994. For the first two weeks after President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, the region remained calm, as a handful of administrators—both Hutu and Tutsi—worked to suppress conflict amid national calls for attacks. The late historian and human rights activist Allison des Forges hypothesized, “Perhaps this reflected the history of the area, the heart of the old kingdom, where bonds between Tutsi and Hutu were multiple, long-standing, and strong, disposing the Hutu to defend Tutsi more vigorously. Remote from the major military posts, resisters in the region also had more time to organize their efforts before substantial military force was brought against them” (1999:496). Before the genocide, the region had high rates of interethnic marriage and a higher percentage of Tutsi than the national average of 15 percent. For example, Butare, the largest city in the South, home of the National University of Rwanda and the former colonial capital, was a quarter Tutsi before the genocide, higher than Kigali’s 17 percent (Des Forges 1999:353, 432).
Killings only began when the genocidal regime sent militias from the capital, at which point the bloodshed escalated to new levels of scope and intensity (Des Forges 1999). Ultimately the violence was perpetrated by militias as well as civilians, people from inside the area and people who came from outside. Thousands of Burundian Hutu refugees, who had been living in the province since fleeing national massacres in 1993, participated once the situation deteriorated. Confusion increased further as tens of thousands of Rwandans passed through on the way to Burundi or the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for safety. This history—which combined coexistence, protection, and catastrophic violence—made the South Province a particularly compelling place in which to learn how people more than a decade later were rebuilding their lives, particularly using legal forums and understandings of the past to shape collective belonging. By 2004, people living in the South Province represented a range of experiences from the genocide, including those who lived through it and others who returned after living as refugees or citizens in Burundi, the DRC, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, or Europe. The province’s population was diverse across class, from farmers to civil servants to university professors, as well as across religion.
The South Province’s population highlighted the challenge of rebuilding the social fabric across varying lines of identification. Grassroots legal forums in the South Province had high hurdles to overcome in terms of creating community. The province was among the worst affected by the genocide, where the consequences seem to have had the most severe and enduring effects (Des Forges 1999; Ndangiza 2007:4). Despite representing 25 percent of the population, the province housed 47 percent of cases of people accused as planners of the genocide (4,357 cases out of a total of 9,362), who were tried before Western-style domestic courts.32 The province also had the most gacaca cases. Further, according to a nationwide 2007 survey, it had the highest levels of self-reported poverty, where 68 percent of people lived below the poverty line (Frw 90,000, or U.S. $180, per year), and 90 percent self-identified as somewhat poor, rather poor, or very poor (Ndangiza 2007). The same survey showed that the South Province had the lowest levels of meat consumption and mattress ownership in the country. Southerners also expressed the strongest preference for continuing to live on agriculture rather than engaging in land reforms, which were aimed at the “transformation of agriculture into a productive, high value, market-oriented sector” as part of the national economic development plan in Vision 2020 (Ministry of Finance 2000:3).
People’s faith in and respect for the legal institutions which privileged their neighbors’ knowledge, and which depended on lay judges and their neighbors’ testimony, could not be taken for granted. According to the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission’s 2007 report, compared to the rest of Rwanda, inhabitants of the South Province were more skeptical of decentralization and had “lower levels of interpersonal trust and a perceived lower ability to work together among citizens” (Ndangiza 2007:4). Thus, government through community in this province was particularly visible in people’s efforts to create or defy binding relations and a shared moral field.
Ndora
Ndora, the sector capital of Gisagara district, was a rural agricultural community approximately eighteen miles south of the university town of Butare, near the Burundian border. The population as of December 2007 was 20,340
