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 and violence at independence, through the lead-up to genocide, and culminating in the world’s inaction and even support of the genocidal regime. This served to frame Rwandans as twice victims: first of the genocidal regime and second of Western countries, based on insidious racism. In a notable example, Kagame said in his 2004 speech, “All these powerful nations regarded one million lives as valueless, as another statistic, and could be dispensed with. And of course some claimed that the dying people were not in their national strategic interests. But if the death of a million people was not a concern to them, then what is? I hate to think that this may be due to the color of the skin of these Rwandans who died or other Africans who might die in the future. Ten years after the powerful nations eventually called the mass killings by their proper name, genocide, they have not demonstrated proportional responsibility where it belongs.” Comments like these positioned Rwanda in solidarity with the African continent and the non-European developing world more globally.
Further, placing blame on foreigners exonerated Rwandans (particularly Tutsi) for certain forms of oppression and division in the past and the present. It was a counter-hegemonic move to neutralize international critiques of the RPF in the past or present and justify the government’s ongoing efforts to chart its own fate, consistent with the widespread use of culture to justify mediation in harmony legal models. Also, it allowed the postgenocide government to assert that the international community had a moral obligation to provide ongoing support, but on the RPF’s own terms.
Indeed, as I discussed earlier in the chapter, the international community carries a share of the blame. For good reason, between 2004 and 2008, the Hamitic Hypothesis was mentioned in newspaper articles, narrated by taxi drivers and tour guides, included as part of Rwanda’s official colonial history in the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center (Smith 2004:9), and referenced in virtually every academic and popular history of Rwanda.14 For more than a century, Europeans had argued that Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa constituted distinctly separate racial or ethnic groups.15 In the 1950s, the ideas at the core of the Hamitic myth were at the center of the Hutu Revolution, when leaders claimed Hutu autochthony and therefore rights to govern, while Tutsi were cast as foreign and innately domineering (Lemarchand 2009:58). In the 1990s, the same ideas played a central role in anti-Tutsi propaganda in the lead-up to genocide (Chrétien 1995:139–208). As I outlined earlier, scholars have further shown that the international community played a role in the escalating tensions and violence in Rwanda between the 1950s and 1990s and did not do enough to stop the genocide.
But placing blame on colonial leaders—and by extension on the West in the present—overlooks the problems in place under Rwandan leadership. Specifically, it erases how the reign of King Rwabugiri (1867–1897),16 who ruled immediately prior to the arrival of colonial leadership, marked a crisis of social health and spurred the formation of resistance or liberation movements directed against the monarchy, as well as examples of anti-Tutsi violence (Botte 1985a,1985b; Feierman 1995; Vansina 2004:137–138). Under Rwabugiri, internal factional rivalry among elite families fueled competition and further territorial expansion that increased insecurity and impoverishment for the bulk of the population, herders as well as farmers (D. Newbury 2009; Vansina 2004:126–139,163). The “nearly permanent recourse to violence” created social instability and led to social disaggregation (Vansina 2004:164–195). Catharine Newbury and Jan Vansina point specifically to the role of uburetwa, a form of mandatory unpaid labor performed for a chief as payment for occupation of the land, as “poisoning” interethnic relations because it was imposed only on farmers, not herders (C. Newbury 1980, 1988; Vansina 2004:134–139). To do uburetwa symbolized low status and powerlessness, and it was “difficult to exaggerate” its “exploitative character” (C. Newbury 1988:141). Uburetwa began under