Peasants, power and ethnicity: A bottom-up perspective on Rwanda's political transition

African Affairs

Volumn 109, Issue 435, 2010, Pages 273-292

  Ingelaere, Bert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ANTWERP   (Belgium)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ETHNIC CONFLICT; ETHNICITY; GOVERNANCE APPROACH; IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION; POLICY MAKING; POLITICAL CHANGE; POLITICAL POWER; VIOLENCE;

RWANDA;

EID: 77951117037     PISSN: 00019909     EISSN: 14682621     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adp090     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. On the Rwandan transition between 1990 and 1994, see Filip Reyntjens, L'Afrique des Grands Lacs en crise: Rwanda, Burundi, 1988-1994 (Editions Karthala, Paris, 1994).
2. Gerard Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis: History of a genocide (Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 1995).
3. André Guichaoua (ed.), Les Crises Politiques au Burundi et au Rwanda (1993-1994) (Editions Karthala, Paris, 1995).
4. René Lemarchand, 'Managing transition anarchies: Rwanda, Burundi and South Africa in comparative perspective', Journal of Modern African Studies 32, 4 (1994), pp. 581-604.
5. On (mainly) the second phase of the transtion see Filip Reyntjens, 'La transition politique au Rwanda' in Filip Reyntjens and Stefaan Marysse (eds), L'Afrique des Grands Lacs: Annuaire 2003-2004 (L'Harmattan, Paris, 2004), pp. 1-22.
6. Filip Reyntjens, 'Rwanda, ten years on: from genocide to dictatorship', African Affairs 103, 411 (2004), pp. 177-210.
7. Filip Reyntjens, 'Les transitions politiques au Rwanda et au Burundi' in Filip Reyntjens and Stefaan Marysse (eds) L'Afrique des Grands Lacs - dix ans de transitions conflictuelles: Annuaire 2005-2006 (L'Harmattan, Paris, 2006), pp. 3-23.
8. Marina Rafti, 'A perilous path to democracy: political transition and authoritarian consolidation in Rwanda' (Discussion Paper 2008.03, Institute of Development Policy and Management, Antwerp, 2007).
9. David Newbury and Catharine Newbury, 'Bringing peasants back in: agrarian themes in the construction and corrosion of statist historiography in Rwanda', American Historical Review 105, 3 (2000), p. 874.
10. Johan Pottier, Re-Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, survival and disinformation in the late twentieth century (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002), p. 202.
11. David Newbury, 'Understanding genocide', African Studies Review 41, 1 (1998), p. 85.
12. To understand the nature of the ideological underpinnings of the previous regime see Philip Verwimp, 'Development ideology, the peasantry and genocide', Journal of Genocide Research 2, 3 (2000), pp. 325-61.
13. Nigel Eltringham, Accounting for Horror: Post-genocide debates in Rwanda (Pluto Press, London, 2004), p. xiv.
14. Bert Ingelaere, 'Changing lenses and contextualizing the Rwandan (post-)genocide' in Reyntjens and Marysse (eds), L'Afrique des Grands Lacs - dix ans, pp. 389-414.
15. For studies based on micro-level research highlighting the importance of either political or economic motives in the genocide, see Timothy Longman, 'Genocide and socio-political change: massacres in two Rwandan villages', Issue: A Journal of Public Opinion 13, 2 (1995), pp. 18-21.
16. Catherine André and Jean-Philippe Platteau, 'Land relations under unbearable stress: Rwanda caught in the Malthusian trap', Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation 34 (1998), pp. 1-47.
17. Michelle D. Wagner, 'All the bourgemestre's men: making sense of genocide in Rwanda', Africa Today 45, 1 (1998), pp. 25-36.
18. Villia Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards: From production to genocide in Rwanda (State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 2002).
19. Danielle de Lame, A Hill among a Thousand: Transformations and ruptures in rural Rwanda (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2005).
20. André Guichaoua, Rwanda 1994: les politiques du génocide à Butare (Editions Karthala, Paris, 2005).
21. Philip Verwimp, 'An economic profile of peasant perpetrators of genocide: micro-level evidence from Rwanda', Journal of Development Economics 77, 2 (2005), pp. 297-323.
22. S. Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, power and war in Rwanda (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2006).
23. Jean-Paul Kimonyo, Rwanda: un genocide populaire (Editions Karthala, Paris, 2008).
24. Timothy Longman, 'Memory, identity and community in Rwanda' in Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein (eds), My Neighbour, My Enemy: Justice and community in the aftermath of mass atrocity (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004), p. 176.
25. Susanne Buckley-Zistel, 'Dividing and uniting: the use of citizenship discourses in conflict and reconciliation in Rwanda', Global Society 20, 1 (2006), p. 112.
26. Eugenia Zorbas, 'Reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda', African Journal of Legal Studies 1, 1 (2004), p. 42.
27. Penal Reform International, 'From camp to hill: the reintegration of released prisoners' (research report on the Gacaca, Report VI, Paris and Kigali, 2004), p. 38.
28. On the particular nature of communication in Rwanda see Bert Ingelaere, '"Does the truth pass across the fire without burning?" Locating the short circuit in Rwanda's Gacaca courts', Journal of Modern African Studies 47, 4 (2009), pp. 507-28.
29. Jennie E. Burnet, 'Whose genocide? Whose truth? Representations of victim and perpetrator in Rwanda' in Alex Laban Hinton and Kevin O'Neill (eds), Genocide: Truth, memory and representation (Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2009).
30. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden transcripts (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 1990), p. 14.
31. A life story approach in Rwanda has previously been adopted by Helen Codere, The Biography of an African Society: Rwanda 1900-1960. Based on forty-eight Rwandan autobiographies (Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika, Tervuren, Series In-8°, No. 79, 1973).
32. Catharine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960 (Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 1988).
33. de Lame, A Hill among a Thousand. For the postgenocide period, see Susan M. Thomson, Resisting Reconciliation: Everyday life and state power in post-genocide Rwanda(Dalhousie University, unpublished PhD thesis, 2009).
34. The aim of the research activities was to strike a balance between collecting quantitative rankings and qualitative narratives. In order to increase the sample more emphasis was put on gathering rankings from all respondents and reducing narratives. This article is informed by an in-depth analysis of the life story narratives collected, but only presents the quantitative rankings. A more extensive reference to the methodology and narratives can be found in Bert Ingelaere, 'Living the transition: a bottom-up perspective on Rwanda's political transition' (Discussion Paper 2007.06, Institute of Development Policy and Management, Antwerp, 2007).
35. Inspired by Hadley Cantril, The Pattern of Human Concerns (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1965). The World Bank research on movement out of poverty makes use of a similar 'ladder of life' tool in order to understand perceived changes over time. This approach was an inspiration in the development of design and methodology of this study.
36. See Deepa Narayan (ed.), Measuring Empowerment: Cross-disciplinary perspectives (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005).
37. Deepa Narayan and Patti Petesh (eds), Moving out of Poverty: Crossdisciplinary perspectives on mobility (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007).
38. We refer to sectors rather than 'villages', as in Rwanda people live dispersed on the hills in the countryside and are grouped in administrative units. We define the local level, a local community, as equivalent to the cell and sector level which existed before the administrative restructuring of January 2006.
39. All of the life story interviews and rankings were conducted by the author, together with five Rwandan field assistants. The interviewers were selected based on their previous experience with participation in survey and qualitative research, their capacity to reside in rural communities, and their skill in interaction with the peasant population. The enumerators were not inhabitants of the communities. They received several days' training on the principles and methods of life story interviews and general fieldwork. The life stories were collected in each community with all enumerators present and the author as supervisor. It was highlighted that we had the permission from both national and local authorities to conduct the research. We always stressed the fact that we were not connected or working for the government. All interviews were administered in the house of the respondent. The interviews were translated from Kinyarwanda to French by a field-assistant/translator. The interviewers wrote down expressions in Kinyarwanda with a specific meaning surpassing immediate possibility of translation. These were discussed afterwards and compared with the translated statements. All interviews were later typed out by another assistant, who would also annotate the interviews when faced with particularities related to translation of statements from Kinyarwanda. We did not use recording devices since respondents may not be familiar with them and they may arouse suspicion, affecting responses.
40. Rankings for the economic situation, the feeling of security and confidence, and the discussion of the narratives accompanying these rankings are discussed in Ingelaere, 'Living the transition: a bottom-up perspective', pp. 24-47.
41. Bert Ingelaere, 'Living the transition: inside Rwanda's conflict cycle at the grassroots', Journal of Eastern African Studies 3, 3 (2009), pp. 438-63.
42. Ingelaere, 'Living the transition: a bottom-up perspective', pp. 19-21.
43. This procedure was modelled on the work of, for example, Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2002).
44. Chris Gibson and Michael Woolcock, 'Empowerment and local level conflict mediation in Indonesia: a comparative analysis of concepts, measures, and project efficacy' (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3713, World Bank, Washington DC, 2005). The communities are situated in the different regions of Rwanda - North, Central and South-Central, East and South-East.
45. See Eltringham, Accounting for Horror for a discussion of these new identities.
46. During the life story interviews with 'old caseload returnees' the questions about political representation in the 1980s (when they did not live in Rwanda) was not further qualified but asked as prescribed in the standard procedure. It implies that respondents in their narratives and rankings predominantly took into account both the feeling of representation in the countries where they resided at the time and in relation to their home country, Rwanda.
47. We did not use the category of so-called 'new caseload returnees' since this category is no longer salient in social life in the Rwandan hills.
48. Some communities did not have old caseload returnees; others didn't have released prisoners.
49. Interviewers were instructed to start the ranking exercise from the first year of adult life or marriage - or, if necessary, always in the year 1990, even if the respondent was not yet adult or not yet married then. This implies that very few respondents were below adult age in 1990. It also implies that for the 1980s there are less observations (rankings). Weighting was applied in order to account for research design and sampling procedure. The figures picture the weighted 'average' ranking of all respondents. For the years 1980-9, these weighted averages are based on the rankings of less than all respondents, since some respondents were not of adult age or were not yet married.
50. The crystallization and the (changing) nature of ethnic identities in Rwanda is of central importance in the work of Catharine Newbury and David Newbury. See Catharine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression.
51. Catharine Newbury, 'Ethnicity in Rwanda: the case of Kinyaga', Africa 48, 1 (1978), pp. 17-.
52. Catharine Newbury and David Newbury, 'A Catholic mass in Kigali: contested views of genocide and ethnicity in Rwanda', Canadian Journal of African Studies 33, 2/3 (1999), pp. 312-16.
53. David Newbury, Understanding Genocide, pp. 83-8. Both Catharine and David Newbury's writings on ethnicity and the importance of the factor of power were instructive in the understanding of the rankings presented in this paper. An insightful discussion of the different paradigms to understand ethnicity is available in Varshney, Ethnic Conflict, pp. 24-39.
54. A social constructivist position in the understanding of violent ethnic conflict is examined in James. D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, 'Violence and the social construction of ethnic identity', International Organization 54, 4 (2000), pp. 845-77.
55. Newbury and Newbury, 'A Catholic mass', p. 313.
56. Catharine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression, p. 51.
57. John Gledhill, Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological perspectives on politics (Pluto Press, London, 1994).
58. Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The development enterprise in Rwanda (Kumarian Press, Bloomfield, CT, 1998), p. 33.
59. Gerard Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis, p. 80.
60. Names of individuals and places have been changed to ensure confidentiality.
61. Interview, Central Rwanda, March 2006, Tutsi, genocide survivor, male, peasant, 56 years old.
62. Interview, Central Rwanda, February 2007, Hutu, male, teacher, 45 years old.
63. Marianne Ferme, The Underneath of Things: Violence, history and the everyday in Sierra Leone, (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2001).
64. Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (Human Rights Watch, New York, NY, 1999).
65. Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, memory, and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1995), p. 55.
66. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Culture Troubles: Politics and the interpretation of meaning (Hurst and Co., London, 2006); Gledhill, Power and Its Disguises.
67. Reyntjens, 'Rwanda, ten years on'.
68. Malkki, Purity and Exile.
69. For an insightful and powerful description of life in the Rwandan prisons see: Carina Tertsakina, Le Château: The lives of prisoners in Rwanda (Arves Books, London, 2008).
70. See for example, Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, pp. 42-3.
71. James K. Gasana, 'La guerre, la paix et la démocratie au Rwanda' in Guichaoua (ed.), Les crises politiques, pp. 215-16.
72. Arjun Appadurai, 'Dead certainty: ethnic violence in the era of globalization' in Alexander L. Hinton (ed.), Genocide: An anthropological reader (Blackwell, Oxford, 2002), p. 297.
73. René Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnocide as discourse and practice (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994), p. 14.
74. The concept of imihigo refers to the 'heroism' of the soldier in Rwandan culture and history. The soldier attempts through his actions in combat to show his competence and capability as a 'hero'. Recently performance contracts are also being signed with individual peasants.
75. See: 'Performance contracts to be signed at household level', The New Times, Kigali, 19 November 2007.
76. Catharine Newbury, 'Ethnicity in Rwanda', p. 20.
77. Filip Reyntjens, Pouvoir et droit au Rwanda: droit public et evolution politique, 1916-1973 (Musée Royal de L'Afrique Centrale, Tervuren, 1985), p. 515 (translated by the author).
78. Insightful here is the increasing difficulty confronting the open discussion of issues of identity encountered over the years in a project seeking to establish a history curriculum in Rwanda.
79. Sarah W. Freedman et al., 'Teaching history after identity-based conflicts: the Rwanda experience', Comparative Education Review 52, 4 (2008), pp. 663-90.
80. Pottier, Re-Imagining Rwanda, p. 126.
81. Lemarchand, Burundi, p. 10, pp. 107-18.
82. See Ingelaere, 'Living the transition', pp. 28-31, pp. 43-8.
83. Newbury and Newbury, 'A Catholic mass', p. 313: 'The paradox is that ethnicity was simultaneously the product of politics and yet, at times, a powerful determinant of the shape of political culture.'.
84. For the importance of civic structures or 'institutionalism' in connection with ethnic identities see Varshney, Ethnic Conflict. On the importance of consociationalism as an approach to power sharing in Rwanda.
85. see Stef Vandeginste and Luc Huyse, 'Consociational democracy for Rwanda?' in Stefaan Marysse and Filip Reyntjens (eds), Political Economy of the Great Lakes Region of Africa: The pitfalls of enforced democracy and globalization (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 101-22.
86. René Lemarchand, 'Consociationalism and power sharing in Africa: Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo', African Affairs 106, 422 (2007) pp. 1-20.
87. Reyntjens, Rwanda, ten years on.
88. A comprehensive insight in the administration of genocide and the role of state structures and personnel can be found in Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story and Straus, The Order of Genocide.