Remediation in Rwanda. Kristin Conner Doughty
of the other prisoners seated alongside him. The following chapters show that Rwandans were not simply “pretending peace” (Buckley-Zistel 2009) or “rehearsing consensus” (Ingelaere 2010a) in these forums; rather, they contentiously expressed disagreement with respect to principles of collective cohesion, individual rights, the common good, and ultimately moral community and belonging. The cases I illustrate in the coming chapters, like Beata and Joselyne’s case, involved heated contestation and disagreement rather than straightforward accordance with harmony principles. People situated in a variety of positions alternately enacted mediation principles or contested them at varying moments across a given case discussion, and dynamics of power shifted across moments and in relation to different charges and allegations. Unity in Rwanda was not a dominantly expressed legal ideology among disputants of the kind Nader (1990) and Laurel Rose (1992) have described in other contexts. The two recent ethnographies of postgenocide Rwanda—Jennie Burnet’s Genocide Lives in Us (2012) and Susan Thomson’s Whispering Truth to Power (2013)—both provide rich detail of the sources and expression of disagreements in postgenocide Rwanda, among everyday Rwandans as well as between people and state policy. Thomson explicitly analyzes these disagreements as everyday acts of resistance to the nationwide policy of unity and reconciliation.
I am thus suggesting that we must analyze the historical and political-economic context, to be sure, but not allow it to obscure the smaller-scale interpersonal interactions that make up ordinary life. This argument is consistent with much recent work by anthropologists on warscapes who argue that focusing on violence and the macro-political struggles of war as the “only primary feature” of life in war zones overlooks, as Sharika Thiranagama writes, “myriad mundane (and perhaps more severe for being mundane) experiences of life in protracted war zones,” such as Sri Lanka (Thiranagama 2011:5).29 I suggest here we can extend that analysis to the so-called postconflict period, especially in a context like Rwanda, where, in many people’s perspective and experience, protracted political violence has not ended but has merely transmuted. Stephen Lubkemann has argued, based on work in Mozambique, that exclusive attention to violence and state-level political dynamics, and to interpreting people’s reactions as a response to national-level macro-political struggles, erases attention from the “other struggles” related to “gendered or generational power configurations within households, to seeking socioeconomic advantage, and to the pursuit of redress for personal grievances” (2008:162) that shaped people’s lives during war. Those same dynamics in postgenocide Rwanda, I fear, are overlooked through overemphasis on silencing, coercive effects of state-backed unity programming.
Throughout this book, I therefore attend to how people maneuvered within Rwanda’s legal architecture of social repair, which is a way of conceptualizing how legal forums and logics constructed particular concepts, aesthetics, and practices of time and space, some stated and some implicit, in which Rwandans maneuvered, during the period of my fieldwork, 2004–2008. I build here on Abramowitz’s description of how the “architecture of post-conflict time” in Liberia created a liminal postconflict space and time in which the fundamental rules of the social order were being reworked (Abramowitz 2014). In Rwanda, the architecture of postgenocide legal time was likewise active, and intentionally transformative. It created a set of processes into which all Rwandans were drawn, to varying degrees.
I illustrate in the following chapters how people used these spaces to debate the terms of social connection and collective belonging, what Theidon has called “reconstructing moral orders” in a “micropolitics of reconciliation” (2006:436). Alphonse’s case, like many others that I present here, involved situated debates over how much people should compromise and sacrifice for each other, and thus served as part of an ongoing debate about the terms of moral community among Rwandans. We have long known that in legal disputes people debate over not simply circumstances of disputes but normative paradigms and the meaning of relationships (see, e.g., Comaroff and Roberts 1981; Merry 1990). Further, we know that discussions within courts are shaped by, and shape in turn, power dynamics and relations of dependence in the broader social context—Lubkemann’s “other struggles,” or what Sally Falk Moore has called the “micropolitics of local social standing” (1992:33). Ben Jones, for example, has recently shown how discussions in village courts in rural Uganda were framed by political debates about the violence, and how people used them to settle private disputes, articulate public concerns, and develop ideas of seniority and propriety (Jones 2008:65).
I suggest that the focus on oral testimony across gacaca, comite y’abunzi, and the legal aid clinic—whereby sessions involved what I call “contextualized conversations,” which I discuss more in Chapter 3—further heightened these relational and political dimensions of testimony. I suggest that we understand discussions in mediation sessions as episodes in ongoing negotiations over how the details of ubumwe and ubwiyunge—the unity and reconciliation often proclaimed by the Rwandan government—played out in practice in people’s lives, at different interconnected levels of scale. The polysemy of the term “unity,” which was invoked as a ubiquitous but vague principle on which to make legally binding judgments and allocate resources, opened up space for discussion. What resulted, I argue, was not the creation of official normative versions of national belonging, nor monolithic coerced silence, but rather a terrain in which people contested moral community.
One significant component of such negotiations in legal forums was that people confronted head-on what Theidon calls the “economics of memory”: how in an industry of truth telling and postconflict justice people instrumentally “narrated with new possibilities and aspirations in mind,” including “hope for some economic relief” (Theidon 2012:109). Catherine Bolten has similarly underscored the importance of “material loyalty—relationships forged and sustained in complex, often compassionate acts of resource exchange” (Bolten 2012a:4) in explaining how people survived the civil war in Sierra Leone and rebuilt in its aftermath. Rwandans’ discussions in legal forums confronted the material and financial dimensions of living together, which have long been understood as central to reconciliation but are often sidelined in prevailing discourses about reconciliation that emphasize affective dimensions, moral imaginaries, and intersubjective communication.30 Collective belonging in postgenocide Rwanda was intimately bound up with land and other assets, continuous with earlier time periods (De Lame 2005:165). Exchanges and transactions of material goods and labor have long been tools of social integration in Rwanda (De Lame 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