Muhammed and I are taking a walk through his neighborhood in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, as we talk about the Itorero program. This program, meant to engage the citizenry in a united effort toward national development, had recently mobilized all secondary school graduates in the country in a three-week-long camp. Muhammed and I had met at one of Kigali’s training sites, situated on the premises of a local boarding school. Muhammed is happy about having undergone the program. “It teaches you to be together. To live in harmony as Rwandans.” He is even happier about having graduated from the program. Without the Itorero certificate, he assures me, it is impossible to access the university or even obtain a passport. However, unlike most of his fellow trainees, Muhammed did not join the government party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), when its representatives visited the training site. He is concerned about the future consequences of that decision, but he is glad that he nevertheless obtained his Itorero diploma. At least he was now an Intore, that is, an Itorero graduate certified by the Province of Kigali City and the national Itorero Taskforce. Hopefully, that should suffice to keep some doors open for a good job while allowing a certain measure of personal “neutrality,” as Muhammed puts it. “You can try to stay away from it all,” he explains to me as we sit down in his uncle’s living room. “But it’s hard. Even when you try to keep from entering politics, politics enters you.”
This book explores some of the ways in which people in Rwanda have come to relate to the state and to themselves as its citizens, in light of current government practices and the political leadership’s pursuit of model citizens. My conversation with Muhammed took place in the early spring of 2012, 18 years after the civil war and genocide in Rwanda. Between April and July 1994, when Muhammed was just a child, extremists within an interim regime orchestrated the massacres of over half a million Rwandans.1 About 75 percent of Rwanda’s Tutsi population died, as well as many Hutu who opposed the regime and the killings (Verwimp 2004, 233). The genocide was the result of a century-long power struggle in which the identities of Hutu and Tutsi had been used as political weapons. The Belgian imperial regime is not least to blame for this, as it sought to rule Rwanda by privileging the Tutsi community. In doing so, it severely polarized and congealed a system of Tutsi hegemony that had begun under the reign of the last kings of the Rwandan monarchy. Moreover, the genocide took place during an armed conflict that had started in 1990, when a guerrilla movement consisting mostly of exiled Tutsi launched attacks on Rwanda from Uganda. Most of them belonged to families in exile who had fled during the years around Rwanda’s independence in 1962, when the first general elections brought representatives of the Hutu majority population to power and large numbers of Tutsi met their death in politically fueled pogroms. The genocide came to a halt in early July 1994, when the RPF seized Kigali. While seeking to defeat the former regime and its later remnants in exile, they, too, committed massacres of civilians, many of whom were Hutu. The UN peacekeeping force to Rwanda, established in 1993 to support the fragile peace process between the RPF and the Rwandan government, was of virtually no help in preventing or stopping the genocide. Only in the aftermath of the genocide did the horrors in Rwanda attract widespread international attention, then primarily in the form of humanitarian aid and the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).
Major demographic changes have followed since 1994, not only as a consequence of the many killed and imprisoned, but also due to large-scale migration flows across and within country borders. After the genocide, millions of Rwandans, including Muhammed and his family, fled to eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC; then Zaire) and other neighboring countries, returning months or years later. Hundreds of thousands of people returned to Rwanda at the same time from decades in exile, including the bulk of the RPF, the present government party.
In this radically changed and still-changing environment, people’s belonging to the Rwandan nation-state has been of special importance for the political leadership ever since it first came to power after the genocide. To ensure that efforts for institutional state-building are accompanied by processes of nation-building, the government has launched a countrywide program of education and training that aims to engage each and every Rwandan living in the country and beyond. This program, called Itorero ry’Igihugu,2 or, for short, Itorero, is formally profiled as the main channel through which the population is to be sensitized on the government’s vision for the Rwandan state and nationhood. Inherent in this vision is the creation of a new and improved citizenry called Intore, which is the title one receives when graduating from the Itorero program.
Although this program came to form the point of departure of my ethnographic fieldwork as a doctoral student, my first contact with it occurred outside of the anthropological context. In 2009, I was working for the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) in Kigali. Part of my job was to manage Swedish support for the Rwandan government’s demobilization program of former Rwandan combatants.3 That program included a component of civic education which engaged the same government institution, the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC), which hosted the taskforce in charge of Itorero.
Back then, my encounters with Rwandan society were not that dissimilar to those of the many other foreign development practitioners operating in Kigali. I was far from ignorant of the criticism targeting the government for the ways in which it pursued post-conflict national development. At the same time, it was (and remains) difficult not to be impressed by that development. Two decades after the genocide, Rwanda offers a scene of safety, cleanliness, peace, and order that is quite striking. In the central parts of Kigali, roads are paved and tall new buildings are popping up, all in line with the urban modernization efforts stipulated in the “Kigali Master Plan.” In contrast to many other African countries, especially those ravaged by a recent history of war and mass violence, “the state” in Rwanda is far from absent or incapacitated. Quite contrarily, it is known as the principal actor and driver of change in most spheres of contemporary society. That society has not been without its challenges. Beyond Rwanda’s recent history of mass violence and radical demographic changes, the country is associated with its small, overpopulated, and landlocked territory; a predominantly agrarian economy; few natural resources; and a complicated and conflict-ridden relationship with several of its neighboring countries. In this environment, the workings of the political leadership have been praised as a success case in national post-conflict development and reconstruction (see e.g. Baker 2007; World Bank 2013). For years, Rwanda has demonstrated high rates of physical security and political stability while maintaining low levels of corruption and crime. In early 2013, the government assumed the seat in the United Nations Security Council. Present-day development economists, diplomats, and private business actors hail Rwanda as a textbook example of efficient governance and a steady commitment to economic development (see e.g. Chu 2009; Crisafulli and Redmond 2012). The country has maintained steady economic growth ever since the genocide, and has made significant improvements, for example, in terms of access to and quality of education and health care. Most of these efforts are governed by Rwanda’s overarching policy framework for development, called Vision 2020. The Vision was launched in 2000 and intends to rapidly transform Rwanda from a low-income agrarian economy to a knowledge-based middle-income society by the year 2020 (Republic of Rwanda 2000). It draws inspiration from the development experience of the so-called Asian tiger states, and centers on human capital accumulation, foreign investment, service sector expansion, and turning Rwanda into a regional “telecommunications hub” (Knutsson 2012, 183).
At the same time, the Rwandan government has been greatly criticized for the heavy hand with which it pursues its efforts toward Vision 2020 (see e.g. HRW 2006; Reyntjens 2013; Straus and Waldorf 2011). Inequality is high, especially between Kigali and rural Rwanda.4 Human rights groups, scholars, journalists, and foreign state representatives condemn the government for tight censorship, social control, and political repression. Such allegations follow, for example, from the imprisonment, disappearance, and exile of government critics and political competitors; the expulsion of human rights groups; and the closing down of Rwandan news journals. Reports on the government’s military involvement in the DRC have accompanied criticism for its lack of an independent justice system. This last factor ties to post-genocide policies and laws, which have been marked by a combination of efforts for national reunification and the pursuit of accountability for genocide-related crimes—a combination that is not without its paradoxes. While over a million cases of crimes committed during the genocide have passed through domestic courts, the government has refused to address killings committed by the rebels of the RPF during the years around the genocide.5 Also, while the government’s efforts to forge a new sense of common nationhood have centered on the rejection of the identities of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa as colonial tools to divide and rule, since 2008 the genocide is officially termed “the genocide against the Tutsi”. Finally, while post-genocide reconstruction has been characterized by future-oriented modernization efforts and a pronounced break with the past, it has equally been marked by large-scale interventions to “re-traditionalize” the Rwandan state and society, emphasizing the importance of honoring Rwanda’s cultural heritage and historical roots.
Certainly, every society embodies its own set of paradoxes. Perhaps post-genocide Rwanda belongs to the countries where contradictions brought on by elite state-making are especially pertinent. As the years following the genocide go by, Rwanda increasingly appears as somewhat of a two-faced state, both in the eyes of the surrounding world and to many of its citizens. To some extent, these two faces were mirrored in my encounters with Rwanda during the two different years I spent in the country—first as a development practitioner (2009–2010) and then as a field-working anthropologist (2011–2012). Both of these years were spent in Kigali, and both were devoted to issues of government, security, development, and civic education. Nevertheless, the contrast between them cannot be ignored, nor the way it complicates the image of Rwanda both as a dictatorship and as Africa’s most recent symbol of prosperity.
When I returned to Rwanda in 2011, my new observations as an anthropological researcher came to confirm the widely shared conception of the country as a prime example of contemporary development norms around strong state presence and a functioning public sector. For many of the persons I came to know, “the state” indeed played a prominent role in everyday life. Yet, beyond being one that responded, returned, or enabled, the state was also one that controlled, demanded, and threatened, transgressing the boundaries between bureaucracy, politics, and military force. The Itorero program exemplifies the ambiguity of the Rwandan state. The official objective of the program is to create independent, critically thinking citizens, but it is also to change people’s “mindsets” in line with the government’s view of Rwanda’s history, present, and future. Moreover, while the program is run by the government and participation is mandatory, it is officially portrayed as an initiative emanating from “the people” and therefore effective in bringing about this mindset change. Finally, alongside the program’s military characteristics, reflecting the RPF’s guerrilla past, there exists an official portrait of Itorero as modeled on a precolonial institution.
A Glimpse into the World of Itorero
What happens in Itorero, then, in practice? Basically, it depends on whom the program targets. The bulk of the Rwandan population goes through Itorero in their local village or neighborhood (umudugudu).6 For a few hours once a week, residents gather on a plot of grass or in a local public building to learn about topics related to the syllab...
