Stuck

Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood

Marc Sommers, Gary Bertsch, Howard Wiarda

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780820338927
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Menschenrechte

Young people are transforming the global landscape. As the human popu­lation today is younger and more urban than ever before, prospects for achieving adulthood dwindle while urban migration soars. Devastated by genocide, hailed as a spectacular success, and critiqued for its human rights record, the Central African nation of Rwanda provides a compelling setting for grasping new challenges to the world's youth.

Spotlighting failed masculinity, urban desperation, and forceful governance, Marc Sommers tells the dramatic story of young Rwandans who are "stuck," striving against near-impossible odds to become adults. In Rwandan culture, female youth must wait, often in vain, for male youth to build a house before they can marry. Only then can male and female youth gain acceptance as adults. However, Rwanda's severe housing crisis means that most male youth are on a treadmill toward failure, unable to build their house yet having no choice but to try. What follows is too often tragic. Rural youth face a future as failed adults, while many who migrate to the capital fail to secure a stable life and turn fatalistic about contracting HIV/AIDS.

Featuring insightful interviews with youth, adults, and government officials, Stuck tells the story of an ambitious, controlling government trying to gov­ern an exceptionally young and poor population in a densely populated and rapidly urbanizing country. This pioneering book sheds new light on the struggle to come of age and suggests new pathways toward the attainment of security, development, and coexistence in Africa and beyond.

Published in association with the United States Institute of Peace

Stuck

MARC SOMMERS

RWANDAN YOUTH AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ADULTHOOD

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Boxes and Tables

Preface

Acknowledgments

PART I. INTRODUCTION: YOUTH VIEWS

Chapter One. Youth in Waithood

Chapter Two. Doing Research in Rwanda

PART II. FEAR OF FAILURE: RURAL YOUTH LIVES

Chapter Three. Living in a Vertical World: Rural Youth and the Government

Chapter Four. Low Horizons

Chapter Five. Striving for Adulthood

PART III. QUEST FOR CASH: URBAN YOUTH LIVES

Chapter Six. Desperation on the New Frontier: Urban Youth and the Government

Chapter Seven. An Inconstant Existence

Chapter Eight. Prostitution, AIDS, and Fatalism

PART IV. VISIONS AND REALITIES: RWANDA AND BEYOND

Chapter Nine. Stuck Youth

Appendix. Bet/Wager [Performance Contracts] on the Umudugudu Level

Notes

References

Index

Illustrations

MAPS

Major Cities of Rwanda 12

Districts of Rwanda 53

PHOTOGRAPHS

A Formal Rwandan Wedding 4

Rwandan Vista 72

Bare Feet 85

Rwandan Hillside 98

Female Youth, Digging 101

Male Youth, Digging for Pay 102

Unfinished House 119

Female Youth, Rural Rwanda 124

Male Youth and One Female Youth in Rural Rwanda 127

Kigali’s City Center, at Dusk 145

Kigali Vista 161

Urban Cobbler 163

Male Youth, Kigali 185

Female Youth, Kigali 186

After a Demolition, Kigali 219

New Housing, Kigali 220

Boxes and Tables

BOXES

2.1 Fieldwork in Rwanda: A Sketch of One Day 45

2.2 Field Research Sites 57

2.3 The Twenty Original Research Questions 65

2.4 Four Questions That We Asked Officials 67

TABLES

2.1 Research Sample by Designation (Male Youth, Female Youth, or Adult) 61

2.2 Research Sample by Gender 61

2.3 Research Sample by Location 62

2.4 Youth Research Sample by Age 62

2.5 Youth Research Sample by Education Attainment 62

2.6 Youth Research Sample by Economic Status 64

2.7 Youth Research Sample by Marital Status 64

7.1 How Much Things Cost in Kigali 167

7.2 Reported Youth Incomes in Kigali 173

Preface

The only place that today’s Rwanda resembles is pregenocide Rwanda.

Central Africa scholar, private interview, 2008

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1951

Several years ago, I wrote that the central irony concerning Africa’s urban youth was that “they are a demographic majority that sees itself as an outcast minority” (Sommers 2003: 1). Since that time, field research with rural and urban youth in war and postwar contexts within and beyond Africa has led me to revise this assertion. The irony appears to apply to most developing country youth regardless of their location.

Research for this book underscores the relevance of this unfortunate irony. Youth who felt overlooked and misunderstood ran like a deep, wide river through the field data for this book. The irony surfaced in many ways, including in a theme linking the plight of urban and rural youth in an immediate and concrete fashion: 200 francs ($0.37).¹ Amafaranga magana abiri was a common way of highlighting the plight of a youth’s immediate situation. In rural Rwanda, 200 francs is the most common daily payment for cultivating another person’s farmland. That wage rests at the core of the plans of many if not most rural youth. For male youth, those earnings are how they buy roof tiles for a house they hope to complete. For female youth, the earnings go toward personal care products and perhaps savings that might attract a male youth. In Kigali, Rwanda’s mushrooming capital, 200 francs is what it costs to buy one plate of food in a simple restaurant. This was the daily focus of many urban youth: to somehow get enough money to eat one hot meal a day (most lacked cooking facilities in their residences). These activities circumscribe the central findings in this book: the exacting adulthood requirements in Rwanda’s countryside and the desperation of city life for its urban youth. Stuck is offered as a contribution toward a more accurate picture of contemporary Rwanda and toward a deeper understanding of the powerful influence of two dynamic forces in youth lives across the world: masculinity and urbanization.

The two forces are linked. The first step to socially recognized manhood in Rwanda is to build a house. This sets the stage for a formal, legal marriage (as opposed to an embarrassing and illegal informal arrangement) and then children. Once a man can do this, and protect and support his children and wife, manhood is achieved. Yet research for this book revealed that attaining manhood is exceedingly difficult. Many male youth are caught on a treadmill toward the first step—building a house—which they know they may never complete. Rwanda, already among the world’s highest ranked in population growth, population density, urban growth, and poverty, also has a traditional culture that is both demanding and unrelenting toward its own young people. Male youth drop out of school to start working in order to save to build their house. Then they get stuck. The fallout from this housing crisis is breathtakingly severe, and a common result is for male (and female) youth to escape adulthood requirements by migrating to an urban area, usually Kigali, where their main pressure is not obtaining adulthood but sheer survival.

The impact of this situation on female youth is profound. Because male youth get stuck, female youth get stuck too, since they cannot attain womanhood without having a formal, legal marriage and then giving birth to children. Rwanda’s infamous genocide of 1994 (and its far lesser known civil war of 1990–94) has compounded this female youth challenge, since it is estimated that there may be eighty-eight men for every one hundred women in the land (Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Sports n.d.: 9). With polygamy outlawed, and if the above estimate is accurate, then perhaps 12 percent of female youth cannot marry because there aren’t enough men to wed. A much more immediate fact is that so few male youth are able to marry because they are unable to complete their houses. In addition, the clock is ticking: while male youth strain to construct a house and consider the prospect of a life of public failure, female youth must marry before society considers them failures as well. Once unmarried women reach the age of twenty-eight, but perhaps just twenty-four or twenty-five (male youth and men debate the cutoff age), they are labeled “old ladies” or “prostitutes” and permanently forced onto the margins of society. Since no one can legally marry before the age of twenty-one in Rwanda, the window of marriage opportunity for female youth may be as narrow as four years. A male youth, by contrast, has more time to marry than female youth, but it’s far from forever: by his early thirties, a single male youth faces public embarrassment if his house is not completed and he still isn’t married.

The widespread inability of most male and female youth to become adults in Rwanda results in an array of negative social and economic concerns. These include illegitimate children, prostitution, the spread of HIV/AIDS, crime, a high urban growth rate, and an increase in school drop-out rates. Rwanda’s government, together with some of its largest international donors, engages with youth concerns mainly through efforts to expand access to secondary and vocational education. Its disconnect from youth priorities is stark. Even after the government and donors doubled access to secondary education, few Rwandan youth are able to attend, and many youth drop out of primary school to start wage work aimed at becoming adults. Vocational education is available to even fewer youth. Meanwhile, as we see in chapters 5 and 7, government restrictions on house construction and on income generation make the task of attaining adulthood, and a stable economic existence, significantly more difficult. National and international institutions in Rwanda are focused on what they think youth should be doing, not on what youth priorities are.

The importance of masculinity in the minds of Rwandans shone through the research for this book and brought forth a challenging proposition: if one wants to help young women in countries such as Rwanda, one probably has to help young men first. The traditional dependence of womanhood on manhood appears to make this necessary. Clearly, this is a troubling suggestion, since exacting a measure of independence for and direct assistance to women often seems appropriate if not absolutely urgent. But not helping male youth may prove dangerous and destructive for female and male youth alike by undermining their prospects for becoming adults. Many youth, and nonelite youth in particular, may lack the ability, and sufficient agency, to escape adulthood mandates without risking harsh and perhaps devastating repercussions.

Urban growth is a central component of Rwanda’s current transformation. Before the genocide, movement within Rwanda was severely restricted. Today, although the government hardly welcomes the surge of youth toward the capital (reports of harassment of urban migrant youth by the authorities were common), there exists at last some degree of an outlet from the extraordinary pressures in Rwanda’s thickly populated countryside.

Whether Rwandan youth attempt to achieve adulthood in villages or migrate to town, the government’s presence is commanding. The recent decentralization reforms illustrate this. One of the most sweeping changes has been the increase in regulations that has followed the enhanced empowerment of lower-level government officials. Many local officials have seized the opportunity to mandate change in their areas by administering fines if, for example, someone enters a market area in bare feet, does not send all his or her children to primary school, or fails to compost garbage properly. Still other mandates arrive from farther above. A list of “suggested” reforms that the Ministry of Local Government gave to umudugudu leaders (the lowest government level, at the village level) featured thirty objectives (see the appendix). Among them were the objectives of “bringing people to love their country” and “eradicating infiltration.” All citizens are expected to know who is entering and leaving their community and to be a part of the “Eye of the Nation.” Given the source of these suggestions, an umudugudu leader intimated that it would be difficult to disagree with or even modify them.

The list is but one indication of a nation that, despite regular government declarations to the contrary, remains infused with a sense of insecurity. It also illustrates the degree to which Rwanda remains on a war footing, maintaining its vigilance against the remaining interahamwe (those who work together) militia who helped carry out the genocide and persist as a fighting force just across Rwanda’s border in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).² They are also the notorious “infiltrators” who have, on occasion, slipped into Rwandan territory and attacked.

Internationally, Rwanda is seen generally either as a spectacular success story with dynamic leadership and a promising future or as an unequal society facing serious strains and bleak prospects. Although findings from this research detail a mixture of the two, the situation facing most Rwandan youth is significantly more serious than the glowing assessments allow. The Rwandan government tends to be sensitive about depictions of life in Rwanda that do not describe a nation and its citizenry as rapidly advancing forward. This governmental sensitivity impacted the way in which the research was proposed, undertaken, and discussed. Stuck began as a regional research endeavor funded by the World Bank, a research study on youth and gender in Central Africa (here defined as Rwanda and Burundi) aimed at finding out how youth were faring and whether they posed a risk to a return to violent conflict. Once in Rwanda, I was told by Rwandans working with international donor agencies to present the endeavor to government officials as a one-country study. Many in the government evidently believed that Burundi ranked far below Rwanda in terms of development, thus making such a comparison unsuitable. Rwandans and non-Rwandans with deep knowledge of the government’s sensitivities also advised me not to mention the issue of violent conflict. It could only arouse suspicion about the underlying motivation of the study.

Once a satisfactory, nonconfrontational way of describing the research to officials had been established, government doors began to open. Officials of all ranks were available for interviews, and they were, in general, thoughtful and comp...