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Abstract
In this article, I examine the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, An Ordinary Man, to interrogate the narrative construction of identity in contemporary Rwanda. My primary focus is the discursive and narrative dynamics involved in the problematical configuration of ethnic, class, and national identities prior to, and after the country's 1994 genocide. Regarding the contradictions in the way Rusesabagina attempts to articulate modern Rwandan identity (especially with respect to the perceived sameness and/or difference between Hutu and Tutsi), I argue that the dominant narratives of pre-colonial harmony he echoes are over-simplistic, homogenising and misleading in certain respects. This article thus seeks to problematise the prevailing idea – forcefully reinforced by Rusesabagina – that colonial interventions constitute the all-encompassing roots, rather than catalysers, of the endemic and seemingly irreconcilable differences that culminated in the genocide. My purpose in this regard is not to downplay colonialism's negative impact on social relations in Rwanda, but to foreground some of the often overlooked historical complexities that are revealed by Rusesabagina's valuable but as yet underexplored narrative.
Note on Contributor
Aghogho Akpome is a Research Associate at the Centre for Africa Studies, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. His wider research interests include narratives of nation and the discursive representation of identity and difference across different narrative genres.
Notes
1. Nothing is said in the book (referred to in this article by the abbreviation AOM) about Tom Zoellner's actual role in its writing and of his relationship with Rusesabagina. The book's copyright is ascribed to Rusesabagina alone, and Zoellner is identified in the postscript note on the ‘authors’ as ‘a freelance journalist and writer who has worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle [and] lives in New York’ (AOM:265). A short online article in which he comments on his work with Rusesabagina strongly suggests that his role was not more than that of an amanuensis (see The Waltonian Citation2008:n.p.).
2. Gacaca is a Kinyarwanda (the indigenous language of Rwanda) word ‘loosely translated “justice on the grass”’, an informal system of arbitration used within communities to reconcile neighbours who had had relatively minor disputes (AOM:0–2).
3. See footnote 5 below and the off-set quotation on page 18 of this article.
4. This is so regardless of the fact that in the short term, the demonstrable impact of such narratives on ordinary citizens in a developing country like Rwanda is bound to be curtailed by limitations such as low literacy levels, poor reading habits, poverty as well as the on-going political face-off between the author and the current government (see the section titled Analysis).
5. This might also be in keeping with the post-1994 Rwandan law that people may no longer be identified as Hutu or Tutsi, a development for which the author gives Kagame's government ‘great credit’ (AOM:254). Yet, in the next paragraph, Rusesabagina denounces the regime as one ‘by and for a small group of elite Tutsis’. This position resonates with the view that the elimination of official ethnic identification serves the government's self-preserving interests of neutralising minority-majority concerns related to its questionable programme of democratisation (see Reyntjens Citation2006).
6. As a Francophone country, Rwanda maintained strong cultural, economic, and political ties with France after independence from Belgium in 1962. France supported the Habyarimana regime during the war with the RPF from 1990 until the RPF victory that ended the genocide in 1994 (see Melvern Citation2000:48).
7. This tradition has several versions and was championed by 19th century British explorer John Hanning Speke and others. One version includes the claim that native Hutus were civilised by the fine-featured and presumably superior Tutsis who had allegedly migrated from somewhere far north of Central Africa (Sanders Citation1969:521–522; Mamdani Citation2013:53–54). In the version that Rusesabagina cites, the majority agriculturalist Hutus are the cursed descendants of Ham, the dark-skinned son of Noah in the bible. This, as the myth goes, is responsible for their subservience to the historically dominant Tutsis.
8. Ubuhake was a patron-client (Tutsi-Hutu) relationship in traditional Rwandan and Burundian societies that has been compared to serfdom (see Briggs & Booth Citation2010:8). It reflected the historical, social and economic divisions between Tutsis and Hutus and its interpretation in the post-genocide period has been the subject of contestation. According to Gérard Prunier ‘[f]or the Tutsi ideologues it was a mild practice amicably linking different lineages into a kind of friendly mutual help contract. For the Hutu ideologues it was an ironclad form of quasi-slavery enabling the Tutsi masters to exploit the poor downtrodden Hutu. Of course the reality was somewhat complicated’ (1995:14).
9. An anonymous reviewer of a previous draft of this article refers, with hardly any equivocation, to the ‘fairly straightforward argument that relatively fluid identities were solidified by colonial rulers, assigning privilege to one group in perpetuity in order to divide and rule’ (emphasis added). Rusesabagina echoes this notion in several places in his narrative, stating in one instance that ‘[w]hat divided [Rwandans] was an invented history’ (AOM:21), while he downplays, or neglects to account for, the complex pre-colonial factors that contributed to this rift.
10. For instance, although he declares in the Introduction that ‘the difference between Hutu and Tutsi means everything in Rwanda’ (AOM:xi), he later writes, that between him and his Tutsi wife, this is nothing but a ‘trivia of ancestry’ (AOM:136, emphasis added).
11. See the discussion that follows on the pre-colonial institutions of ubuhake and uburetwa.
12. Sakota-Kokot argues that ‘Hotel Rwanda’, the movie on which An Ordinary Man is mostly based, adopts a simple and mechanical ‘classical Hollywood formula/narrative’ in order to achieve its specific cinematic objectives (2013:213). Her argument that the film's representational system is sometimes at odds with the reality it seeks to represent and that it ‘promotes specific readings with reference to history, myth and narrative’ (Sakota-Kokot Citation2013:211) is also relevant to an understanding of the representation of history in the book under discussion.
13. According to Bangwanubusa (2009:159), ‘[u]buretwa was a form of forced labor in return for access to land. It was imposed upon the Hutu peasant farmers by [Tutsi king] Rwabugiri's administration … Under the Belgian colonial administration (1916–1962), uburetwa became part of the tax regime imposed on Hutu male adults and justified’ as a contribution to national development (Twagilimana Citation2007:162).
14. Literally, akazu is a Kinyarwanda word meaning little house or hut, but in recent Rwandan political parlance generally refers to former President Habyarimana's powerful clique of close associates (see also Bangwanubusa Citation2009:43). Bangwanubusa also suggests that it also connotes Rwanda's ‘oligarchy’ at any given time (2009:103).