‘Buying a path’: rethinking resistance in Rwanda

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I tell the story of Jean-Baptiste, the president of a motorcycle taxi drivers’ co-operative, and his struggle against the machinations of certain high officials in Kigali City Council. Crucial to this story is the way in which Jean-Baptiste’s attempts to retain his position in the face of powerful opposition pit certain agencies of Rwanda’s party state against others. I use this ethnographic narrative to question the way in which much scholarship on popular resistance in Rwanda, drawing on Scott’s simplified opposition between the powerful and the powerless, opposes ‘ordinary Rwandans’ to ‘the government’ as entities with opposed interests. Theorising Jean-Baptiste’s story in terms of Rwandan idioms of relative power and influence, I suggest that such a Manichean view of power and resistance in Rwanda oversimplifies social realities. I propose instead a model of power and resistance that sees in popular relations to government a field of capacities and opportunities, where ‘paths’ to influence and security may by ‘bought’ – especially, but not exclusively, by those who are ‘strong’ and ‘high’.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• resistance
• Rwanda
• James C. Scott

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Federica Guglielmo and Nicolas Argenti for their comments in the preparation of this article, and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Will Rollason http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5250-8370

Notes

1. Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression; Newbury and Newbury, “Bringing the Peasants Back In”; Newbury, “Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda.”

2. Uvin, Aiding Violence; Kamola, “The Global Coffee Economy and the Production of Genocide in Rwanda”.

3. See references in Ingelaere, “From Model to Practice”; Sommers, Stuck.

4. Palmer, “Re-Examining Resistance in Post-Genocide Rwanda”.

5. Ibid., 231.

6. Ibid.

7. Thomson, “Whispering Truth to Power”.

8. Ingelaere, “Does the Truth Pass across the Fire without Burning?”; Ingelaere, “Peasants, Power and Ethnicity”; Ingelaere, “What’s on a Peasant’s Mind?”

9. A theoretical exploration of the state is beyond the scope of this article (and the subject of another publication). Here I follow Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance in treating the state as synonymous with government and its agencies. This is also in keeping with my informants’ usage of the Kinyarwanda word leta. Leta covers both ‘state’ and ‘government’ and refers primarily to the agencies and personnel of rule rather than an abstraction like ‘the state’ of political theory. This makes it appropriate for me, like Scott, to focus on the relation between people and power, rather than on theorising the character of that power.

10. Chemouni, “Explaining the Design of the Rwandan Decentralization”.

11. Ibid.

12. Ingelaere, “The Ruler’s Drum and the People’s Shout.”

13. Scott, “Domination and the Arts of Resistance.”

14. Scott, Weapons of the Weak; Scott, “Domination and the Arts of Resistance,” etc.

15. For a critique of Scott’s position see Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal”; and Sahlins, “What Is Anthropological Enlightenment?”.

16. Scott, “Domination and the Arts of Resistance,” 45.

17. Scott, “Resistance Without Protest and Without Organization”.

18. Scott, “Domination and the Arts of Resistance,” 86.

19. Straus and Waldorf, “Seeing like a Post-Conflict State.”

20. Booth and Golooba-Mutebi, “Developmental Patrimonialism?”

21. Ingelaere, “What’s on a Peasant’s Mind?”

22. Scott, “Domination and the Arts of Resistance,” 101.

23. A concern he clearly shares with Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; The History of Sexuality) and de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life), although their work does not figure in his argument in this connection.

24. This is not to say that the scholarship on Rwanda regards the state as being monolithic. Indeed, it could scarcely do so, since so much anthropological work has been done to explode the notion of a monolithic state – see, for example, Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, States at Work. The claim here is rather that the quality of the relation between the state and the population in much of the literature in Rwanda appears almost exclusively to be one of mistrust and veiled confrontation. Since anthropologists are usually mainly concerned with people who are not powerful players in formal politics, and because Rwandan political processes are in any case extremely secretive and difficult to penetrate, the apparent lack of intense relations between the peasantry and the government in turn tends to make government appear overly unified in many accounts of the relationship between government and governed.

25. At the time of my fieldwork, there were around 10 RWF to one pound sterling.

26. All of the interviews quoted in this article were conducted in one quarter of Kigali during two field trips. The first, from January to September 2012, provided general details of the motorcycle taxi business. The second, in January 2013, yielded data on Jean-Baptiste’s case. Given the political environment in Kigali, and the potential risk it presents to my interlocutors, I do not provide further information on interviews.

27. Rollason, “Performance, Poverty and Urban Development.”

28. Oz Architecture and Kigali City Council, ‘KCP’.

29. Sommers, Stuck.

30. National Institute of Statistics, “EICV Poverty Report.”

31. Republic of Rwanda, “Law No 50/2007 of 18/09/2007 Determining the Establishment, Organisation and Functioning of Cooperative Organisations in Rwanda.”

32. This is a de facto arrangement. RURA regulations stipulate that a motorcyclist has to belong to a formal organisation in order to obtain a permit to carry passengers. Such an organisation might be a co-operative, a syndicate or a company. However, since at the time of my fieldwork there were no commercial motorbike companies in Kigali, this meant that co-op or syndicate membership was effectively compulsory to drive in compliance with regulations. Motorcyclists certain understood that such membership was a requirement.

33. ‘Rwanda Co-operatives Agency’, last modified 2013. http://www.rca.gov.rw/spip.php?article89.

34. My analysis of the role of co-operatives in overseeing the motorcycle taxi business in Kigali is somewhat at odds with Goodfellow’s recent account of this system as one demonstrating the effectiveness of the Rwandan state (‘Taming the “Rogue” Sector’). While Goodfellow argues that the co-operative system is continuous with state activities, in principle and at times in practice, it is quite independent of government and the lines of responsibility linking co-operatives to the City Council and their line ministries are murky at best. Indeed, the systems in place for identifying and policing riders do not appear to respond directly to any official policy, although they almost certainly reflect decisions made by the party. As such, I regard the organisation of ikimotari as an example of para-statal effectiveness, or of the complexity of the Rwandan state, rather than of its effectiveness in enforcing regulation.

35. c.f. Green, “Making Africa Middle Class.”

36. Nobody, it should be noted, complained about the role they saw the party as having taken in Jean-Baptiste’s release. There was a general acceptance that he had been treated unjustly, and that some degree of fairness had been restored by what had happened. Everyone was aware that there was a chance that similar things could happen to them, and especially the motorcyclists I spoke with about what had happened were full of nothing but praise for the authorities – both in their official capacity in the Sector and Cell, and in the form of the RPF – for solving their problems. They fully accepted the role of the RPF as a shadow to the state, an alternative source of support in the business of balancing one source of power against another to protect or advance a person’s interests.

37. Taylor (“The Concept of Flow in Rwandan Popular Medicine”; Sacrifice as Terror) makes a similar argument, but based on the notion of flows rather than paths. I adopt the language of paths from the expression kugira inzira.

38. Des Forges, “The Drum Is Greater That the Shout”; Ingelaere, “The Ruler’s Drum and the People’s Shout.”

39. Ingelaere, “The Ruler’s Drum and the People’s Shout,” 67.

40. Ibid., 75 my emphasis.

41. Indeed, there are indications that such complex deployments of obligation, protection and coercion were very much present in pre-colonial Rwanda. Thus, Catherine Newbury (The Cohesion of Oppression) suggests that the relations of umuheto, uburetwa and ubuhake – all of which defined relations of obligation between a commoner and a noble – might similarly be exploited by politically exposed people to afford protection or advantage from the powerful.

42. Booth and Golooba-Mutebi, “Developmental Patrimonialism?”; Chemouni, “Explaining the Design of the Rwandan Decentralization.”

43. Palmer, “Re-Examining Resistance in Post-Genocide Rwanda.”

44. Simone, For the City yet to Come.

45. de Boeck, Kinshasa; Rakodi, “Relationships of Power and Place.”

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was funded by Brunel University.