accessible elites...

i am amazed at the level of accessibility that senior rwandan officials provide. i am phoning senators, parliamentarians, ministers and other high-level officials on their direct line. it is very easy to track down the cell phone numbers of these people. drop them a phone call, make an appointment, and they receive me.

and when we meet, they avail their time generously. we talk for up to two hours. where a meeting or some other official duty arises at our appointed time, the individual him/herself calls to re-schedule our appointment.

i wonder what it means, that meeting these government individuals is so easy. it is because i’ve been in-country before, and that i have some currency here? nah. is it because my research question is of interest to the rwandan government? also unlikely. they don’t even know my question until i present it to them in our face-to-face meeting. it is because the Rwandan government is open to research about life in post-genocide rwanda? maybe. there are many, i would guess over one hundred foreign whites here doing research at both the Master’s and Doctoral levels, on topics ranging from sustainable agriculture, to deforestation, to resilience among survivors, to ICT and development…

i have no sense of the dominating, controlling elite that i’ve read about in various western journals (see for example, Eltringham, 2003; Reyntjens, 2004). instead, i’m encountering an open, patient elite that respond with well-thought out answers to my equally well-planned questions. (i spent my evening writing and re-writing questions for different members of government, trying to anticipate what might come up so i have something intelligent to say, to ask). what wiggles in my mind is whether the open-door policy is itself part-and-parcel of the policy of national unity…. the western academic literature suggests a manipulative elite. i don’t have this sense; what i see is a compassionate elite that is committed to the reconstruction and reconciliation of their rwanda.

does make me go, hmmmmmmmmmmmmm, nonetheless….