this is an amazing website: http://www.politicaltheory.info/about.htm
this is a great website for anyone interested in the relationship between politics and philosophy. it is overflowing with information on
on political theory across a variety of approaches and on a multitude of subjects.
Enjoy!
for all you fellow book nerds out there, check out this website:
http://thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/hot_library_smut/
i read some doozies. great books that i simply have to recommend. one that left a big impression is Michela Wrong’s I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation. This is a pithy, glorious novel written from the perspective of the Eritrean people, as well in the voice of Italian colonialists. The mix of historical, political and cultural analysis revealed from the perspective of both oppressed and oppressor offers new insight into colonial Eritera, and all that colonialism left in its wake. She highlights the damage wrought by the US during the Cold War and constrasts their looting with the work of a British activist, Sylvia Pankhurst. Pankhurst took on the machinery of both the US and Britain to show the use and abuse heaped on Eritera by its so-called allies. Pankhurst’s activism is woven throughout the book, and it is refreshing to see her work given priority. Surely many a (male) historian has overlooked the contribution of a woman dismissed as a nutter. Sylvia’s son, Richard, has taken up the mantle and Wrong also includes his voice in her analysis of modern Eritera.
This book is a must read for anyone interested in understanding and explaining the callousness of colonialism in Africa. It is also a useful primer on the Eritera-Ethiopian wars, which has great resonance today, particularly as Ethiopia is saber-rattling in Somalia and Sudan. It is one of the most beautifully written books I have encountered in a long, long time. Wrong is a first class writer, and her ability to uncover the good, the bad and the ugly within a country that holds a mystical spell for many Westerners is the book’s true strength.
I also read Abigail Thomas’s Three Dog Life in one sitting. A memoir, Thomas chronicles her life following a devastating accident that resulted in her husband’s traumatic brain injury. He was institutionalised with hallucinations and psychotic episodes. The injury erased any memories he had of their life together, and the story is about Thomas’s attempt to adjust to life without the man who was her husband and her coming to grips with the man he is now. She finds solace in her home, in her extended family, and in her dogs. She re-shaped her chaotic life into one of richness and beauty, facing her new reality with courage, mixed with bursts of anger, humility, patience and humour.
As I read Three Dog Life, the parallels with the women in my Rwanda research were hard to ignore (try as i did). Rwandan women, particularly those who identify as Tutsi survivors of the genocide (not all Tutsi choose the moniker of ’survivor’ although all have it thrust on them) have lost their ability to choose how they will cope with the changes brought by the loss of family, neighbours and other loved ones during the 1994 genocide. Instead, the government has decided to paint them with the broad brush strokes of victim. The victimhood of Tutsi survivors, particularly women, is the calling card of the government when it knocks on the doors of potential development partners. But these women have no agency, they exist only by virtue of their status as widows of genocide. Identity is thrust upon them, and the support they need, assuming they can even identify and articulate what it is they need to regain a sense of their pre-genocide lives, is lacking. Wrong’s novel also shows this. Just as Rwandans are nothing without the genocide, Eriterans are nothing without their colonial oppressors woven into their story.
A fun link is Columbia’s Africa 100 Best Books of the 20th Century: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/africa/cuvl/Afbks.html#list
So it finally hit the fan last night. A soldier, armed with an aging AK47, shot one of his mates just in front of my house. I saw them take away the body this morning. He was a young man, maybe 25. I wondered what would come of his family if he was the sole breadwinner, or if he was perhaps a student at the university. The whole family may have had their hopes and dreams of future (economic) security on his shoulders, on his degree. The news would be doubly devastating on that count: loss of a son and future income and the social prestige of having put a child through university. I thought of his mother, and how she would react when the news finally reached her ears….
I have been thinking to myself for the past several weeks that something has to give…. Butare has been increasingly militarised as the gacaca courts intensify their work, and as more and more ordinary Rwandans try to flee to neighbouring Burundi to seek refuge from the effects of gacaca. Both accused and accuser are unhappy with the current state of affairs around ‘seeking justice’ through the gacaca courts.
The government, in typical prescience, has responded with an armed presence. Instead of the usual 2 or 3 soldiers on foot patrol, we now see contingents of at least 12, often 15 soldiers, walking in formation, armed and ready. Usually, the foot patrols are just a subtle reminder of past insecurity in Rwanda, with the soldiers chatting with locals, laughing with friends, and with weapons hanging at their sides, safety on. Now, the foot patrols are serious. Weapons over the shoulder, primed and ready for use at a moment’s notice.
On top of the stresses and strains of seeking justice (whatever that means around here, I am still trying to wrap my mind around that one…), the government has remained steadfast in its policy of formalising kiosks. Some clever owners have devised innovative ways of circumventing the directive to remain closed until the paperwork with Rwanda Revenue Authority is signed, sealed and delivered. Music plays from within a kiosk while the shop keeper sits at a distance, awaiting customers willing to trade. Candles burning on creaky countertops act as ‘open’ signs. The government is not chuffed with these acts of subversion, and with typical Government of Rwanda sensibility, foot patrols are also ‘to deal with’ shopkeepers who fall out of line.
The problem with this is that the boys get thirsty. They get tired. They get hungry. They don’t make enough money to frequent the restaurants and bars in town. These guys need the closed kiosks to fuel up before they set off of their gruelling 12-hour foot patrols through Rwanda’s hills and valleys. The kiosk across the street from my house had a bar attached to it. The owner has modified to be an informal space par excellence. He has cut down a tree, shaved off the stump and placed a piece of plywood on it to act as a table. He has taken the branches from the felled tree and turned them into a canopy of sorts, a means I suppose to offer some relief from the sun. He has stayed within the boundaries of the kiosk rule, which allows him to sell the stock he had on hand when the directive to shut the kiosks came down.
Last night. 9pm or so. The boys are over having a drink (or 4 or 5). The culture around drinking beer is a constant source of amusement and fascination for me. First, the beer must be big! Mutzig and Primus come in 1 litre bottles. The beer must be warm, meaning room-temperature. The beer must come to the table un-opened, lest someone has poisoned it while in the back room. Yes, beer is served in an air of paranoia and power. Paranoia because you only drink in places you know, in large groups of people you know, in case something happens and action is required. The place you know eases your mind about the quality (and available quantity) of the beer, while the large group serves as a buffer of complicity if something does go down. There should also be enough Rwandans present to totally confuse the situation and leave any possibility of uncovering the fictionalised facts of what happened dead in the water. There is safety in numbers, and Rwandans prefer never to be alone. Power because the server must acquiesce to the whims of his customers. Only big men drink big bottles. Les petits are for peasants!
Then, around 10pm. A shower of bullets from an automatic weapon. The AK. Much clucking from women, and more shouting from men. My ‘guard’, the affable mzee who stays with me, in his Rwandan way, can’t miss an opportunity to get a whiff of the potential suffering of others. He knocks on the door, and tells me in a mixture of Swahili, French and some Kinyarwanda that something is happening across the way. I had already kinda figured that out, but there is so much noise coming from across the way that I tend to ignore it wholesale. Back to reading for me, and off to the drama for mzee. You might think that the bullets would pique my curiousity, but no. I have been told on numerous occasions that the bullets are not counted by the Ministry of Defence, and once fired into the air, they never fall back to earth. Long story short, when I hear the boys firing off a few rounds, I just stay indoors, not convinced that the bullets stay high in the sky.
I am roused to my feet about 5am. This for me is an ungodly hour and not one that I witness very often. A member of the Rwandan National Police is at the gate. You must see him. Ok, I say, I’m coming.
I sit down with the officer. A baby-faced guy, with the front teeth of a 10-year old. His teeth has not yet grown to the smooth finish of adult teeth. And not a spec of facial hair on him! He is a smooth baby face. But crazy eyes, steely, mean, I’ve-seen-it-all-before eyes. When he opens his month, to ask me what I saw last night, he is all man. An exemplar of patriarchal dominance. Bossy, intimidating, probing for me to add credibility to his theory of the death. What am I doing in Rwanda? Why do I live here, in this big house, all by myself? Who takes care of me? Where are my children? These are odd questions when there is a body outside the front gate. Eventually, he tells me about how a young Rwandan died there. Did I know? Did I care? I did care, but I wasn’t going to share anything with this guy.
I did though want to ask him if the further militarization of society, combined with the continued squeeze on the livelihoods of ordinary Rwandans through half-baked and unplanned directives had any role to play the death. I wanted to ask too, was the deceased a survivor, was the killing retribution? But these are not questions to be asked when seeking justice.
so my access to the internet was blocked. i am a member of several list-servs and am always participating in one debate or another. i think the posting that did me in was this one that i made to a members’ only list at Queen’s University. a few days after posting, i was called to ‘account’ for my revisionism by both survivors’ organisations as well as some members of the government, although i didn’t actually get my knuckles formally rapped for this one. i was simply informed that as a friend of Rwanda, i should be more careful about the kind of information i choose to share. here it the post in question…
“I think it goes without saying that there were factors other than ethnic hatred that led to Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. I haven’t read Diamond’s book, so cannot comment directly on his analysis on the genocide. However, reading your overview of his distinctions, ultimate and proximate explanations, leads me to believe that he has not visited Rwanda, but instead has based himself on reading the literature on Rwanda’s genocide and its aftermath. There are both academic and journalistic literatures, and together its quantity is voluminous and its quality mixed. Some works are unworthy of citation (see Pottier 2002 for critical analysis), others outstanding (e.g., DesForges, 1999; Prunier, 1995; Mamdani, 2001; Vansina, 2005; Uvin, 1998), and many in between (e.g., Dallaire, 2004; Eltringham, 2003; Harrell, 2003).
In the first place, I don’t think it is remotely accurate to suggest that Rwanda’s genocide was driven by ethnic hatred. Diamond correctly suggests there were other factors at play, notably competition for land, population density, and drought, and to some extent these factors did play a role. But his analysis is decontextualised from the local realities in Rwanda before the genocide. By decontextualised, I mean that his analysis is lacking local insights into local realities. I’m guessing that his analysis does not include a historical analysis of both Rwandan society and state. Important factors into understanding how fear, racism and violence culminated in the individual acts that constituted the Rwandan genocide must be considered. Without local knowledge, gained from ordinary people living on the ground, most analysis is missing big pieces of picture. I won’t get into broader debates about the validity of local knowledge, but suffice it to say local knowledge is usually overlooked in both academic and policy analysis of conflict and post-conflict situations. I’ll also avoid discussion of those age-old Western discourses that perceive African wars as ethnically-driven by a subaltern ‘other’ (although I wouldn’t be surprised if that was Diamond’s ontology).
His model also seems to ignore the relationship between the then-Rwandan government and the international community (see, e.g., Anderson, 2000; Uvin 1998). Major contributing factors squeezing the legitimacy of the pre-genocide government was the imposition of programmes of democratisation and economic liberalisation by the World Bank and IMF in 
1989/90
. This effectively wiped-out the ability of the Rwandan state to meet its patron-client obligations, and instead of promoting multipartyism resulted in ethnic polarisation along party lines. The imposition of democracy brought back the bad memories of independence when Rwanda’s first (and at the time, last) democratic experiment, which resulted in the first genocide of Tutsi (1959), and the mass exodus of Tutsi into neighbouring countries. These refugees, and their children, grouped militarily, forming the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and invaded from Uganda in October 1990, claiming their right to return to their motherland. During the period of multipartyism and liberalisation, the government also on the one hand fought (with French and Belgian support) the rebel RPF invaders, and negotiated with them at the Arusha Peace Accords. The then government used the invasion of the Tutsi rebels as a pretext to persecute Tutsis living in Rwanda at the time. In so doing, they resurrected the Hutu 10 Commandments, and used the local media machine to announce to ordinary Rwandans that their deepening poverty was the fault of invading Tutsi inyenzi (cockroaches), and that all Tutsi living in Rwanda were sympathisers with the rebels. In fact, few, if any Tutsi living in Rwanda at the time of the RPF invaded knew of its existence, and indeed of the more than 30 Tutsi that I have spoken to in my research on the period leading up to the genocide reported that they and their Hutu neighbours knew next to nothing of the political pressures facing the elite in Kigali. As one woman reported, ‘”…that was Kigali business. We didn’t think politics was any of our business and so we ignored what we heard. Things were being said but it wasn’t any of our concern”. These are the first signs that the genocide was pre-meditated and systematically planned, rather than the result of spontaneous ethnic violence (as it was characterised by the western media in the April to July 1994 period, see Pottier, 2002).
So it is a misnomer to characterise Rwanda’s 1994 genocide as ethnic. Its genesis is in the manipulation of ethnic identity by a power elite bent on holding state power more than on firmly held identities of ethnicity among local, ordinary Rwandans. I would argue that any so-called ethnic hatred has its basis in what Newbury (1988) called ‘the cohesion of oppression’. Rwandan society is characterised by structural forms of domination — that is institutional arrangements that allowed the political elite to appropriate labour, goods and services from a subordination population, both Tutsi and Hutu (and Twa). Social mobility in pre-genocide Rwanda was virtually fixed, although there are some examples of Hutu becoming Tutsi and Tutsi becoming Hutu recorded before the institution of identity cards in the 1930s, under the Belgian colonisers. The myth that the pre-genocide government propagated was that Tutsi were foreigners, and were illegal invaders to Rwanda. This discourse was ‘verified’ and indeed buoyed, by ideologies of race science from the early 1900s, with ‘scientists’ like Speke to local populations through dubious scientific measurements of width of nose, height of forehead, cranial capacity, etc.
These ‘theories’ of racial superiority were manipulated to justify the manipulation of ethnic identity as innate and immutable. They were also used by the political elite to maintain authoritarian-like control on Rwandan society. Ordinary Rwandans, the 90% of the population that lives a subsistence existence, understood that elite members of state institutions and organisations held power, and they both accepted and accepted that politics was the domain of the elite. The idea of mobility, that is moving up to the ranks of the powerful, or as one of my research participants put it, of “becoming an important person” was virtually nil. This high power divide exists where hierarchy is the societal standard, inequality is anticipated (and in some cases even desired), less powerful people expect to be dependent on more powerful people, centralisation of state institutions is popular and unquestioned, subordinates envision being told what to do, and privileges and social status are expected for elite members of society. The personal rule of the President is sacrosanct, as are relations of patronage and clientelism. These are the main qualities of Rwandan society before the genocide.
Ordinary Rwandans, of low social status, being in the main peasant farmers, petty traders, or day labourers, had a sense of security of knowing their place in society, and these characteristics allowed the idea of genocide – of neighbour killing neighbour, or friend, or spouse, to become possible. In short, the social fabric was such that to imagine a tear as violent as genocide was not much of a leap. These are characteristics that stifle innovation, individual reflection, initiative, or problem-solving, and ultimately made way for the conditions that would culminate in the genocide of Tutsi, and the politicide of Hutu and Twa (see the Radical Information Project for details of this distinction, as well as an analysis of the genocide through time and space: http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/davenport/genodynamics/index.htm ). The cohesion of oppression also allowed mid-level functionaries, well-aware of the political woes of their patrons, to form alliances and make deals, usually sealed in cash, with ordinary Rwandans to do the dirty work. The culture of oppression also allowed for the manipulation of ideologies that fed into the genocidal machinery of the state. In a country that was, as Diamond points out, reaching the limits of its cultivable land, as well as subject to the demands of exiles from a previous generation, both of which feed into the manipulation of the foreigner thesis.
I could go on, but suffice to say that to explain the Rwandan genocide as based on ethnic-hatred between Hutu and Tutsi is an oversimplification. I think also, it allows for the hastily drawn portrayals of peoples who are eternal foes that circumvent contextualised analysis of the multiple historical, sociological, cultural and political causes that led to the final, and lethal, decision to embark on a well-prepared campaign of slaughter.
And, finally, looking to the future, if post-genocide Rwanda, is to use the ethnic identity/hatred angle, which the present government is doing, under the banner of ‘Rwandanness’ (ethnic divisionism has been outlawed), it could lead to a re-creation of the same conditions that gave way to the 1994 genocide. For example, the discourse of ethnic hatred within Rwanda has pointed fingers at the international community for not stopping the genocide and has called on them to account. But what of the role of Rwandans themselves in killing their brethren? In qualifying the 1994 genocide as genocide driven by ethnic hatred veils the true nature of the conflict, and pushes us to ignore its realties, and in the process overlooking and/or underestimating the drivers of genocide. Those drivers need to be studied if we are to better understand political violence with an ethnic dimension.”
or so goes power relations in rwanda. i was apprised that EVEN powerful ministers can fall afoul and they can too fight their way back, but with the appropriate apologies and enough contrition.
i like the quote alot since it was reflective of how my time in rwanda has been going. one day i was up, all was well; next day, calls to present in the big offices of kigali, hat-in-hand, tail-between-legs, etc, etc. they even went so far as to ask me not to blog and blocked my access from my personal wireless modem which was registered with a local company. when i went to the offices of that company to ask what gives on my internet connection, the guy helping me looked at my file and said, ‘ah, you’re the one’. i left it at that.
but the block on my access hasn’t been a block on my writing. i’ll start re-posting when i get back to canada.
