How collective memory of the Rwandan genocide was preserved

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda took place over a little more than three months, during which militias representing the Hutu ethnic group conducted a mass murder of members of the Tutsi ethnic group along with some politically moderate members of the Hutu and Twa groups. Soon after, local citizens and aid workers began to document the atrocities that had occurred in the country.They were establishing evidence of a genocide that many outsiders were slow to acknowledge; other countries and the U.N. did not recognize it until 1998. By preserving scenes of massacre and victims’ remains, this effort allowed foreigners, journalists, and neighbors to witness what had happened. Though the citizens’ work was emotionally and physically challenging, they used these sites of memory to seek justice for victims who had been killed and harmed.In so doing, these efforts turned memory into officially recognized history. Now, in a new book, MIT scholar Delia Wendel carefully explores this work, shedding new light on the people who created the state’s genocide memorials, and the decisions they made in the process — such as making the remains of the dead available for public viewing. She also examines how the state gained control of the effort and has chosen to represent the past through these memorials.“I’m seeking to recuperate this forgotten history of the ethics of the work, while also contending with the motivations of state sovereignty that has sustained it,” says Wendel, who is the Class of 1922 Career Development Associate Professor of Urban Studies and International Development in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP).That book, “Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty,” is published by Duke University Press and is freely available through the MIT Libraries. In it, Wendel uncovers new details about the first efforts to preserve the memory of the genocide, analyzes the social and political dynamics, and examines their impact on people and public spaces.“The shift from memory to history is important because it also requires recognition that is official or more public in nature,” Wendel says. “Survivors, their kin, their relatives, they know their histories. What they’re wishing to happen is a form of repair, or justice, or empowerment, that comes with disclosing those histories. That truth-telling aspect is really important.”Conversations and memoryWendel’s book was well over a decade in the making — and emerged from a related set of scholarly inquiries about peace-building activities in the wake of genocide. For this project, about memorializing genocide, Wendel visited over 30 villages in Rwanda over a span of many years, gradually making connections and building dialogues with citizens, in addition to conducting more conventional social science research.“Speaking with rual residents started to unlock a lot of different types of conversations,” Wendel says of those visits. “A good deal of those conversations had to do with memory, and with relationships to place, neighbors, and authority.” She adds: “These are topics that people are very hesitant to speak about, and rightly so. This has been a book that took a long time to research and build some semblance of trust.”During her research, Wendel also talked at length with some key figures involved in the process, including Louis Kanamugire, a Rwandan who became the first head of the country’s post-war Genocide Memorial Commission. Kanamugire, who lost his parents in the genocide, felt it was necessary to preserve and display the remains of genocide victims, including at four key sites that later become official state memorials.This process involved, as Wendel puts it, the “gruesome” work of cleaning and preserving bodies and bones and preserving material remains to provide both material evidence of genocide and the grounds for beginning the work of societal repair and individual healing.Wendel also uncovers, in detail for the first time, the work done by Mario Ibarra, a Chilean aid worker for the U.N. who also investigated atrocities, photographed evidence extensively, conducted preservation work, and contributed to the country’s Genocide Memorial Commission as well. The relationships between global human rights practice and genocide survivors seeking justice, in terms of preserving and documenting evidence, is at the core of the book and, Wendel believes, a previously underappreciated aspect of this topic.“The story of Rwanda memorialization that has typically been told is one of state control,” Wendel says. “But in the beginning, the government followed independent initiatives by this human rights worker and local residents who really spurred this on.”In the book, Wendel also examines how Rwanda’s memorialization practices relates to those of other countries, often in the so-called Global South. This phenomenon is something she terms “trauma heritage,” and has followed similar trajectories across countries in Africa and South America, for instance.“Trauma heritage is the act of making visible the violence that had been actively hidden, and intervening in the dynamics of power,” she says. “Making such public spaces for silenced pain is a way of seeking recognition of those harms, and [seeking] forms of justice and repair.”The tensions of memorializationTo be clear, Rwanda has been able to construct genocide memorials in the first place because, in the mid-1990s, Tutsi troops regained power in the country by defeating their Hutu adversaries. Subsequently, in a state without unlimited free expression, the government has considerable control over the content and forms of memorialization that take place.Meanwhile, there have always been differing views about, say, displaying victims’ remains, and to what degree such a practice underlines their humanity or emphasizes the dehumanizing treatment they suffered. Then too, atrocities can produce a wide range of psychological responses among the living, including survivors’ guilt and the sheer difficulty many experience in expressing what they have witnessed. The process of memorialization, in such circumstances, will likely be fraught.“The book is about the tensions and paradoxes between the ethics of this work and its politics, which have a lot to do with state sovereignty and control,” Wendel says. “It’s rooted in the tension between what’s invisible and what’s visible, between this bid to be seen and to recognize the humanity of the victims and yet represent this dehumanizing violence. These are irresolvable dilemmas that were felt by the people doing this work.”Or, as Wendel writes in the book, Rwandans and others immersed in similar struggles for justice around the world have had to grapple with the “messy politics of repair, searching for seemingly impossible redress for injustice.”Other experts have praised Wendel’s book, such as Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a professor at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, who studies the psychological effects of mass violence. Gobodo-Madikizela has cited Wendel’s “extraordinary narratives” about the book’s principal figures, observing that they “not only preserve the remains but also reclaim the victims’ humanity. … Wendel shows how their labor becomes a defiant insistence on visibility that transforms the act of cleaning into a form of truth-telling, making injustice materially and spatially undeniable.”For her part, Wendel hopes the book will engage readers interested in multiple related issues, including Rwandan and African history, the practices and politics of public memory, human rights and peace-building, and the design of public memorials and related spaces, including those built in the aftermath of traumatic historical episodes.“Rwanda’s genocide heritage remains an important endeavor in memory justice, even if its politics need to be contended with at the same time,” Wendel says.