Part of review forum on “Navigating Cultural Memory: Commemoration and Narrative in Post-Genocide Rwanda”
Navigating Cultural Memory is a powerful, challenging, and thought-provoking work of scholarship. Drawing on a unique combination of original data including interviews, focus group discussions, site visits, ethnographic “encounters,” and his own memories and personal reflections, David Mwambari skillfully and sensitively exposes the complex, contradictory, and ever-shifting memory landscape of postgenocide Rwanda, and its intersection with both everyday lived experiences and the country’s national and international politics.
Theoretically, the book challenges us to reconceptualize and reimagine how memory is negotiated and reconstituted in postconflict contexts, drawing on decolonial approaches. It also illuminates how these processes both undergird and confront different power structures. Empirically, the study significantly advances our understanding of postgenocide Rwanda and the navigation of these issues by ordinary people, including survivors. Indeed, particularly given how over-researched Rwanda and the legacy of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda are in contemporary scholarship, Mwambari offers a disarmingly fresh and novel set of insights. This is in part due to the richness of his data, in part because of his own positionality as one of few Rwandan international scholars, and in part because of the interdisciplinarity of the work, with analysis of state discourses and approaches examined alongside the stories of artists and performers.
Indeed, in many respects, the book is somewhat difficult to place within a particular discipline. Though conceptually framed within memory studies, the significance and relevance of Navigating Cultural Memory is truly multidisciplinary, and this reflects the ambition of the research. In many ways, the study of memory—particularly memories and memorialization of an event as traumatic and impactful as the Genocide in Rwanda—defies disciplinary categorization. As the book shows so powerfully, memory and memorialization is “messy” in the sense that it emerges from the intermeshing of subjective experiences of individuals and communities. What we experience is not siloed into disciplinary categories and the book presents, ultimately, a challenge to scholars in terms of where “memory” fits in the academy. Given that memory is at least in some way key to almost everything in the Social Sciences and Humanities, should memory studies be considered a sub-field or, rather, a super-field? And what are the implications of this for the production of knowledge on memory in an academy which often struggles to engage with supra-disciplinary frameworks?
A central contribution of Navigating Cultural Memory is also its exposition of the emergence, evolution, propagation, and (re-)negotiation across many different levels of what the author calls the “hegemonic master narrative” around the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda. These dynamics are vividly brought to life in the characterization of figures in the study as either Champions, Antagonists, or Fatalists vis-à-vis their acceptance of this narrative. Contested narratives surrounding post-1994 Rwanda have, of course, also been at the heart of both scholarly and wider debate on the country and its politics globally, and it is difficult to think of a contemporary African state which has divided analysts and policymakers more than Rwanda (Beswick, Reference Beswick2014; Booth and Golooba-Mutebi, Reference Booth and Golooba-Mutebi2012; Chemouni, Reference Chemouni2020; Fisher, Reference Fisher2015; McDoom, Reference McDoom2023; Matfess, Reference Matfess2015; Mwambari, Reference Mwambari2023). For some, the narrative is that of Rwanda the development success story and for others it is that of Rwanda the murderous police state. Indeed, competing narratives on whether Rwanda represents a “safe country” have dominated recent debates between UK legislators, ministers, lawyers, and judges in the context of UK government plans to remove some people seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda.
The latter example demonstrates how these now well-established narratives and positions come to be deployed by a diverse range of actors in favour or opposition to various policies—from the provision or suspension of Western development aid to Rwanda to the transposing of a notional “Rwanda model” of governance and state-building to elsewhere in Africa. Few actors have been as skilled and practiced in the deploying or attempted neutralization of these different narratives as the post-1994 Rwandan government itself, and Navigating Cultural Memory provides fascinating insight into the micro-politics of this work. Given the political instrumentalization of narratives on Rwanda, however, what approach should scholars take to engaging with them? In delineating the archetypes of the Champion, Antagonist, and Fatalist identities, is there a risk that codifying these identities—and the narratives that underpin them—serves to further reinforce the rigidity of both the master narrative and people’s approaches to it?
On this final point, the book does, of course, emphasize how some of its central “characters” have moved over time within and between these three identities, underscoring, at the very least, that these are malleable and unfixed categories. Indeed, in many ways, a critical takeaway of this impressive and engaging study is precisely that memory narratives cannot be detached from people and their lived experiences, even if they are often presented by scholars as disembodied ideal types.
