Abstract
In Rwanda, a single definition of the model citizen has come to dominate the public realm, following the government’s launch of the Itorero program. Intore, as this identity is called, represents the government’s design for how Rwandans should relate to themselves normatively—as cultural antecedents, subjects of state leadership, and members of a modernizing society—and what can and cannot publicly be said about this identity, practically. In essence, Intore has implied the introduction of new politico-ethnic undercurrents running within a formally universalist citizen construction. Sundberg shows how the Itorero program’s militaristic and future-oriented attributes echo a legacy of African revolutionary movements. Its pronounced fetishizing of the state and its leadership, and its hierarchical and comprehensive strategies to disseminate its teachings, also reflect African postcolonial state-making and socialist practices of narrative control.
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Notes
- 1.
The Ubudehe program is a scheme for mutual assistance and poverty alleviation at the community level, co-financed through state grants and local resources (i.e. residents’ labor). Activities include the construction or maintenance of local infrastructure (public buildings, roads, and anti-erosion terraces).
- 2.
The words quoted were used during Itorero lectures on “traditional” Itorero held in various Itorero trainings I attended, including in two secondary schools and two national level camps.
- 3.
Other songs, described as “traditional” and “widely known,” were associated with Scout training, church, or secondary school. They did not necessarily address Rwanda, nationalism, or patriotism but could also be about nature, God, or romantic love.
- 4.
The definition reads: “a consensus practice of citizens who have common nationality, who share the same culture and have equal rights; citizens characterized by trust, tolerance, mutual respect, equality, complementary roles/interdependence, truth, and healing of one another’s wounds inflicted by our history, with the objectives of laying a foundation for sustainable development” (NURC 2007, 6–7 quoted in NURC 2010, 18).
- 5.
Ubumwiyunge also alludes to military or government authority, designating the joining together of several countries or regions under the same authority (Burnet 2012, 151).
- 6.
The Eight Points Program had as objectives to promote national unity and reconciliation, establish democracy, provide security, build a self-sustaining economy, eradicate corruption, repatriate and resettle refugees, provide social welfare, and pursue progressive foreign policy (Rwandan Patriotic Front 2015).
- 7.
Purdeková (2015, 215–217) makes a similar analysis of Ingando camps.
- 8.
A few initiatives to reintroduce national history have been made, including a guide on civic education and a series of “social studies” books in primary school. At the secondary level, a guide on reflective and dialogue-based history teaching was developed by Rwandan state institutions, an American university, and an American NGO, but was later halted by the Rwandan government (King 2014, 130–135; Freedman et. al. 2011, 297–310).
- 9.
Geschiere describes the upsurge of these movements as a response to globalization’s boundary transgressions, and, in many African countries, large-scale reforms for decentralization and multiparty democratization (Geschiere 2009, 17).
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Sundberg, M. (2016). Rwanda and Rwandans in the Post-Genocide Political Imaginary. In: Training for Model Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58422-9_3
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