Rwandan leadership, Ma’at, and identities

July 12, 2008

Two nights of good sleep!

Dinner last night with Justine and Florída, the sisters of my friend Mike who is studying in the US. Good Italian: pasta in butter, garlic, and pilli, a Rwandan hot sauce I think based on habañero peppers. [On a side note, Mike and Steph bought one of these little peppers from the women who set up baskets of produce on the street, not knowing what it was. They put a quarter of one in some marinera sauce, but it was too hot to eat.] The pasta at Chéz Robert was good, but I think they must prepare it for their perceptions of muzungu tastes. This muzungu misses her jalapeños. Justine’s face lit up when I shared this longing with her. Next time, she said, we will go to an Indian restaurant where the food is both delicious and spicy.

Oh, and Justine tells me that there is a pasteurized form of urwagwa. Sorry, Mike in the US: I’m going to have to try it at some point while I’m here. :-)

The conversation during dinner was terrific. We talked a long time about family as well as clothing and cultural expectations. Even better, Justine provided insights that begin to fill the gaps in my understanding of Rwandan life.

As we talked about the increasing prosperity of Rwanda, I asked if the benefits of development are reaching those in the lowest rungs of society. I was thinking here of the neighborhood where the interns Mike and Steph live, where conditions appear almost dire: streets are almost impassable, there is no running water, and people’s faces look a bit harder than those I’ve seen.

Justine said that in some ways, things are getting better for those people. She, for example, is working on women’s land rights initiatives. We didn’t get into the details of this, but she told me that some of the people on the colline I’m staying on, Muhima, were relocated from their houses to other areas outside the city. The houses they were told to leave were derelict. The mayor of Kigali relocated them outside the city in planned communities with water and electricity. At first, the people were upset about losing access to the Kigalli markets and their livelihoods. But a few months after the relocation, they realized they were better off.

This same leader (I asked Justine his name and even had her repeat it slowly, but I can’t remember it) was then asked to govern the Eastern province of Rwanda, a semi-arid area that had been a national park. This man told the people there that he didn’t want to see children barefooted nor animals running loose. He also made them put away some of their harvest into some kind of community storage place. Farming there is more risky than in the fertile areas of the country. Here, again, people were disgruntled about the initiatives, but the next period of drought came and crops failed, they had food in the community storage. I guess they “sold” it to the storage, because they bought it back at very low prices. The point is, though, that people didn’t go hungry, and now they have a process for managing the vagaries of nature and avoiding famine.

Another initiative involves, again, the concept of relocation villages. Apparently South Africa has them as well. These villages are of about 2200 people, with schools, markets, and other necessities. The idea here is of land management. Instead of letting houses stay on fertile land, houses are built in unproductive areas and the fertile land formerly used for housing is farmed by the community in economies of scale. When I asked if these are mixed communities (survivors and perpetrators), Justine answered yes, but that even those labels are discouraged in the interest of reconciliation. Farming together, though, creates a more intense interdependency, and they work together for their mutual survival and benefit.

[On another side note, Justine talked about Rwandans’ feelings about needing to move on with their lives. When I asked how the country can reconcile after the Genocide, she told me that Rwandans acknowledge what happened—they don’t forget—but they need to move on. Not want or think about moving on, but need to move on. Not dwelling on the past maybe promotes healing. I think of the Genocide orphans at the Memorial Centre, about their grief. This continues to generate big questions for me: What is the balance between grieving the past and moving on? What do Rwandans do when they have moved on, but then the past comes flooding back and they cry for their mothers and fathers? Will Rwandans teach the rest of us something new about healing from PTSD? What can Rwandan survivors teach us about trauma reconciliation?]

The Eastern province leader has now been promoted to the Minister of Education, and now people are looking forward to his initiatives because they trust that he will improve things based on his past successes.

I made several comments to Justine regarding this leadership. I imagined my friend and colleague back home, LH, and told Justine that if the American government tried to relocate its citizens or mandated even shoes on children, there would be outcries of individual rights and you-can’t-make-me-do-anything! There would be no way that these initiatives would be successful in the States. Justine raised an eyebrow.

I also told Justine that American knowledge of Rwandan leadership, based on William Kristoff’s reportage in the New York Times, as well as a new book, focuses exclusively on Paul Kagame. I’ve seen no information, no stories about mid-level leadership. And the portrayal of Kagame is that of a benevolent authoritarian. I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on about Rwanda for the past year, and the dominant Western image of government here is that Kagame drives this country, and that when his term as president is over, the country will be in danger of disintegrating into chaos.

Justine was surprised at this. She told me that, in contrast to the government pre-1994 (which was ruled from the top down), the government now is acting from the bottom up based on local and regional initiatives. All the work, the new initiatives—by both governmental and non-governmental organizations—must fulfill some area of the Vision 2020 plan. This visionary document is available on the web. It functions as a strategic plan for the country.

The metaphor that now comes to my mind is that Rwanda is governed as a well-run business might be in the US. I think of Malcolm Baldrige quality criteria, and many processes and forms of accountability look the same here. Justine said even she doubted in 2000 that progress could be made so quickly, but in five years, she saw the improvements to people’s lives, and since then, she has had hope. Many of my friends know that I’ve long been interested in intentional communities, and Rwanda seems to me an intentional nation.

I don’t think Westerners understand enough Rwandan culture to be able to judge fairly what is happening here. We have a difficult time with the concept of relinquishing individual rights for the good of the group. We have a more difficult time trusting our leaders. We believe in individual property rights. But if we interpret government initiatives here based on American values and we assume those values to be universal, then of course we would characterize leaders here as autocratic. How could we possibly see their actions as caring, when care is not a function of our concept of government?

Here, the group identity, the feeling of togetherness, dominates life. Afrocentrism presents a vastly different paradigm of reality than almost any of the Western approaches to life, particularly positivism and the overreliance on scientific reasoning and the agonism of us versus them or me versus you. Even feminists, especially those aligned with Carol Gilligan’s work who appreciate and work toward interdependence—that is to say, even I—struggle to understand the group dynamic here. Scholars describe Afrocentrism as predicated on the concept of Ma’at, a philosophy based on an ancient Egyptian goddess. This philosophy is based on the principles that not only are we all in this together, but that everyone also has a human obligation to do what is best for others. Ma’at is easily observable here in everyday life.

This group identity and obligation to act for the group’s benefit was, of course, twisted and abused by the planners of the Genocide. Bagosora and the other Genocide planners raped Ma’at.
I have so much to learn about this concept of group identity and how sub-groups identify themselves and interact with other sub-groups. The idea of delineation and marginalization must come into play somehow. I wonder whether the needs/idiosyncrasies of the individual are denied by the group or whether those needs or idiosyncrasies are met with/integrated into the group. I wonder what the implications are of this group identity for PTSD? Does the group help heal the trauma or do they marginalize the individual symptoms?