Legislating Memory in Rwanda

Abstract

This article describes and critiques the government of Rwanda’s use of legal and extra-legal means to control memory and history in their country. The regime, to the extent it admits its actions, justifies them as necessary to maintain stability and avoid a repeat of the country’s horrific 1994 genocide. But increasingly, critics claim that Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, along with his ruling coterie, are tailoring memory and history with the aim of legitimizing their autocratic rule. American legal scholars who focus on Rwanda tend to describe what is happening there in terms of First Amendment values, focusing their attention on the Rwandan government’s suppression of political speech. This paper takes a different approach. Borrowing from the disciplines of history, historiography, and memory studies, it argues that Rwanda’s government is surpassing mere suppression of speech and is instead engaging in a comprehensive effort to rewrite history and reprogram its citizens’ collective memory. Scrutiny of the Rwandan government’s program of “memory entrepreneurship” grows more consequential as Donald Trump settles into the office of president of the United States. Before President Trump’s ascendance, the United States and the world community generally condemned politicians’ efforts to fabricate and enforce history as a means of holding on to power. President Trump’s administration, however, has introduced the Orwellian notion of “alternative facts” to the American people and has raised the possibility that bald fabrication paired with aggressive insistence may now be acceptable conduct in the political realm.For Rwanda, the question of whether “memory entrepreneurship” and “alternative facts” are or are not acceptable political stratagems grows all the more urgent as the country approaches a presidential election in the summer of 2017, one that Paul Kagame is virtually certain to win.