Media, Minority Discourses and Identity Politics in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Abstract

Summary This article explores how media has been used to shape the contours of political debate and ethnic identities in post-genocide Rwanda. The article will argue that although the government of Paul Kagame has loosened control on media, its obsession with constructing an “exeptionalised genocide narrative”, has been to a larger measure used as a weapon to gag media freedom. The poor and marginalised Rwandans or “minority discourses” find it very difficult to express their political identities outside the officially sanctioned spaces and categories. The consequence is a fundamentally flawed political narrative that the state uses to practice state sanctioned media censorship, eliminate “dissenting” voices and destroy civic society. Also, in postgenocide Rwanda, there is a worrisome tendency by the government in which citizens are categorised into two groups, described as “saints” and “sinners”, although this is veiled under the policy of “Rwandanicity”. This binary categorisation of society, which is also used to [re]configure state-owned media narratives, is heavily contested in this article because it discourages the emergence of alternative “voices” and “discourses” which can confront the politics of inclusion and exclusion practiced by the state based on who was a “victim” or “perpetrator” of violence during the 1994 genocide. It is also going to be unveiled how private media is often accused by the state for causing “ethnic divisionism”, “negationism”, and of harbouring an “ethnic ideology and genocide mentality”. The degree to which media contest the manipulation of “truths”, challenge the monopoly on knowledge construction, and of political correctness by the state will reflect the extent to which the government can either constrict or democratise media space for full citizen participation in post-genocide Rwanda.