Moving on by settling down? Ambiguities of urban housing and home in post-genocide Rwanda

Abstract

What can Rwandans’ post-genocide experiences of house and home tell us about how people live with histories of violence? Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the university town of Butare, I argue that educated town residents’ relationships to ‘home’ are a nexus of the genocide’s legacy, of the contingencies of lives not lived, and of post-genocide politics. Drawing from participant observation and interviews, I delineate four relationships between home, temporality, and genocide to elicit the broader tension between settlement and what remains unsettled in the wake of violence. Central to this tension is how seemingly private talk of home offers a powerful critique of the former colonizer, of the actors who planned the genocide, and of post-genocide social and political conditions. Butare residents’ relationships to house and home thus uncover the inherent contradictions in the idea that people ‘move on’ from violence by ‘settling down.’