Spectres of ‘development’: Francophonie, agricultural coloniality and genocide memory in Scholastique Mukasonga’s La femme aux pieds nus and Inyenzi ou les Cafards

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholastique Mukasonga’s testimonial memoirs document the environmental conditions of forced resettlement within Rwanda in the decades prior to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Inyenzi ou Les cafards (2006) and La femme aux pieds nus (2008) attest to a form of ‘internal’ exile on coffee-growing paysannats—government-sponsored farms introduced in the colonial period. In this article, I contextualise the Belgian administration’s interest in settling Bugesera in light of continuing economic and colonial-scientific investment in agronomy and agricultural development. I map the intensification of this ‘agricultural coloniality’ in the context of post-independence Hutu nationalism, in which ‘development’ is linked to the coffee economy, neo-colonial involvements based on Francophonie, and the cleansing of ‘invasive’ Tutsi pastoralists from the national landscape. This history illuminates Mukasonga’s premonitory construction of genocide memory, in which colonial models of rationalisation, resettlement, and forced cultivation anticipate both the 1994 genocide and the social cleansing of Tutsi in the early 1960s. ‘Spectres’ of the genocidal implications of development, linguistic reminders of social exclusion, and dehumanising metaphors of eradication as environmental management permeate the memoirs and resonate with a broader colonial topos of development-as-eradication, namely, attempts to eradicate tsetse flies in Bugesera through pesticide spraying and instrumentalised Tutsi resettlement.