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Zoe Berman: No Love in Rwanda? The Politics of Marriage and Social Reproduction after Genocide

April 11 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Alum-300: EVELYN HANDLER FORUM

This event is open to the public.

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How does the generational transmission of memory and political ideology shape processes of reconciliation after domestic conflict? This paper builds on over two years of ethnographic research to explore intergenerational conflict around marriage as a challenge to the politics of ethnic unity introduced in Rwanda following the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi. Today, many Rwandan youth proudly follow a 2003 law that forbids citizens from publically identifying as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa and rather insist that they are “all Rwandan.” However, at home many Rwandan parents draw on memories of ethnic segregation and violence to discourage their children from socializing and dating across ethnic lines—practices encompassed by what my interlocutors referred to as “Ideology at the Hearth” (ingengabitekerezo ku ishyiga). Some parents assert this influence over marriage, threatening to withhold traditional forms of social and financial support from children who marry against their wishes. Indeed, despite the fact that many of my youth interlocutors disavowed these practices as part of “a history that is not theirs,” they nonetheless mobilized the “marriage problem” as a way of carefully discussing how historically rooted aspects of identity continue to divide their friends and families. In this paper, I therefore explore marriage as a site of social reproduction through which issues of ethnic discrimination and ideology are negotiated, but not resolved. The paper explores a series of debates within a youth group in the northwest town of Gisenyi, as well as broader conversations about marriage and desirability in the region. On one hand, I illustrate how youth mobilized the idea of transcendent liberal love to discursively combat the influence of ideology at the hearth on marriage, situating interethnic love as an antidote to historically rooted social cleavages. At the same time, I highlight how economic precarity inflamed romantic anxieties, encouraging some young people to fall back on old patterns of social, ethnic, and economic discrimination.  Reflecting on these dynamics, the paper considers whether discrimination can be eradicated in Rwanda without reckoning with differences that shape everyday life in the post-genocide era.