Reconciliation in Rwanda: education, history and the state.

• Author: Hodgkin, Marian
• Position: ANDREW WELLINGTON CORDIER ESSAY

A group of school buildings about thirty kilometers from Butare, Rwanda's second largest town, was a place of education, then of refuge, then of horror. Today, it is a place of death and remembrance. Murambi was a technical school, with brick-built classrooms and a large hall. During the genocide in 1994, 50,000 to 60,000 people fearing for their lives gathered in these buildings hoping for safety from genocidal militia. Only four survived. Now the classrooms are filled with more than 20,000 bodies exhumed from mass graves, laid out on trestle tables, deathblows visible, and here and there a rosary round a neck and scraps of bright cloth faded by chemicals. The school hall is empty apart from a pile of old, decaying clothes removed from the victims.

Murambi encapsulates the difficulty of Rwanda's past. The country has a history of brutal and cyclical violence. Murambi is a testament to the most recent episode. But the memorialized school buildings also remind us that Rwanda's violent history is itself an issue of contestation: The bodies were exhumed and preserved as evidence so that the crime that occurred there--genocide--can never be denied. The current government in Rwanda is faced with a difficult and daunting question: How does one teach a nation's history when not only the scale and longevity of violence in the past is overwhelming, but the history itself is contested? The government's response has been to remove formal history from all school curricula, arguing that modern national history is potentially too divisive to be taught in a society emerging from decades of ethnic hatred, distrust and prejudice. Instead, the government is focusing much of its time and resources on promoting unity and reconciliation, stressing that Rwandan identity should now be based on national bonds rather than ethnic differences. There is much to unite the Rwandan people: language, culture, religion and ancestral belief. Moreover, despite the formal history-teaching moratorium, this new collective identity does draw upon a historic foundation: The government is emphasizing those periods that are considered to demonstrate a pre-colonial Rwandan unity.

Under the most difficult of circumstances, the Rwandan government has made massive strides in educational reform since the genocide. There is evidence to show that those directly involved--teachers, parents and students--are satisfied with the emphasis placed on merit-based opportunity and ethnic equality. The international community is also highly complimentary of the progress Rwanda has made on this issue. However, most reports written by international donors working in Rwanda either neglect the issue of history in education or support the government's view that, in order to avoid causing instability and upsetting the fragile reconciliation process, teaching history can be indefinitely postponed. Rwandan officials and policymakers have not solicited the views and opinions of local people regarding the teaching of history. (1)

Reconciliation is a process that involves the rebuilding of relations--both individually and collectively. (2) It is not an activity that simply entails "being nicer to each other," but a long-term project that is based on the needs and interests of both groups. (3) Long-lasting, deep and meaningful reconciliation will not occur in Rwanda without reconciliation with history. An open, democratic and participatory debate about a national history curriculum is not only necessary for reconciliation but, if conducted well, could further social reconstruction and cohesion. This paper argues that no matter how honorable the intention, the repression of discussion about divisive and contested moments in Rwandan history, both within and outside the school curriculum, will only serve to create new dynamics of social exclusion. Furthermore, it is contested that the international community is in danger of failing to learn lessons from its own historic failures. The development of a history curriculum should not wait: It is a precondition for the building of a lasting peace in Rwanda and the Great Lakes region.

HISTORIC DIVIDES

As many as 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in just three months during 1994, in a genocide orchestrated by the extremist Hutus in government and carried out by the army, trained militia and ordinary Rwandans. (4) Schools like Murambi became places of refuge and then the venue for some of the worst massacres. The entire school system was massively affected by the genocide. Not only was much of the infrastructure destroyed, but 75 percent of teachers in 1994 were either killed or are now in jail for alleged participation in the genocide. (5) Moreover, 70 percent of children reported witnessing violent injury or death during the genocide and concurrent civil war. (6) The post-genocide Rwandan government faces severe financial and human capital pressures, all in a context of extreme psychosocial disruption.

After the genocide, the newly instituted government of Rwanda not only had to react to the educational emergency prompted by the events of 1994 but also had to address the legacies of an educational system that had been based on racial and ethnic inequality and discrimination since its inception. From the introduction of widespread formal schooling in Rwanda by the Belgian colonialists in the 1920s, the ruling elites--first the minority Tutsis under indirect colonial rule and then the Hutus following independence in 1962--privileged their ethnicity in terms of access to education and employment opportunity.

Inequalities of opportunity and access based on ethnic or regional affiliation permeated the entire education system. Perhaps even more harmful in terms of social equality and stability was the extent to which many elements of the institutional structure, teacher and pupil behavior, textbooks and curricula promoted ethnic division and hatred. Documentation is hard to come across, but anecdotal evidence is plentiful. One government minister recalled a moment from his school days:

The teacher asked us [the class] to stand in two lines face to face. He asked if we looked the same. We laughed because we had the same life, traveled to the same school, wore the same clothes. The teacher told us we were not the same: he compared our heights and noses. Then our class was divided: long noses on one side, flat noses on the other. We had not been aware of our ethnic identity ... but after this incident we no longer played together with banana leaf footballs. (7) DEPOLITICIZED DEVELOPMENT

Given the overt and underlying structural discrimination and divisive inequality in Rwanda, it is perhaps surprising that the international community considered the country a development success story. Before 1994, Rwanda was seen as a model of macroeconomic development. As a World Bank report from 1982 commented, "Rwanda's approach to economic and social development could be considered as successful." (8) Rwanda was praised for expanding primary school enrollments and achieving gender parity in primary schools by 1990. (9) Rwanda was one of the most aided countries in the world, receiving much more...