Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Abstract

More than a decade after the genocide, Rwanda's local communities remain severely affected by the experience of the violence and horror. This is reflected in the way people remember their past, as well as in what they choose to forget. During fieldwork in Nyamata and Gikongoro it became apparent that even though the memory of the genocide as such, its pain and suffering, was essential for all interviewees, a clearer picture of the causes of the genocide had disappeared into oblivion. In this article I argue that this forgetting of pregenocide social cleavages reflects less a mental failure than a conscious coping mechanism. What I shall refer to as chosen amnesia, the deliberate eclipsing of particular memories, allows people to avoid antagonism and enables a degree of community cohesion necessary for the intimacy of rural life in Rwanda. While this is presently essential for local coexistence, it prevents the emergence of a critical challenge to the social cleavages that allowed the genocide to occur in the first place and impedes the social transformation necessary to render ethnicity-based violence impossible.