Susan Thomson's "Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace"

Susan Thomson is associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University. In 1994, she was program officer for the United Nations Development Programme and present in Rwanda during the crisis.

Thomson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace finds the reader almost a third of the way into the story. We meet Placide, Esther, and Gisele, middle-aged Tutsi siblings, all of whom returned to Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. The trio was born in eastern Rwanda to a Hutu mother and a Tutsi father. The family scattered in 1959 when political violence targeting Tutsi intensified. Ephram, their father, made life-changing calculations to find safety for his family. Placide traveled by car south to Burundi his father while his sisters fled east to Tanzania by foot with their mother, Anysie. They were reunited almost 40 years later, in 1996, having been raised in vastly differing circumstances, some of which are explained on page 99.

Their experience of returning to Rwanda and trying to settle into postgenocide society are but one of many such stories that frame my book. I situate the experience of Rwandans within the country’s centralized bureaucracy, mindful of different forms of stratification beyond ethnicity. Whether it’s age, gender and experience of exile like Placide and his sisters, or education, generation or occupation, the book pay close attention to Rwandan voices.

The goal is to explain the political, social and cultural reasons why the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front has adopted the policies it has from the perspective of the ordinary men and women subject to them. To do so, each chapter presents the stories of Rwandans like Placide, Esther and Gisele to analyze Rwanda’s prospects for lasting peace.

I find that government promise of peace and prosperity are reserved for political and military elites. This generally means RPF party officials and their kin networks. For most Rwandans, RPF policies have resulted in increased economic hardship and social shaming. Poverty, particularly for Rwanda’s rural majority, remains a pressing issue that the RPF is barely addressing. Instead, Kigali, the capital city, gleams as an ode to RPF policy while the majority of Rwandans continue to struggle, economically, politically, socially and emotionally.

Learn more about Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue