A Discussion with Dr. Eric Ndushabandi, Vice-Dean of the School of Social-Political and Administrative Sciences and Researcher at the Centre for Conflict Management, Rwanda
With: Eric Ndushabandi Berkley Center Profile
June 23, 2016
Can you please tell me about yourself?
I am Dr. Eric Ndushabandi, I have been working with the University of Rwanda as a lecturer and now as the deputy dean of the school of social and political sciences, but also I am the director of the Institute of Research and Dialogue of Peace, which is a private think tank research institute that does research on peacebuilding and political science. The institute also specializes in the questions of memory and identity, which have been my areas of research for a long time.
How did your background shape your current interests?
For the question of identity, I started this in 1994 or 1993 when I was in the Congo. I grew up there, and I started writing on identity questions because the region was characterized by many conflicts. That was before the genocide, so I was writing on interpersonal relationships, and from there, when I was about to know who I am in this very difficult context where identities are conflicted, I started working on my bachelor’s degree in philosophy, and I started saying that Africa needs to reshape and reflect on more positive identities and inclusive identities. So later on, after the genocide, I came back to Rwanda, and with my degree in political science I started shaping this idea, and I started reflecting on post-genocide context and on how we can deal with the past and with identity questions in such a difficult context, because the genocide was based on identities, on ethnic identities.
So, this is how my personal life was very connected to my research interests, because I was trying to understand what was happening around me. Somehow, my research was a projection of myself, coming from DRC to Rwanda and having been called for a long time a Congolese, I was in a situation where I myself was facing a conflict of identities.
You mentioned the term positive identities. Can you explain what it means?
A positive identity is a part of our lives really because it includes diversity. It is to say that individuals are different, but that it does not mean people should fight and kill each others. Positive identity is an open identity, an identity that is inclusive. This inclusiveness tries to focus on common human values instead of looking on differences of race, religion, gender, or ethnicity. What matters is to focus on how to live with those identities. It is an integration of others in a positive way based on focusing on the commonalities between each one’s subjective views.
In terms of that definition, how would you define social justice and reconciliation?
Positive identities mean each person will feel secure with their identities. When conflict between identities happens, it is usually based on few elements that you have to take into consideration, like historical backgrounds. Also, the state’s context, so if you are in the context of a failed state, or a context in which people focus on differences between identities, conflicts can happen. In democratic societies, and here I am defining democratic societies in terms of the state’s capacity to include in the process of construction and governance system a participation of all social categories, and to integrate the society in the process. This is to me is called social justice.
When people feel ontological fear, which is when you consider that someone has been responsible of your bad living conditions, that someone is responsible of your problems, this victimization process start by defining others as enemies. So the question of social justice means that in this process of society building, there is a feeling that someone is not well integrated in the society.
In whatever case, this is the responsibility of the government to make sure that everyone is being integrated in the process, so social justice is the right of education, security, having accommodation, to really have a good system that covers all your basic needs. When these conditions are not provided, identity-based conflicts are ready to raise, especially if a state becomes a failed state. So social justice is very important to rebuild the society and help with reconciliation.
For reconciliation, to reconcile means to build a developmental state, I mean that the state is responsible of all its citizens, to have an accountable government. This means that reconciliation can be effective, but only if the conditions of development addresses people’s problems, to address poverty, to increase access to different opportunities, to include all identities, and also to make sure you address people’s pasts and histories. So social justice and reconciliation are very connected, because social justice is a component of reconciliation. This means that you have to work on people’s mindsets, about educating them, about deconstructing of past self-presentations and negative identities that caused the problems in the first place. So education is very important to fix the perspectives and lead to a sense of having a common destiny, which is why I am telling you that social justice is a prerequisite of reconciliation.
During the conference, you mentioned that there is a difference between collective imagination and personal memories. Can you explain how you would choose which personal memories to include within the collective imagination of the nation?
After the genocide, everyone has their own experiences; everyone has been victims at different levels. On one side you have the direct victims of the genocide, which is a particular experience as they suffered from crimes against humanity. Secondly, you have other victims whom identities were victimized. But above all of these memories, we have other memories. What I mean is the genocide itself was a result of a long history of discrimination, and that everyone has their own experiences. This is why when it comes to post-genocide contexts and reconstruction, memories will be conflicted by nature. You will have opposite memories and different dynamics that change with time. They change because memories can be affected and changed with age, or because of political discourse, which means that no memory is fixed.
From an individual perspective, there is sameness, or a process of grouping oneself with others. It can be subjective or objective, as you can feel that you share similar memories like mine, but it depends on how you present yourself and how you view your identity in the first place. If we share our feelings about our identities, we will share a common understanding of the past. This is why the concept of a collective imagination or actually a collective memory is very controversial. Because it is not fixed or harmonious and stable. There are social, economic, and political dynamics that can bring these memories to change.
But in any case, what I am trying to explain is that these memories are very different from the official memory of the state. The official memory, or the public memory or the memory of the state, is about how we manage the past, so the government would say let’s bring people together through reshaping the future by creating the state’s memory. Memory in this case is by nature selective. Governments in post-conflict contexts, if they want to construct, they have to choose some memories that can go against some individual memories, or even collective memories of some groups. The official memory cannot be a global memory. All these kind of memories can find themselves in conflict with each other post-genocide or post-conflict in general, as some people or groups choose to adopt the official memory, while others can reject it. But it is always a matter of time that depends on moving in the right direction. The right direction is the one that leads to stability of a nation state with a national collective memory, it is about having common references to the past, which is very difficult. Also, having a common vision which will mean you have to fix some values, to find values that are universal and that can go beyond the personal memories.
The process should pass by what I call a walk of memory, a walk that includes discussing different memories to create a common narrative that is guided by common values, and a common destiny which is bigger than anyone’s personal memories or group’s memories. It is of course a very difficult challenge to make all those personal memories into a collective vision. On this basis of creating a national narrative, which is one of the contributions I am trying to make for my country Rwanda, I think about the nation itself. I think about how we share the same language, same culture, and the same territory, which means you can definitely have some commonalities and values that you can share with everyone else. This way you can develop discussions on what bring people to unite rather than to be divided. The government in Rwanda is trying to do this through something like Ingando, where you bring everyone together from different social categories like students and others with the objective of trying to talk about the past, what has been going wrong, and what has been positive.
Once again, the issue here is not the reality of the past. What matters here is what is necessary to understand to be able to shape the future together. This is the objective in my opinion, because it will affect the policies and the government programs and even school curriculum.
In that sense, would you say that a top-down approach is necessary before the active engagement of grassroots movements?
In a post-genocide society, how can you think about a grassroot movement when people are living in a Hobbesian state of nature? People were fighting; there was no common vision, no possible common identity, so we needed a structure that can bring people together to reflect on the situation. That can happen either by state-building approach and a nation-building approach. That means there should be a structure that leads these processes of construction. With time, the two approaches, top-down and grassroots movements, have to work together progressively, to open spaces for different grassroots movements to work, especially when it comes to the issues of memory. You need both institutions and individuals in the construction process which is what nation-building is all about. So of course grassroots movements are very important, but you have to remember that they can only start when you have some degree of stability and fixed values and a common feeling of direction. Then you can bring everyone to discuss their ownership, especially again with the issue of memory.
Would you say different generations have different perspectives on the essentiality of remembrance?
I work with youth at the university, and I talk to them about these issues to see whether they accept or reject the official memory. We have two categories of people who were born after 1994, after the genocide. The first category of people are those who want to learn about the past, I think they are more rational because they are willing to listen to different perspectives. The second category are those young people who are still victims of what I see as ideologies coming from the colonial period which led to the genocide. What I mean is that research has showed that families are still a challenge as through families. Young people learn about what happened, and we know that the generation of the parents was highly influenced by discriminatory ideologies and dividing dichotomies, which makes them explain everything in terms of ethnicity. We know this ideology is still existing, and younger generations are still victims of that.
With these two categories, you have others who simply do not care. I have seen it with some of my younger relatives who would tell me not to bring up those subjects because they are not relevant to their lives anymore. Is it a rejection? Or a psychological reaction? I do not know, but it exists. But it can also be good because they do not care about the ethnic identities of others or those divisions; I find that very interesting with the new generations. For many of them, all of that history is behind their backs now. I think it is a result of the education as well, which proves that with time everything change, people will feel more comfortable with regional and global identities, with globalism and technology, that is it. But we still have serious work to do. I was writing recently about genocide ideology, which you can still see even among some categories of young people who are victims of this kind of thinking.
This is why the government needs to be tough and to work hard on building positive identities, through creating equal opportunities for the new identity of Rwandans. This new identity now is a reality. Even if someone would identify as an extremist Hutu or a Tutsi, at the end of the day, if you go ask those people who they are, they would say they are Rwandans; they would not say we are Hutus or Tutsis. When I travel to London or Paris, I introduce myself as a Rwandan. This for me proves that there is always a room for deconstruction and for establishing social justice where everyone feels secure about their identities.
How would you reconcile between going back to tradition, and by that I mean commonalities that existed before the colonial period, and focusing on building the future? Are they contradictory?
There is no gap between these two. As a new generation, to look for your future, that does not mean you will leave your identity behind, that you are Rwandan. Culture and traditions are part of this. The government of Rwanda is trying to build the country by looking back at our traditions and by adapting them to international standards. Gacaca is a good example for this. This approach reminds the populations that they are the main resource of Rwanda, that we should go back to our traditions and culture to look for solutions. To go back and find our common values and use them in civic schooling. In that way, when people go and explore global identities, technology, and new perspectives, they will not forget that they are still Rwandans with specific values. This generation that has a positive understanding of identities, an inclusive understanding, who believe in their traditions, will not find a gap between them and the global values, because they will look for positive ways of benefiting from it.
How do you see the purpose of memorial sites, and do you think they can recreate traumas?
I see memorial sites as a medium. They are a way to situate ourselves with the past; they are instruments, educational instruments. When we face the history through visiting those sites, or watching films, we should keep in mind how this instrument is serving education. So, it really depends on the individual and how they receive different things and how they are psychologically impacted by them. The important thing is to make sure that the memorial sites are beneficial and that they are educating—especially younger generations—about the past which is absolutely important. Also, we should see how this trajectory of the past is serving the international community in teaching them that something happened, and that it should not happen once again. The impacts of trauma is a psychological approach to see things, but once again we have to focus on the message the memorial sites send. It is of course important to have supporting staff at the memorial sites, to support people who are traumatized. But this is partial and does not reduce the importance of the sites.
How do you situate your work within Rwandan development?
As a professor and researcher, I feel that I am giving my best. I lived for a long time in Belgium where my family lives today, but I felt I had a moral obligation to come back. I feel responsible to come back to Rwanda and to talk to younger generations. This is really my passion. Education is very important; it is a component of construction. So my contribution to Rwanda’s development is through making education key, to encourage critical thinking, to encourage leaving negative, divisive, and colonial ideologies and identities behind.
Also, my role is to provide a good education that will build Rwandans who can compete here, as well as in any other part of the world. To encourage the students be competitive, so what I have in my mind is really to bring Rwandans, especially younger generations, together in a competitive environment. My work here in the Peace Institute, I meet a lot of people and encourage them to participate in dialogue, which is also a contribution because I am doing that through two fields, academia and civil society engagement through peacebuilding.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
I believe that social justice is a direct responsibility of the government and the international community and system. They have to ensure that there is an evaluation of how people feel, if they are discriminated against, because a main way of preventing future conflicts and genocide is to have a very inclusive and developmental programs.
