This paper is concerned with the mass graves and exhumed bodies of victims of the Rwanda genocide and war of the 1990s. A government-led programme of exhumation of mass burials and individual graves has taken place over the last decade. The exhumation of mass graves has been undertaken, in the main, by Tutsi genocide survivors who work under the supervision of state officials. Post-unearthing, these bodies are unravelled, and the remnants of soft flesh, clothing, personal possessions and bones are separated from each other. Skeletal structures are fully disarticulated and the bones pooled into a vast collective, for placement within memorials. The outcome of these exhumations is that remains almost always lack individual identity at the point of reinterring. A productive analytical comparison is found in examining exhumations of Spanish Civil War graves, where the fates of individual dead are closely entangled with the lives of survivors. Here there is a clear contrast with exhumations in Rwanda, in the possible re-articulation of identities with specific human remains. But a similarity is also critical: in both cases the properties of human remains, as unsettling materials, garner specific 'affects', which drive forward national political projects that aim to consolidate particular collective memories of conflict, albeit that this kind of 'material agency' is mobilized to very different ends in each case.Le présent article porte sur les charniers et les corps exhumés des victimes du génocide et de la guerre des années 1990 au Rwanda. Au cours de la dernière décennie, le gouvernement a mené un programme d'exhumation des fosses communes et des tombes individuelles de victimes. Des exhumations de charniers ont été entreprises, pour l'essentiel, par des survivants tutsis du génocide travaillant sous la supervision d'agents de l'État. Après déterrement, le corps est démêlé ; les restes de tissus mous, vêtements, effets personnels et os sont séparés les uns des autres. Les structures squelettiques sont entièrement désarticulées et les os regroupés en grands amas pour être placés dans des mémoriaux. En conséquence, à l'issue de ces exhumations, les restes sont presque toujours dépourvus d'identité individuelle au moment d'être redéposés. L'examen des exhumations de tombes de la guerre civile espagnole offre une comparaison analytique fructueuse: le sort de l'individu décédé est étroitement lié à la vie des survivants, et un contraste est manifeste étant donné la possible réarticulation de l'identité pour chaque cas. Une similitude est également cruciale: dans les deux cas, les caractéristiques des restes humains comme matériaux troublants recueillant un «affect» particulier font avancer des projets politiques nationaux qui visent à consolider la mémoire collective des conflits, mais c'est une agencéité mobilisée à des fins très différentes.

In a recent discussion on the display and concealment of bodies during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, Nigel Eltringham asserts a common anthropological truism that 'violence is discursive', and that 'the victim's body is a key vehicle of that discourse' (2015, 161). This point preambles his argument that scholars should pay 'the same attention … to post-mortem disposal as has been given to ante-mortem degradation' (2015, 172) in contexts of violent conflict. His argument points to the need to consider ante-and post-mortem violence within continuous, coherent necropolitical frameworks of meaning (Fontein 2010), across often arbitrary or imposed distinctions between life and death. But the argument he develops also questions the validity of differentiating between 'the instrumental, didactic display of bodies in "cultures of terror", where the intention is to discipline a population and, in contrast, the concealment of bodies in contexts of genocide, where the intention is to exterminate a population' (2015, 168). As he shows for Rwanda's genocide, with comparative examples drawn from Argentina (Robben 2004), Columbia (Uribe 2004) and Zimbabwe (Fontein 2010), this dualism simply does not work. 'Not all cultures of terror display bodies instrumentally' and as the Rwandan case clearly shows, 'not all genocides only involve concealment' (Eltringham 2015, 167-168). Eltringham builds his case for the didactic and discursive significance of the diverse ways in which corpses were handled and disposed of during Rwanda's genocide with reference to, amongst other things, Taylor's well-known analysis of 'flow/blockage symbolism' in Rwanda's conceptions of the body (1999). These, Taylor argued, were reflected in the way that the genocide was carried out, which betrayed a preoccupation with the movement of persons and substances and with the canals, arteries, and conduits along which persons and substances flow: rivers, roadways, pathways, and even conduits of the human body such as the reproductive and digestive systems. (Taylor 1999, 128) Although this analysis is (as Eltringham notes) necessarily speculativebecause it is impossible to know, without thorough ethnographic work amongst perpetrators, what motivated them, and it remains possible the disposal of bodies 'was more pragmatic' and 'prosaic' than 'poetic'it does resemble cultural motifs and 'flow metaphors' elsewhere in the region (Warnier 2007). The articles in this special issue not only engage with the concerns that Eltringham raises but also, in an important way, move beyond them. The articles derive from a workshop held at the University of Edinburgh in September 2013, one of three workshops that formed a three-year British Academy-funded project entitled Transforming Bodies: Health, Migration and Violence in Southern Africa. Building on a recent growth of academic interest in the complex social and political significance of human corporeality, this international partnership between scholars at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and the University of the Witwatersr...

English Abstract: The governments of Rwanda and Burundi exhume mass graves with the promise of revealing truths about the contested histories of past conflict and genocide. In Rwanda, exhumations recover and conserve the bodies of victims of the genocide against the Tutsi. Since December 2019, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Burundi has also begun mass exhumations; these efforts are motivated by truth-seeking and reconciliation aspirations that articulate a specific narrative of victimhood and state legitimacy. The state employs vernacularised forms of forensic practices and ‘international’ rights-based discourses in both cases. Drawing on our respective ethnographic fieldwork, we describe and analyse exhumation practices in Rwanda and Burundi. The ‘forensic turn’ in post-conflict settings has been the subject of much discussion and debate among scholars since the proliferation of the practice over recent decades. We add to these debates in our consideration of two linked settings in which the exhumations had become powerful political tools, in this case serving as a source of power for specific regimes.French Abstract: Les gouvernements du Rwanda et du Burundi exhument des fosses communes en promettant d’éclaircir les vérités sur les histoires contestées des conflits et des génocides passés. Au Rwanda, les exhumations ont été organisée pour récupérer et conserver les corps des victimes du génocide contre les Tutsis. Depuis décembre 2019, la Commission Vérité et Réconciliation au Burundi a également entamé des exhumations de masse ; ces efforts sont motivés par des ambitions de recherche de la vérité et de réconciliation articulées autour d’un récit spécifique de victimisation et de légitimation de l’État. Dans les deux cas, l’État utilise des formes vernacularisées de pratiques médico-légales et des discours « internationaux » fondés sur les droits. En nous appuyant sur nos travaux ethnographiques de terrain respectifs, nous décrivons et analysons les pratiques d’exhumation au Rwanda et au Burundi. Le tournant médico-légal » dans les contextes post-conflits a fait l’objet de nombreuses discussions et débats parmi les chercheurs depuis la prolifération de ces pratiques au cours des dernières décennies. Nous contribuant à ces débats en examinant deux contextes liés dans lesquels les exhumations sont devenues de puissants outils politiques, servant dans ce cas de source de pouvoir pour des régimes spécifiques.

It is not difficult to understand why the events of the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 lend themselves easily to representation in film. The genocide provoked an enduring desire to understand why its organisers were so effective in propagating the violence and why the UN, among others, failed to intervene effectively despite the events unfolding in front of its observers. Black Earth Rising, an eight-part television series aired by the BBC, is one of the first mainstream television series to approach the issue from a broader perspective, focusing on events in and around Rwanda after the genocide. It was screened in a prime-time slot for UK television and was a frequent feature of media commentary for weeks. It received largely positive reviews, in particular because of its unusually complex approach to postconflict politics. Despite this, I was hesitant about watching the series. Fictional stories inspired by ugly truths around international political involvement in the global south are a popular theme for mainstream film and television productions. These are often excruciating to watch for the wrong reasons. The tendency to critique contemporary western involvement while unselfconsciously presenting problematic, even neocolonial, stereotypes can be particularly grating. 1 Despite sincere intentions, these stories rarely escape the stereotypes about Africa that the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina forcefully protested in his article 'How to Write About Africa'. 2 Set against this standard, Black Earth Rising is a sophisticated production, delving into the complex politics of Rwanda and the east-central region of Africa in the decades since the genocide. The fictional story focuses on a legal investigator, Kate Ashby (played by Michaela Coel), a troubled Rwandan survivor of the genocide, now working in London and employed by Michael Ennis (John Goodman), an American-born barrister. Kate was found as a small child by a humanitarian worker in 1994 among the dead at the site of a recent massacre in Rwanda. Kate's adoptive mother is a well-known British prosecutor for cases held at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Early in the series, Kate's mother decides to lead an attempted prosecution of military leader General Simon Nyamoya, a Tutsi and former soldier of the Rwandan Patriotic Front's (RPF) army. As a member of the RPF in 1994, Nyamoya is credited with helping to bring the genocide to an end. He is badged as a warlord by the media, in command of mercenaries involved in the ongoing conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and entangled with the mining and mineral trade in the region. This unfolds much to the chagrin of Kate, who views her mother's involvement as a personal betrayal, given her own history of loss at the hands of extremist Hutu g enocidaires. A tragedy then interrupts the judicial proceedings at the ICTR and, as a result, Kate and Michael become the two main, antagonistic figures intent on understanding a conspiracy that centres around the actions of high-ranking ...

No abstract