Twenty years after the genocide in Rwanda, the country has made great strides in security and development. Despite the immense tragedy experienced by the nation in 1994, the country today boasts peace and stability as the fruits of reconciliation. The government has undertaken various initiatives to facilitate such reconciliation through justice, education, political reform, business and development. Stephanie Wolfe's chapter examines how some of the mechanisms for justice and remembrance of the genocide have played a role in reconciliation in the country. This chapter examines an underlying component of many of these efforts that has driven the government's approach to reconciliation: a careful construction of a narrative of national unity. Through this narrative, the government has aimed to overcome a perpetual and competing narrative of ethnic differences, which the government argues was instrumental in fuelling violence and genocide. In this chapter, I describe the historical evolution of narrative in Rwanda while also questioning how competition between the present official narrative of national unity and conflicting narratives may threaten enduring peace for the country.

NARRATIVE, VIOLENCE, AND RECONCILIATION

Narrative can play an important role in facilitating reconciliation amongst divided nations, communities, and individual relationships in the wake of violence. The formation of narrative occurs as the expression of collective memory, or lived experiences, weaves together to create coherent storylines of the past, attributing special meaning to certain events and moments and rationalising causal relationships. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs first theorised such collective memory. American historian Peter Novick further illustrated the concept as ‘a significant collective memory, understood to express some eternal or essential truth about a group – usually tragic’. However, as individuals and groups in society possess different recollections of the past, the expression of differing memories naturally causes conflicting narratives to emerge. Divergent perceptions and presentations of the past are common in peacetime as well as in post-conflict settings, and the treatment of such competing narratives can have a significant impact on whether the expression of memory contributes to reconciliation or perpetuates conflict.

Several scholars have examined the role of narrative and the presentation of collective memory in conflict and post-conflict situations. Lisa Malkki's study of violence and memory among Burundian Hutu refugees revealed the centrality of memory of dispossession and violence, expressed through narrative, in the construction of the present conception of the identities of Hutu and Tutsi.