Rwandan Women Rising by Swanee Hunt (review)

Rwanda is regularly lauded on the global stage as a leader in gender equity, from unprecedented representation of women in Parliament and on the courts, to its policies promoting female land ownership and girls’ education. Swanee Hunt’s Rwandan Women Rising, based on interviews with approximately ninety women leaders over sixteen years (beginning in 2000), aims to “provide an inside look at how they came to have the positions of influence that they do, what they’ve done with that influence, and how they’re thinking about securing their sway” (p. 221). The book overall argues that “the rise of Rwanda’s women and the extraordinary gains of that country post-genocide are not coincidental” (p. 221).

The book is built around moving stories of women persisting in the face of unimaginable violence, overcoming cultural norms that prioritized men’s influence, and rising to leadership positions through resilience and creativity. Hunt spotlights women who have spearheaded a wide range of programs, from crafting governmental policies on gender violence or leading the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, to developing artisanal cooperatives selling handicrafts or mushroom spores. In five sections that chronologically move from the lead-up to genocide through the violence and subsequent twenty years of policy up until efforts to consolidate gains in 2016, Hunt interweaves the women’s narratives, such that individual trajectories maintain coherence even as the overlaps in their stories reinforce each other across the chapters to show that “strong woman have ascended to admirable heights and have been essential to rebuilding their country” (p. 7). Her primary audience appears to be two-fold: outsiders who locate social change in top levels of government policy; and women leaders in post-conflict regions whom she hopes “can think about which elements they may use in their own contexts” (p. 121).

While men and women in the Global North can indeed learn a great deal from African women leaders, there are limitations to how Hunt frames her arguments that ultimately mean the book misses analytic opportunities and risks serving as an uncritical public relations campaign for the current Rwandan regime. Hunt explicitly asserts that to describe the “past two decades of female leadership” she must “profile those at the heart of this movement” (p. 10). Yet determining whether a correlation is more than “coincidental” (p. 221) requires considering counterexamples: not only those women at the center of power, but also those excluded or pushed out. Further, Hunt glosses over why virtually all women “at the heart” of power are Anglophone repatriated Tutsi refugees from Uganda (mirroring the dominant characteristics of the ruling RPF government), saying “the point of this book isn’t to analyze why speakers come from this background or that” (p. 10). This avoidance, while partly understandable given restrictions on public speech in Rwanda, overlooks insights from postcolonial feminist women of color that gendered power is intersectional, operating differently depending on class and ethnicity. Finally, Hunt presents these profiled voices as unified by their national identity (the cover title uses colors of the Rwandan flag), without exploring contestation over who belongs to the national community and who can access particular rights, both of which are highly criticized by prevailing scholarship on Rwanda and human rights activists alike.

Absent data on counterexamples, and disinclined to probe the ethnic, linguistic, regional, and class commonalities that unify the people she selected to profile, Hunt is left with only analyzing them as Rwandans and as women. Her conclusions to explain this “tremendous tale of female advancement” (p. 150) are thus that Rwandan women are more forgiving than men, natural peacemakers, and better leaders because they are mothers (e.g., p. 305). These emic explanations her informants offer warrant further examination not merely because the focus on such explanations “would vex many Western feminists” (p. 305), as she notes, but because Rwanda’s recent history provides a cautionary tale on locating leadership abilities in ostensibly natural biological categories, whether race...