Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence

14. High Modernism at the Ground Level: The "Imidugudu" Policy in Rwanda

223  14 High Modernism at the Ground Level The Imidugudu Policy in Rwanda catharine newbury L and is the source of powerful emotions as well as critical resources in contemporary Africa. As Issa Shivji reminds us, land issues constitute an important “terrain of democratic struggles in Africa” (Shivji 1996, quoted in Bowen 2000, 210). Therefore state-sponsored efforts to reshape the rural landscape test the legitimacy of postcolonial governments , and often illustrate the dynamics of (and the possibilities for) democratic participation. But at a more fundamental level the politics of land merits our attention because millions of people depend directly on access to land for their very subsistence. Where the perceived responsibilities of the government for economic development—sometimes defined by outside financial agencies, sometimes encouraged by internal initiatives—potentially compromise access to land on the part of rural residents, tension often arises. In the past twenty years, many countries in Africa have engaged in efforts to revise land policies and laws; land issues remain volatile in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and many other states. In contemporary Rwanda, land issues are particularly sensitive and not only because of the country’s recent history. First of all, Rwanda remains one of the most densely populated countries in Africa and simultaneously one where more than 80 percent of the population is rural—reflecting one of the lowest urbanization 224 H i g h M o d e r n i s m a t t h e G r o u n d L e v e l rates in Africa. Therefore most people rely directly on agrarian output for their material survival. Second, there is deepening inequity in land access, with large holdings and microholdings (as well as landlessness) both increasing . At the same time, Rwanda is a country that has seen successive waves of people returning from diverse historical layers of migration. These returning refugees often advance claims to particular land plots, formerly their own, with the result that many plots have overlapping claims embedded in histories of flight. Finally, Rwanda’s current administration rests on fragile legitimacy and is characterized by increasingly narrow ethnic composition. Thus, land reconfigurations defined from above may be doubly incendiary. Also significant are ambitious new agrarian policies promoted assertively by the post-genocide government in Rwanda. These policies, designed to commercialize production and encourage regional specialization in crops that grow best in particular regions, regulate what rural producers can grow in some regions of the country, when they should plant, and how they may market their crops. The policies often entail substantial coercion and are resented by rural people because of the threat to their food security and the harsh penalties for noncompliance (Ansoms 2009; Huggins 2009; Ingelaere 2007). In such a highly charged political terrain, Rwanda’s leaders might have been expected to take a gradualist, consultative approach to changing land policy, one that would have encouraged broad-based participation and given real voice to the concerns of diverse constituencies, including rural producers . This chapter attempts to understand why that did not happen in postgenocide Rwanda. It focuses on imidugudu, a government-sponsored program of villagization to replace the traditional Rwandan residence pattern of scattered homesteads. But villagization was not new to African political history. In Africa and beyond, such policies have had disastrous consequences. The following discussion explains why the Rwandan government pushed ahead with villagization despite these histories and explores whether Rwanda will be able to avoid the fate faced by those earlier programs. High Modernism and Villagization The imidugudu project was conceived by the state and its agents with little input from the population and justified through the use of a “high modernist” discourse. James Scott’s Seeing Like a State provides uncanny insights into understanding the nature of the political processes at work. Scott’s study, which includes the case of villagization in Tanzania during the 1970s, identifies “a pernicious combination of four elements in these large-scale forms C a t h a r i n e N e w b u r y 225 of social engineering that ended in disaster” (1998, 4). The four elements underlying such schemes include the following: • A bureaucratic state concerned with the administrative ordering of state and society, and attempting to make the social landscape legible; • A “high modernist” ideology involving uncritical belief in the possibilities...