Whispering Truth to Power: Everyday Resistance to Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda by Susan Thomson (review)

In this book Susan Thomson analyzes peasants’ everyday resistance strategies to Rwanda’s National Policy of Unity and Reconciliation, shedding light on how state power interacts with everyday life in the politically tense context of postgenocide Rwanda. Through its bottom-up perspective, the book is an important and innovative contribution to the literature on this intensely researched country.

The introduction frames the author’s research as a lived experience. Thomson provides rich insights into the story behind the findings and the life path that led her to engage in this research, an important but often ignored aspect of ethnographic studies. The first chapter explains the book’s methodology, which is based largely upon participant observation and life history interviewing. Thomson is a careful researcher and meticulously explains the judicious ways in which she engaged with her participants. Her account of the safeguards to guarantee the well-being of her participants may serve as important guidance to others conducting research in highly tense political environments. Most primary data in the book are drawn from detailed life histories of thirty-seven Rwandans in Southern Rwanda. Given that this is a limited sample, it would have been interesting to have more information about how and to what extent these peasants represent a cross-section of the Rwandan peasantry.

The second chapter provides a historical overview of Rwandan state-building and how it has instrumentalized ethnicity as a tool for domination and consolidation of power. The chapter offers an interesting overview of the important scholarship on Rwandan history that was produced before 1994. The chapter illustrates how the strategic design and reconfiguration of history on the part of political elites seeking to reinforce their own power positions have been practiced in both the past and the present.

The third chapter builds upon the second by analyzing in more depth how the postgenocide regime has instrumentalized its own (re)interpretation of history. It focuses in particular upon the narrow interpretation of the 1994 genocide that—through the national policy of unity and reconciliation—legitimates RPF rule. Thomson illustrates how the summary of the genocide in an “aggregate whole” of “Hutu perpetrators” and “Tutsi victims” ignores the multiple individual experiences of violence throughout the 1990s—particularly those experiences that do not match the official narrative.

The fourth chapter helps us understand the RPF’s authoritarian and top-down state apparatus through its national unity and reconciliation policy. Thomson illustrates how, on the one hand, state power is instrumentalized to enforce the policy. But more important, she highlights how, on the other hand, the policy is designed specifically to reinforce state authority through an “oppressive and structural form of social control” (109) imposed upon the everyday lives of ordinary Rwandans.

The fifth chapter focuses on the strategies of everyday resistance practiced by ordinary Rwandans. This chapter is by far the most interesting, although the discussion of what makes an act qualify as “everyday resistance” could have been spelled out more clearly. For example, the framing of survival in extremely harsh circumstances as itself an act of resistance makes the reader wonder whether all poor Rwandans are then continuously “resisting.” Thomson argues very convincingly, however, that resistance can be subtle and intelligently disguised. One of the most widespread tactics of people in their dealings with authorities is that of ceceka (to be quiet/to shut up). She focuses in particular on the revealing discourses of those who did speak out to her in private, from which she identifies three particular types of resistance: (1) staying on the sidelines, (2) irreverent compliance, and (3) withdrawn muteness. She argues that these acts, seemingly trivial on the surface, offer a more in-depth understanding of the power relations in which ordinary Rwandans are caught up.

In her final chapter Thomson brings together the different parts of the book to analyze the gacaca court...