Brickyards to Graveyards: From Production to Genocide in Rwanda (review)

Brickyards to Graveyards traces the transformation of gender, class, and power relations from the precolonial period to the lead-up to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Using the brick industry as a case study, the book argues that the roots of the genocide lay more in economic recession, land scarcity, elite control of resources, and civil war than in ethnicity and ethnic politics. Powerfully concise analysis and rigorous methodology, which melds ethnographic vignettes with interview data and quantitative research, make this volume a significant contribution to Rwandan studies. Most important, the book offers detailed insights into social relations in Rwanda during the 1980s, when ethnicity played a secondary role to class, regionalism, and gender. Unlike many scholars and journalists who have written about Rwanda since the 1994 genocide, Jefremovas eschews ethnic labels for her informants and instead documents the numerous other social and political realities that conditioned their lives, reflecting the realities of life in Rwanda before the mobilization of ethnicity in the early 1990s.

The book's contributions to Rwandan studies are too numerous to elaborate fully, but I will highlight a few key points. First, the book offers one of the few discussions in English of the competing "traditional" land tenure systems in Rwanda. An understanding of these land tenure systems and their residual influences on rural understandings of property rights is vital to grasping the impact of the land policy promulgated by the Rwandan National Parliament in 2005. Second, the author outlines how transformations in land tenure, common property, and the control of labor, as well as the development of a capitalist market during the colonial period, meant that lineage heads and heads of household lost authority over the labor of their children. Third, the book shows how the husband-wife relationship in Rwandan culture from the 1980s through the present is analogous to the patron-client relationship. Finally, Jefremovas discusses how the success of female entrepreneurs in the 1980s depended for social legitimacy on their relationships with men (husband, father, or brother), even when the women managed their businesses autonomously. Thus women who attempted to operate outside the bounds of social acceptability risked losing control over resources and access to the means of production. The appendixes, including a comparison of chronologies for Rwandan kings, time lines from European contact through the Belgian colonial period, and a chronological list of prestations, corvées, and taxes, are a nice addition.

The book has a few minor weaknesses. The detailed description of the brickmaking process in chapter 2 is tedious; it is, nonetheless, relevant to the arguments in subsequent chapters where the author shows how heads of household lost authority over their children's labor. At times, Jefremovas's concision hinders her argument. The concluding chapter, in particular, presents highly contentious analyses of postgenocide politics as statements of fact. While Jefremovas's conclusions about power relations in postgenocide Rwanda are supported by the research of others, a more robust presentation of evidence to support these conclusions would have strengthened the book.

Brickyards to Graveyards should be read by anyone studying gender, land tenure, or labor in Rwanda or the Great Lakes region of Africa. In addition, those examining the (often hidden) role of women in labor market economies in developing countries could learn a lot here about research methodology. The book is too complex for use in lower-level undergraduate courses; however, it would contribute nicely to an upper-level course on the anthropology of labor or work, Marxist anthropology, or the anthropology of gender.