May 24, 2009, On the Ground
Posted on 6/2/2009
Reporting from Rwanda
Dispatch #1
May 24, 2009
By Samuel Totten
The 1994 genocide, which began on April 6, 1994, and was halted the first week of July 1994, lasted 100 days. During that time, between 500,000 and 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slain at the hands of extremist Hutus wielding traditional farm tools such as hoes and machetes. Due to the latter fact, the Rwandan genocide is often referred to as “the machete genocide.”
The Rwandan genocide was, in fact, the fastest genocide perpetrated in the 20th century, and that is saying something especially when one realizes that the 20th century saw a genocide every single decade of its 100 years.
It is also a fact that the genocide left the country of Rwanda and its citizens bereft in just about every way imaginable. Children were left without parents, wives without husbands, and the country without an adequate number of health personnel (nurses and doctors), teachers, police, judges, and on and on. Survivors returned to their villages to find their homes utterly destroyed and their farms uprooted. Almost anything that could be ripped apart and stolen – including doors, windows, roofing, paper, pencils – was stolen by the perpetrators.
In other words, Rwanda and its citizens were forced to rebuild the country, literally, from the ground up.
Introduction to Rwanda
The genesis of my work in Rwanda resulted from a comment I made at a conference in Sarajevo commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 1995 Serb-perpetrated genocide of some 7,000 to 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica. More specifically, at the outset of my talk on the failure of the United Nations to protect the so-called safe area of Srebrenica, I drew attention to the fact that while we were convening in Sarajevo another genocide was under way a continent away – in Darfur, Sudan.
Moved that I was the sole participant to even mention Darfur, Mr. Rafiki Ubaldo, a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, sought me out to talk. Initially, he commented that he found it interesting and striking that out of all of the speakers at the conference I was the only one to draw attention to the current crisis in Darfur. Subsequently, our conversation turned to the need for me to visit Rwanda. Indeed, he strongly encouraged me to do so and said that he would provide me with key contacts should I decide to go. At his prompting, I decided to travel to Rwanda that March (2006).
Upon my arrival at the airport in the Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, I was greeted by a captain in the Rwandan military. He informed me that he had been tasked, by a Maj. Gen. Karenzie Karake, to escort me through customs, take me to the genocide memorial centre in Kigali, and then drive me to a meeting with the general. To make a long story short, the general and I, as the saying goes, hit it off, and he suggested that I join him the next day for a trip “down country” to the National University of Rwanda (NUR) in Butare. I readily agreed, and the next day I found myself in a series of interesting conversations with a host of scholars at NUR.
During the course of a conversation with the general and the director of the Centre for Conflict Management at NUR, Dr. Anatase Shyaka, I was asked if I would be willing to provide a short workshop on genocide for a group of NUR professors. I said I would be glad to do so. Ultimately, the “short workshop” somehow morphed into a two-day workshop for some 30 professors from across Rwanda. With a day to prepare, I instantly got to work outlining the focus of the workshop, learning activities, et al. Two days later, Professor Shyaka and Maj. Gen. Karake asked me if I would be willing to give a talk to the students and faculty of NUR, and once again I agreed to do so. Some 200 students and faculty showed up for the talk and what proved to be an invigorating discussion/debate over some hot issues germane to the genocide in Darfur.
As Professor Shyaka, Maj. Gen. Karake and I continued to talk, mention was made of the need to provide a more systematic and sustained effort to avail Rwandan students of the history of genocide, issues germane to the prevention and intervention, and what the international community needed to do to make the latter efforts more effective. Highly interested in the idea, I volunteered to design such a program. Ultimately, over the next week I created a full-blown curriculum (rationale, goals, objectives and individual syllabi for each of the 20 proposed courses). Impressed with the results, Professor Shyaka approached the administration at NUR about the establishment of a two-year master’s degree program in genocide studies.
Fulbright Fellowship
Over the course of the next three years, I returned to Rwanda five times, including six months between January and July 2008 when I served as a Fulbright Scholar and Senior Researcher at the Centre for Conflict Management at NUR. Throughout that period, I met with NUR faculty and administrators about various facets of the proposed master’s degree, revised the proposal to fit the “module” system used by NUR in all of its curricular programs, and began to arrange for memorandums of understanding (MOUs) of support from major genocide institutes based at universities in the United States and in Europe.
Following a lengthy validation period during which the proposed curriculum was evaluated internally and externally, the new master’s degree was set to begin the first week of April 2009, during the annual commemoration of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Since the professors tasked with teaching the first class on the theory of genocide were not prepared to begin in April, I was asked if I, in addition to helping with the overall implementation of the new master’s degree program (for which I’ve been given a two-year contract), could teach a course called “The History of Genocide” and incorporate key theories as well. I readily agreed, but on the condition that the theories course still be taught and that it be taught immediately after my course for, as I explained, the theories course is essential to establishing a solid foundation for the rest of the master’s degree program.
Thus, on May 21, 2009, I flew out of northwest Arkansas enroute to Rwanda. On the flight out of XNA enroute to Chicago for my connection to Brussels and then Rwanda I was seated next to a pretty woman in her early 30s, a recent transplant to Arkansas from Oregon. Following an exchange of pleasantries, she asked me where I was going and I said, “Rwanda.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Rwanda.”
Her countenance suggested that the word “Rwanda” was new to her.
“In Africa, a country in eastern Africa.”
“Oh,” she said, as her eyes got big. “And what will you be doing?”
“Heading up the implementation of a master’s degree in genocide studies.”
We then changed topics, but a few minutes later she asked what Rwanda was like. I told her it was a beautiful country but still suffering the ravages of genocide.
“What is genocide?” she asked.
“If only the Rwandans, themselves, could be so uninformed as to the concept and reality of genocide,” I mused to myself.
Opportunity of a Lifetime
It is a long, long haul to Rwanda – basically the equivalent of two flights across the Atlantic Ocean (eight hours from Chicago to Brussels and another eight hours from Brussels to Kigali). The length and distance of the flight and the lack of adequate sleep play havoc with one’s system. The excitement, though, over the prospect of seeing good friends and colleagues somewhat eased the discomfort.
As I flew from Chicago to Brussels, I mused on how I had basically been preparing myself my entire professional life for an opportunity to develop and oversee a major curriculum project that would benefit an entire nation. In fact, I had purposely matriculated at Teachers College, Columbia University, because it had a long and lustrous history of significant work in the field of curriculum studies. Indeed, it was acclaimed as an institution that focused on key social issues and their impact on society and educational programs.
Among some of the many scholars/professors who had taught at TC and had been involved in such work were such luminaries as John Dewey, Harold Rugg, George Counts and Maxine Greene. Over the years, many TC professors had also headed up curriculum projects in such far flung places as Afghanistan, Russia and India. Throughout the years (1980-1985) of my doctoral studies at Columbia, I had been regaled with stories of such efforts, and I was excited at the prospect of following in the footsteps of such professors and researchers. I was particularly pleased at the prospect of blazing my own unique path.
Naively, I had been under the impression that such projects would be plentiful during my career, but that was not to be the case. First, much of the funding available for such projects had dried up in the 1990s, which was the beginning period of my career. Second, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, focuses primarily on teacher education, thus opportunities for curriculum development and implementation have not been as forthcoming as they may have been at those institutions involved in large-scale curricular projects both within the U.S. and abroad. Third, I discovered late in my career that to be involved in such projects one must either seek them out or create them oneself.
Ultimately, my work in Rwanda constitutes one small piece of the larger effort to help rebuild the country and contribute to the ongoing effort at reconciliation and a safeguard against future atrocities, be they individual massacres, crimes against humanity or genocide.
Master’s Program
The tasks I’ve been charged with in regard to helping implement the new master’s degree program are eclectic and numerous. Among them are the following:
Looking askance at “making money” off the dead of genocides, I’ve decided to donate the money I am making as a consultant to the Post Genocide Education Fund (PGEF), a nonprofit foundation I co-founded with Rafiki Ubaldo. The express purpose of PGEF is to provide scholarships for young survivors of genocide across the globe (that is, for those who have survived genocide in such lands as Cambodia, East Timor, Guatemala, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sudan). While my weekly salary (a mere $1,000 a week) as a consultant in Rwanda is fairly scant compared to U.S. standards, it is also a fact that a full year’s tuition at the best universities in Rwanda (such as the National University of Rwanda and the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology) costs approximately $1,200. In other words, a relatively small sum can work wonders in such Third World nations such as Rwanda.
My main concerns – one could even call them fears – as I prepare to launch the graduate program in genocide studies in Rwanda are threefold:
Ultimately, though, I welcome the challenges ahead and believe that, in the long run, they will result in a program of distinction and great value for Rwandan society. My mantra throughout will be that what many of my students have witnessed and experienced during the 1994 Rwandan genocide is something that no human should be subjected to, ever, and that my efforts are part and parcel of reaching such a goal, as elusive as it currently is and no doubt shall remain for decades and decades to come.
We want to hear from you. Please e-mail comments and feedback to Heidi Stambuck at stambuck@uark.edu.