Memoricide, Negationism and Representation: Centring Rwanda’s ‘Double Genocide’ Discourse in the Present Tense

Many claims have been made about what should account for the actual or real genocide in Rwanda. Many, if not all, of these claims focus on a tale of two genocides—involving the uniqueness of either Tutsi or Hutu memories—which has over time produced a curious faction of the post-1994 Rwandan subject. What these contending views seem to ignore is that there can never be collective memory to which all citizens subscribe since history and memory are unavoidably contested. With the aid of Rupert Bazambanza’s Smile Through the Tears (2007) and Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga’s Dying to Live (2012), this chapter argues that the vilificatory representations of the ethnic Other in the two texts have over time produced a Manichean tapestry of Tutsi victimology versus Hutu suffering, and vice versa. The essay does not attempt to offer a comprehensive or comparative treatment of ‘the two genocides’. Instead, it moves beyond textual analysis to pinpoint the broader political and social implications of memoricide in post-1994 Rwanda.