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Shakirah E. Hudani, "Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
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Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Shakira Houdani about her book titled Master Plans and Minor Acts Repairing the City in Post Genocide Rwanda, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. Now, this book does some really interesting interdisciplinary things examining urban spaces in Rwanda, obviously in the context of the fact that the country went through a pretty memorable genocide still in many ways not that long ago, and that's obviously had a huge number of impacts and one that maybe hasn't been thought about a lot, though this book definitely does think about it quite a lot. Is what that means for urban space, both the physical space, what that means to people, what that means to people now, what that means to memory. There's a whole bunch of things all drawn together through this book. So I'm quite looking forward to this conversation. Shakira, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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D
Thank you very much for having me here, Miranda. I'm excited to be here to respond to your questions and talk to you about the book. I know your own work is on conflict affected settings as well, and that you've also interviewed quite a few scholars working on post conflict change. So it's good to be part of this larger knowledge project.
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C
I'm so glad you see it that way. That's very much how I approach this too. So, given that you are joining this lovely community of us who work on these types of things and have talked about it in this particular forum, can you please introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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D
Of course. Thank you. Thank you for the question. So I'm an urban studies and planning scholar with a focus on African cities, on urbanism in the global south, and on post conflict transition, and I'm currently based in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My training has been interdisciplinary in urban studies and human geography, and I come to this book again with an interdisciplinary background and set of interests. On a personal note, I was born in Nairobi, Kenya and have lived between East Africa and North America for most of my life. So now to talk about the book. For the book, I really wanted to ask how one thinks of spatial transformation in Rwanda's towns and cities in relation to the project of post genocide transition, as you said. So in writing the book, my interest was in connecting two problem spaces, Rwanda after genocide and civil war and the question of post conflict transition, which began from 94 and 95 onward until its turning points around 2002 and 2002, 2003, when the first elections were held in the post genocide period and the official transitional period of governance came to a close. So tying that space to the space of urban transformation, which began in the early 2000s onwards, and I was very much looking at this through both spatial and temporal axes. And I wanted to look at urban transformation in Rwanda and its larger context and consider a wider Rwandan urban question that comes from looking at the city from different angles. I'll talk a bit about my research experiences that kind of set up the ground for the book. I first went to Rwanda for research for six to eight months between 2002 to 2004 to study the country's post genocide transitional justice courts. So these were the popular, community based, yet state run in Kiko gachacha courts, meaning in the grass courts in the grass that ran from 2002 to 2012. And they were intended to supplement in Rwanda efforts at bringing perpetrators of the genocide to justice. Most of the efforts for higher level perpetrators were undertaken in Arusha, Tanzania, with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. So when I went to Rwanda during this time, although it was somewhat more limited in duration, it was an intense, informative time for me in terms of what I was able to observe and witness less than a decade after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which is now officially termed by the government the genocide against the Tutsi. So during this time I attended the inception of the Cachia trials in Kigali and in secondary towns and cities around the country. I also conducted extensive interviews in several of the country's prisons and with members of the government and with civil society groups present at the time. And that period really influenced the way I approach my book. Scenes of spatial and social encounters, such as those that I describe in the book's introduction in Kibuye, which is now named Karongi, were viscerally present then. And I'll just give you an example of the setting I describe in the introduction, which sets up this idea of cacophony as post genocide space is also a space of encounter between different groups of people that was possible at this period of time. For example, there were popular markets and one was located near the central prison, which had low fences and walls. And within the prison, thousands of inmates were crowded into densely populated carceral space. Many of these inmates had not yet been tried and were awaiting trial. Opposite the market and the prison was a stadium and an informal memorial space. The stadium later became an official genocide memorial site and changed and formalized over time. And so this scene that I described in the introduction, the space was densely packed and uncomfortable for many survivors of the genocide. But it offered a kind of spatial proximity which enabled visibility and encounter that was almost precluded as time went on. And spaces in urban areas sort of formalized and became more distinctly separated. So then, you know, for the rest of the book, when I returned in 2017 and after, I found there was less access to formalizing urban space and lower visibility given to various groups of people with different experiences of Rwanda's past. And I found that alternative narratives and modes of dwelling were being Silenced or marginalized by the official state master narrative and built forms sponsored by large scale planning and development were taking priority. And so in this way, official state and expert led planning aimed to create a country that had leap forward to a different stage of development, leaving behind its genocide past. And in the book I try and foreground this as a kind of governing by transformation. And much of the book is about discussing the city that I saw, which over these two time periods, which is sort of like a palimpsest with its different forms of social memory and groups of residents with divergent narratives who challenged the meanings of remaking the city. So these are some of the themes that I focused on in the book and the background to my research experience there.
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C
That's a very helpful foundation for our discussion. Thank you so much for that introduction. And does, as you say, lay out so many of the things that come through in the book to make sure we don't miss any out. Were there any other additional lines of inquiry that we want to make sure we mention at this point?
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D
Yes, that's a good question and good to lay out right now. So in my book I look at questions of memory and the built environment quite centrally, as well as questions of dispossession that result from urban change within Rwanda and their connections to repair. So as I said, I question how master narratives of state unity and national progress after genocide are stabilized in urban areas through large scale master plans of various forms. So I would say a central question is what roles do urban planning and development have in formalizing a national narrative through space in such a post conflict country where the master plan is a type of materialized master narrative, it tries to foreclose other modes of living and means of remembering with varying degrees of success. And then I also asked about the forms of dispossession and repair that these plans for state led rebuilding make possible and with what consequences in a post conflict country where repair is really an ongoing endeavor? I ask about how we read dispossession and repair doubly as both social and spatial endeavors, tying together the built environment and social acts of conciliation on urban and national scales. And I think about dispossession doubly drawing on the work of Judith Butler, who in turn draws on Levinas's work. I think of it as both privative as a kind of an encounter of material dispossession as well as a relational encounter of interconnection. So dispossession here has these double meanings. And lastly, I ask about how Rwandans engage in projects of local politics around places to respond or to react, and redefine the contours of state designs of planning.
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C
All right. That's very useful to have laid out, I think, all of the key pieces. I think all the key pieces as we continue the rest of our conversation, letting us now get into some of the things you've mentioned in more detail. And the first one I'd like to pick up is this idea of the master plans, right, the particular kind of government narratives that are very much operating in Rwanda currently to tell a particular story of what's happening in this post genocide transition, in this urban transformation. So as the title of the book suggests, you call these master plans, which is a very helpful way of keeping track of what's going on, what are the kind of main ones that you see currently operating in Rwanda?
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D
Well, thank you for that question. And as you said, I see the central state very much aiming to narrow the acceptable space of discourse on forms of memory that contest this sort of official master narrative. And this includes, for me, how people interact with their built environments through alternative, more informal modes of living and relating to one another. So I see, when I think of the master plan, I see it as a spatialized master narrative that seeks to control how space is used and place is remembered and interacted with. So here the master plan can be taken centrally as a spatial master plan of Kigali, which is designed most recently by the Singaporean firm Serbana in 2013 and again in 2019. When I talk about the spatial master plan, I see it as used by Rwandan elites as a kind of spatial fix to various forms of post genocide and capitalist crisis, but equally by elite planning firms and expertise entrepreneurs to seek out these kinds of terrains of accumulation by transformation, as I discuss in the first chapter of my book. And one of the arguments in my book is centrally that the master plan, however, is more than a spatial device, but also must be read in mnemonic social and political terms for how it serves as a metaphor for ordering space and populations over time. So I argue that the spatial master plan for Kigali is the latest iteration of plans to order territory, territory and population over time. It is a new genre of ordering, but needs to be viewed in the context of this longer history of sedimented spatial ordering undertaken during the colonial period, in the post independence period, and now with the spatial master plan to move populations around and regulate how space is delimited and used. And so I say in my book that there are three master plans in operation here, that layer over one another and intersect in this politicized space. I'll just name them briefly here and not go into details, but they are the master plan of state aftermaths, the master plan of the colonial present, and then the contemporary spatial master plan of post crisis fix. So these longer histories of ordering can be termed master plans writ broadly over time, and they affect the spatial memory of the present, how it is inhabited by people on the ground in various forms. One of my interviewees termed the spatial master plan of Kigali. And in this larger context, as a history of repetitive rupture under Rwanda's post colonial and conflict affected terrain, I really take a broad interpretive approach to thinking about master plans more generally. I just wanted to talk a bit about the second part of the title, which is Minor acts, if that's okay.
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C
With you, of course. Please.
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D
Okay. So in the book, I use minor acts as a small act of repair, conciliation, and material exchange that tie together individuals at the scale of the home and the neighborhood. So this idea grounds the need to view repair in social and material terms, and it also emphasizes the importance of acts of conciliation that are made material through the built environment and the spaces of the city as necessary and important in their own right, even though they may operate in the private sphere or in daily life. So rather than seeing them as trivial or unimportant, I see minor acts as a powerful type of agency that Rwandans have in rewriting and redescribing what it means to think about inhabiting the present through the city and the material politics involved in this cohabitation. So minor acts, then, offer us salient ways to reimagine relationality through repair. And so, just as there are master plans of ordering space, there are these minor acts of redescribing the kind of minor histories of inhabiting urban space. And this offers us different ways of imagining the use of the city and thinking about political futurity here. Hmm.
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C
This, in fact, raises a question that I think maybe we've been implicitly having in the background of the conversation. But I really think it's worth bringing up more explicitly, which is the focus on urban areas and why that's important here. Because, of course, if we're talking about kind of government narratives and what post genocide, well, anywhere looks like, there's so many different places one could examine. But there's a reason you focus on urban areas and what that lets us do, to think about social repair and the materiality of it. So can you tell us a bit more about what choosing this kind of space to look at allows us to do.
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D
Sure, absolutely. Well, I'll just start with discussing repair. And I think, I mean, just to talk a bit about urban areas. Rwanda has been striated by a large urban rural divide over the course of its post independence history. And therefore it's very interesting to look at this urban question, which ostensibly looks at the master plan of Kigali, but cannot be divorced from the very real agrarian question that is there in Rwanda, and how we tie together the urban and the rural, and questions of spatial mobility, social mobility, and imaginative ability to think of the future that is both urban and allows for greater ease of access. So time is to repair. I frame repair kind of as a social process grounded in material exchange and relationality and centered around the built environment. And I talk about the concept of a material politics of repair, which is focused on the stakes of proximate cohabitation and exchange as well as encounter. This concept really came home to me when I was doing research in gachacha courts in Kigali and in southern Rwanda, where people at the local level in villages and town centers provided testimony on concrete forms of disrepair and harm. They also state claims for material restitution around losses that occurred during the genocide period in 1994. So they would say things like stake grievances around a lost pile of bricks, some broken roofing tiles, or missing wood for repairing a house. And these were thus tangible modes of contestation and claims making and enabled bridging social relations between individuals around what could be spoken of and what could be accounted for. And so these material dimensions of cohabitation frequently made possible ongoing social repair at the local level. So in the later chapters of the book, I build upon this premise of the material basis of social repair by centering relationships in neighborhoods of Old Kigali between long term residents, some of whom are survivors of the genocide. And this continuity over a longer period of time has enabled these ongoing forms of connection to one another through the home and the local geographies of the neighborhood. Cartier. And so in a post conflict space like Old Kigali, divergent narratives and forms of social memory exist under the surface. I found in the private realm of life, closely tying personal memory, maps to neighborhoods, space and kind of questions of what has changed, what buildings still orient long term residents, what kind of routines give meaning to city life over time. And not all these memories are easy memories. They may be discordant memories, such as those memories grounded around contentious landmarks like the Saint Fermi Catholic Church or the Kigali Central Prison, both of which were built during the colonial period. But they help long term residents to see through the facades of the changing city and ask critical questions about transformation. So what does transformation mean for them and for the city in which they live? And what does the type of change work to implant a new set of orienting markers and forms of meanings that decenter the past? So I very much talked about a right to the city after conflict, also involving the ability to preserve these local maps of memory and engages older neighborhood space in divergent ways rather than being confronted with the ruptures of master plan development that is largely not aimed at long standing residents of neighborhoods such as these. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use Pull to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss.
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C
So it is exactly this idea of kind of the memory that individuals have and the social sort of fabric of it that I'd like to discuss next and connect it to what you were telling us earlier about the new master plan for urbanization. How much is this new plan? Obviously the word new gives you some hint of the answer, but how Much is this new plan connected or not from the social memory of old Kigali, of the existing memories in the city? And does the plan have any provision for that? Does it make a place for survivors and their memories? Or is it sort of out with the old, in with the new entirely?
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D
These are good questions. So I talk in detail in my book, in a couple of chapters about my research in older parts of the city, like Niamirambo and Mohima, which are old Cartiers that have been affected by the changes planned, but which still have a lot of old term residents living within them, some of whom are survivors of the genocide. And the Kigali Spatial Master Plan has the provision for kind of almost museumizing parts of Nyamirambo closer to the kind of bir yogo area. But in general, the survivors and the long term residents who live there find that this doesn't necessarily answer their needs for having an organic environment of memory and having an affordable space and maintaining their social networks. So for them, these spaces have had long histories of ways of life in the city over time, as a change from one period to another, with one form of planning overlaying with another form of planning and the various ruptures this caused. So one of my interviewees termed the body of the old city as a place of repetitive rupture, that one needs time, care and a sort of pedagogy to understand properly before enacting change and intervention on it. So my interviewees felt that the city is not to be treated like a post conflict tabular rasa, but there is a particular ethics of approaching the city and learning about its complexities before intervening on it. So I found that these older spaces are not adequately addressed in the spatial master plan, but they give the texture and orientation to Kigali that kind of carries it through its different time periods and longer term residents help me to understand that one needs to be attuned to this older history in order to see through its various layers and understand how both trauma and transformation coexist in Kigali today. So oftentimes the factors that make Kigali a post conflict city were not altogether apparent on the surface and required for me a kind of connection between memory and the local spaces of the city. To see the city as an active process of visioning, of seeing into it, that various parts of the city were folded on one another through this the process of sedimented memories and daily routines. So it's a complex process in general.
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C
Yeah, it definitely sounds like so many things kind of all being in Some ways forced to converge all at one point, if that makes sense, or at least kind of not evenly, all sort of going together. And that comes through in some other aspects that you talk about in the book in terms of kind of big policy pushes to achieve certain things, such as projects of hygiene or a focus on the green environment, which kind of, based on what you've been telling us already, seems to come out of a bit of nowhere. How does this relate to conceptions of memory or violence in urban space?
- [25:54]
D
Thank you, that's a really good question. So hygiene is a concept that has been much discussed in literature on the post colonial city because it was so much part of the urban management of urban space in the colonial period in many countries in Africa, and it continued into the post colonial period. So this seems to come out of nowhere. But I argue that in Rwanda there are multiple meanings to the greening and drive towards hygiene and order. Greening can point us towards renewal, be that urban renewal or the renewal of the body, of the city and of the nation. But greening also involves a large amount of urban labor that points to the work that underpins the new aesthetic of the city. In my book I looked at the work that underpins the idea of the term isuku, which can refer both to hygiene and cleaning and to purification, or in this case, a type of transformation that is needed to turn injury and wounded memory into something else. So I found that in the space of the city, this transformation aspires on the surface for a world class green aesthetic as a kind of transactable aesthetic currency. But under the surface it has multiple interpretive layers. So when you go to Rwanda's capital and increasingly secondary urban areas, you see lots of palm trees with green terracing and clean streets. And this takes an enormous outlay of labor that involves both hired and voluntary community work. Cleaning is something that has relevance in Rwandan culture, as Rwandan houses are mostly very clean and orderly. However, the way that cleanliness has been governmentalized as a principle of planning and managing the city in the present day also speaks to various layers of hygiene as a state project and its links to spatial transformation. When you dig deeper into this history, environmental labor such as Umuganda Community Cleaning Sessions has been re operationalized in Rwanda to keep the cities clean. But as Rwandan scholars will Rwandan study scholars will know, Umuganda has a long history in Rwanda dating to the pre genocide and genocide periods where required communal labor came to have compliant and violent meanings and forms during the genocide. So in parts of my book Therefore, I excavate hygiene as a deep concept. Um, I see it as operating on multiple scales in urban Rwanda. And it is very much a capacious term, enabling us to see these layers of memory and injury, and often the work and even the care that is taken to put it to work in the present through urban transformation.
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C
All right, so we've now covered a number of different policies, master plans, as the book's title suggests. This is obviously, however, not just happening in a vacuum where the residents of the city are like, yeah, okay, whatever you say.
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D
Right.
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C
The picture is way more complicated and interesting than that. So can you tell us about some of the. The ways in which urban dwellers have pushed back against these master plans?
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D
Absolutely. This is an important question, and I argue in the book that contestation around place is a cornerstone for local politics and dissent as it's playing out in Rwanda today. As I found out through my research in informal settlements, many of which are stated for expropriation. With the eviction of residents, people are pushing back in various ways, everything from critique of the government at a local scale, through contesting the terms of their expropriation as irregular and unreasonable. And one particular case that I studied, which is recounted in chapter five, through a court case where landowners took the local state to court to push for better terms of payment in exchange for expropriation. So, in general, residents voice a lot of critique of the plan at a local level, and they are highly aware of the local politics around place and belonging in the city. Many tenants also need to remain in close proximity to their jobs, and landowners emphasize the value of the building materials that make up their homes, the history of their residents in various settlements, and the need for Kigali to belong to them as well. So the residents I spoke with wanted planning to be more gradual, with a slower pace, so as to be more humane. But oftentimes I found that residents delimited their critiques around place at the local level. If instead of overtly challenging the master plan as a whole in public, as that was tantamount to critiquing the national political vision for the capital and what was considered almost the law at the time. But they also residents had very clear ideas about how to reimagine the city and ideas about the kind of infrastructure they needed to get to work in the middle of the rains, for example, and how to get to hospital from their homes. Their ideas are very much grounded in the practical realities of everyday life and less about iconography and so called world class design. And my interlocutors felt they belonged in the city, but they also felt less part of it due to the redesign and how it changed their dwelling arrangements through expropriation and regulation that was required for master planning. And I'll just give one example here, that of the high risk zones that are marked in many informal areas of the city, indicating a risky settlement due to gradient and the risk of flooding. In many ways, these designations are politicized or called into question by residents of informal settlements. Some of my interviewees told stories of coming home and seeing a large red X painted on their house or on part of their house with the word toa, meaning remove in Swahili on their wall. And sometimes there was confusion over this designation, as they often did not have prior warning. They did not know how long they would have to stay in their houses before demolition. And they were not able to renovate or repair their homes in the meanwhile. So they were clearly disconcerted and unhappy about these removals and the politics of uncertainty that followed. And I write about what this means for inclusion in the vision of Kigali and the vision of an urbanized Rwanda in the future, as many residents feel they are being moved around. And they don't feel that they're a part of this larger project, despite living in the city for a considerable amount of time.
- [32:43]
C
Yeah. This aspect of kind of quote, unquote, informal settlements as well raises questions about the sort of peripheries of the cities. Obviously, if these places that are being contested in terms of, well, kind of. Who are you calling informal?
- [32:56]
D
Right.
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C
That's obviously part of it. But can we talk a bit more about what the peripheries mean, both in terms of kind of the plans being made, are they even there? As well as sort of how residents actually think about kind of what the periphery of these cities even is.
- [33:13]
D
Great. That's a great question. Thank you. So the last two chapters of my book focus on areas beyond the capital, very much showing that the book is a project that goes beyond the planning of Kigali and looks at a wider urban question in Rwanda and positions Kigali sort of in this broader context. As I mentioned earlier, Rwanda has been governed across a rural urban divide over time. Most residents are rural, and the urban has historically been set apart for various projects of governance and elite rule. So the urban question is very much an intersecting question with issues of the agrarian development of the country as well as with its peripheries. So the questions of who gets to access the city from its peripheries include questions about who participates, who decides, who sees a city from afar and imagines it, and who is able to reside within it with the freedom to move around and call it their own. So in chapter six I discuss the periphery of Bujasera district, where I talk about the types of experiments with planning outside Kigali that have local bureaucrats and planners excited as they compete to be the next Kigali. They conscript various participation of voluntary participation of residents to plan and regularize their land. And they see this as opening up kind of a land frontier for individuals, bureaucrats as well as the middle class who are resident in Kigali. And these individuals very much want to speculate on land and periphery. And so in this chapter I show how the work of this land regularization and planning overlays earlier pre urban space. I discuss the political geography of the district as an urban hinterland where people were often exiled through spatial projects of rural the district was badly scarred by the genocide, and this layer of memory and meaning etched into local political geography for residents who still remember is now being overlaid in part by the speed and scale of new infrastructure and planning processes. So new forms of memory are overlaying the existing layers, and there are new metrics that determine how the current competitive urban moment is measured and accounted for. So space at scale is affected as urbanization expands outward. But also notable is the speed of change and moving onward from the periphery. In my last chapter I go beyond Kigali again to look at the rural planned villages further afield, where I see that dreaming of an urban life for young residents and administrators of these model village projects show that urban imagining is very much a project that goes beyond the capital. So this vision again helps us think of the urban moment in its wider context and frames a significant my last chapter looks at the rural and the group settlement schemes in these areas. So the question asked then is how do we consider the urban and the rural as intersecting spaces? That is helpful for addressing the various publics that the Rwandan urban question affects. So I see that political futurity in Rwanda today is very much tied up with how the state imagines and projects the space of the city. But it is not just an urban question in a narrow sense.
- [36:47]
C
This is definitely really interesting to think about kind of what all this means going forward, having this analysis now for the rest of us to understand, and kind of being able to assess what might develop in future on this front. And in fact, my final question is also on the theme of future. So that sets us up quite nicely which is what you might be working on now that this book is out in the world. I don't know if you have any current projects or upcoming projects, whether or not they're related to what we've been talking about. Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [37:17]
D
Oh, thank you for that question. So my new work is on Nairobi and urban change in Kenya, that being sort of home in a way. But I'm still thinking about the themes I encountered in Rwanda, including transformation and repair, as well as the meaning of minor acts. And I just wanted to add that thinking about Rwanda, there is a lot of new work coming out on African cities which have become hubs for scholarship in the present, creating almost these renewed epistemologies of the urban that are relevant within but also kind of beyond these boundaries. And I think it's an exciting moment for a scholarship on the African city, where you have multiple books and pieces of scholarship coming out on cities like Luanda and Angola and on Kigali. And I see this as a project of growth and collaboration for scholarly work on African cities and on post conflict cities that is highly generative and that we can build on, which is quite exciting. Yes, absolutely.
- [38:24]
C
So for scholars then, who want to learn more about your work and what you're doing in this conversation, of course, the book we've been discussing titled Master Plans and Minor Repairing the City in Post Genocide Rwanda was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. So all further details can be found there. Shakira, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [38:45]
D
Thank you so much, Miranda. It's been wonderful to be in conversation with.
- [39:01]
A
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