Post-genocide Rwanda serves as a case of strong institutional control in which the government engages transitional justice through a strategy of coercion. In this chapter I explore the Rwandan government’s response to international pressure for accountability. To advance government impunity, the government adopts a strategy of coercion, wherein a new transitional justice institution, gacaca, is implemented but subsequently monitored and controlled to advance state impunity and consolidate RPF control. The chapter begins with an overview of armed conflict in Rwanda with particular attention on the complexities of the violence experienced by individuals during the civil war, genocide, and at the hands of the RPF. I then discuss the government’s strategic adaptation of transitional justice to identify and evaluate the coercive strategy in which claims for government accountability are monitored and controlled. I explore the strategy of coercion in practice through an in-depth analysis of gacaca, which has aggressively pursued crimes of genocide while ignoring RPF abuses. To explore the coercion strategy beyond the case of Rwanda, I examine transitional justice in Burundi.

In this introductory chapter I present the core tension in the study of transitional justice: the frequent failure of transitional justice to bring justice to victims of state violence. I question how governments escape justice in the age of accountability. The strategies through which a government adapts transitional justice to manage potentially risky demands for accountability have implications for who is held responsible for the atrocities of the past, a central factor for political order itself. This chapter engages the literature on norm compliance to situate my theory of strategic adaptation.

Thanks in part to a fee-free basic education policy, school enrolment in Rwanda has surged. More children, particularly those from poor families, now have access to more years within the public education system. At the same time, completion rates remain low and repetition rates remain high. This chapter looks at the ‘hidden costs’ of fee-free schooling in Rwanda. It pairs policy analysis with qualitative data gathering with children, families, teachers, and local and national decision-makers to consider why completion and transition rates aren’t as high as expected in the context of fee-free school. Findings suggest children continue to contend with a range of school-related costs that impact attendance, performance and completion. Examination fees, afterschool coaching, school feeding and ‘voluntary’ parent–teacher association dues shape children’s full participation in school. These ‘hidden costs’ are a key factor for why children do not complete their schooling. The notion of ‘culture’ or ‘backwards mindset’ as the primary reasons why families may choose not to send their children to school is challenged; instead there may be direct and indirect costs that are not accounted for, even in the context of a policy that appears to align with the Education for All agenda.

This chapter explores Pentecostal conversion as both an affective and a political process. It considers the kind of subjects young urban Pentecostals are called upon to become: organised, enterpreneurial, armed not only with a transformed heart but with a ‘vision’ for their future and a ‘strategic plan’. This subject both converges with and diverges from the RPF’s attempts to create ‘ideal’ subjects who are able to participate in the country’s post-genocide development. While some young Pentecostals benefited from such self-making, others became disillusioned. Instead, they highlighted the limits of the Pentecostal project and its inability to deliver the bright future they felt they had been promised.

This chapter considers gender dynamics within the new Pentecostal churches and the role of young women within them. It explores Pentecostal gender constructions and how they conflict with the RPF’s more ‘progressive’ gender policies. The chapter foregrounds young women’s timework and how their actions are oriented towards leaving a Christian legacy for imagined heirs in the future. Here legacy is related to notions of urwibutso (memorial), with the concept taking on new meanings in Pentecostal churches. This chapter continues the discussion of Christian ubwenge, arguing that it becomes particularly important for young Pentecostal women.

Chapter 2 explores Pentecostal ethics, and how urban Pentecostal churches in Rwanda attempted to Pentecostalise ubwenge, a traditional concept often translated as ‘intelligence’, ‘wisdom’, or even ‘cunning’. It traces discursive attempts on the part of Pentecostal pastors to show that the ‘spirit of intelligence’ (umwuka w’ubwenge) had divine origins. Moving from discourse to practice, the chapter also considers how young Pentecostals employed ubwenge in their own lives, using it to navigate relationships both within the church and with the state.

Chapter 8 focuses on the popular musical competition Primus Guma Guma Super Star. It pays particular attention to local debates about the merits of both ‘playback’ – i.e. lip-synched – and ‘live’ performance, and what they reveal about the wider relationship between the state and Rwandan youth. The chapter argues that the competition attempted to create a post-genocide celebrity subject who was required to ‘playback’ government ideology through both words and actions. However, audiences were not satisfied with these playback performances and insisted instead that popular artists should be able to perform live. These debates indexed wider anxieties about young people’s ability to access global networks – perceived to be the way to wealth and success – and called into question who was and who was not included in the government’s development vision.

This chapter examines the popularity of Kinyarwanda-language rap and hip hop in urban Rwanda. It considers how it can be understood as a genre both of anger and sorrow, revealing Kigali as a site not of progress and modernity but rather of poverty and deception. The genre’s use and invention of Kinyarwanda slang is considered, as well as its politics. The chapter argues that a simple resistance–domination binary is unhelpful for truly understanding hip hop’s local complexities. Instead, it takes into account the carefully guarded silences that hip hop artists maintained, and the ways in which the performance of swaga was less available to young women than to young men.

Chapter 4 examines in detail a Christian crusade called Rwanda Shima Imana or Rwanda Thanksgiving Day. It explores the controversies that arose from it, in particular a conflict between a well-known Pentecostal pastor and the Catholic singer Kizito Mihigo. The conflict was in part about power: who has the right, ability, and authority to interpret the Bible and, by extension, Rwanda’s history and collective memory. This chapter also complicates the process of transformation, as some hearts were considered unable to transform, a situation which was often related to ethnic identity.

This chapter introduces the main arguments of the book by exploring the case of Kizito Mihigo, a well-known popular singer who was imprisoned, was released, and later died while in police custody. It discusses the idiom of the heart – or, more particularly, the need to transform the heart – as key to understanding post-genocide social life and urban young people’s attempts to navigate a difficult political terrain. Instead of reproducing theoretical binaries – resistance–domination, sound–silence, past–present – this chapter proposes looking to popular culture and Pentecostalism in order to understand the different ways young people in Kigali attempt to assert agency and make ‘noise’ despite a wider context of silence.

This chapter focuses on the new sound economy that Pentecostalism brought to Rwanda after the genocide. It considers a wide range of Pentecostal sound practices – from noise-making to praise and worship to Pentecostal radio – and shows how sound was understood to be key to inner and outer transformation. Pentecostals drew a distinction between ‘godly’ and ‘secular’ media, which allowed some young singers to become ‘gospel stars’. This chapter equally focuses on the materiality of Pentecostal sounds – the work that sound does outside of its discursive properties – and places this within the wider sonic context of post-genocide Rwanda. The RPF state has increasingly cracked down on noise – associated both with the new churches and nightclubs – and in 2018 closed thousands of chruches across the country. Perhaps ironically, despite their differences, the new Pentecostal churches and the RPF state share a conviction of sound’s transformative power.

The Conclusion returns to the case of Kizito Mihigo and his tragic death in February 2020. It considers how his music reveals a certain politics of humanity, and the ways in which the RPF state tries to define who is and is not to be considered human. Returning to the theme of sound, noise, and silence, it sugggests the importance of taking sound seriously in Rwanda. Thinking more closely about sound – not only its discursive properities but its material ones as well – opens up new avenues for scholarship.

This chapter reveals how hazardous a cultural stereotype could be by reviewing the U.S.-Japan trade friction. A cultural stereotype is typically formed by another culture and tends to attach negative value to the target culture. The preconception of “Japanese collectivism” created an image that Japanese economy must be a collective economy, which was ungrounded as shown in Chapter 4. When Americans faced a large trade deficit against Japan, this image caused fury at Japan’s “collective economy” among Americans who had individualism ideology and aversion to collectivism. The alleged collective economy of Japan justified severe trade restrictions against Japanese products and interference in domestic affairs of Japan, which caused collapse of major industries and finacial meltdown in Japan followed by stagnancy of Japanese economy. Cultural stereotypes brought even more serious disasters in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. It is necessary to understand the properties of cultural stereotype in order to prevent it from exacerbating possible inter-group conflicts in the near future due to such global phenomena as population increase and global warming.