Devoir de Mémoire (Rwanda)

In 2000, the publication of ten texts marked the completion of a two-year project entitled Le Devoir de mémoire [The Duty of Memory], which had brought together ten writers from across Africa to write in response to the Rwandan genocide. This article looks at how the project was posited from the outset as a specifically African response, setting this in the context of older problems of voice, self-representation and the renegotiation of miswritten histories in the postcolonial context. This aspect of the project is made all the more urgent by the actuality of the genocide, and the period of residence the writers spent in Rwanda in 1998. This article argues that the project succeeded in creating a space in which Africa as a whole is made part of the genocide, and vice versa, by raising complex questions of responsibility and by drawing on familiar themes in modern African writing, namely history, memory and identity; exile and dislocation.

Small, Audrey.
The Duty of Memory: A Solidarity of Voices after the Rwandan Genocide
Volume 30, Number 1, March 2007, pp. 85-100
Edinburgh University Press

* 2008 marks 10 years since the Rwanda residencies
* Connects to the larger movement of reconciliation literature and theatre over the last decade (in South Africa, etc.)

Theatre of Reconciliation

‘The dominant theme in South African theatre over the last ten years seems to be the legacy of the TRC, which uncovered more in the way of truth than it accomplished in reconciliation. Yael Farber’s MoLoRa, Lara Foot Newton’s Reach, Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother, REwind: A Cantata by composer Philip Miller, and Truth in Translation by director Michael Lessac, all explored forgiveness.’

2008 also marks the ten year anniversary of the publication of the play Ubu and the Truth Commission.

[has their been a similar trend in the Rwandan theatre, or other areas faced with reconciliation?]



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