Research Mondays: “Cultivating the Land of Milk and Honey: The Narrativization of Nationness Amongst Banyarwanda in Uganda, 1959-1994”

Abstract

 In the wake of 1994’s genocide, Rwanda received a mass migration of individuals who had long lived outside of its borders. Today, this movement is portrayed as a celebratory homecoming of a victimized diaspora, a people who were finally able to “return” to their ancestral homeland after over forty years of exiled existence. Venturing beyond this dominant, state-sanctioned narrative of the past, this study explores how returnees in present-day Rwanda remember and formulate their former lives outside of the state. Through this line of inquiry, attention is not only directed towards the tenuous relationship between individual and collective memory, but also, the myriad ways in which “Rwandanness” was imagined and actualized amongst individuals living in neighboring Uganda prior to 1994.