This dissertation explores the relationship between generational change, the transmission of memory, and political ideology in post-genocide Rwanda. In 1994, decades of ethnic conflict climaxed in a 100-days long genocide led by Hutu intending to expunge the Tutsi population from Rwanda. Having claimed victory over Hutu Power forces in July of 1994, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) began a series of reforms intended to eradicate ethnic antagonism. In the 2003 Constitution, the RPF outlawed “genocide ideology” (ingengabitekerzo ya jenoside) from the public sphere, discouraging citizens from identifying as “Hutu” or “Tutsi.” The regime also rewrote the national history curricula to reflect an official narrative of unity and reconciliation, which was disseminated by government officials across commemorative platforms. This narrative emphasizes colonialism’s role in crystallizing ethnic antagonisms and the RPF’s role in restoring unity to the country under the sign of a shared “Rwandan” identity. However, despite the RPF’s claims to unity, evidence suggests that the post-genocide state has not only inhibited Rwandans from discussing the past in an open manner, but also allowed for the covert perpetuation of ethnic tensions in the present.

Against this complicated backdrop, my research investigates how the post-genocide generation of Rwandans born after 1994 is taking up and transforming various narratives related to historical violence and identity. How do they navigate conflicting imperatives to forget Hutu and Tutsi ethnic identities yet simultaneously remember ethnic violence? Drawing on over two and half years of multi-sited fieldwork, the dissertation traces different trajectories of post-genocide identity formation in Rwanda’s northwest region of Rubavu. Specifically, I explore how youth respond to tensions which emerge around what locals refer to as “ideology at the hearth” —divisive memories, ideas, and practices transmitted from parents to children in the home. To manage ideology at the hearth, I argue, young people employ strategies of “generational disembedding”, through which they distance themselves from elders and cultivate their own authority on what it means to be a post-genocide generation. At the same time, however, members of this generation are constantly forced to confront and work through intergenerational continuities which shape social relationships and subjectivities. Balancing these modes of distance and confrontation, youth creatively interweave state discourses of tradition with personal and collective memories of the near and distant past, working within the confines of censorship to enact a trans-historical vision of Rwandan unity. Ultimately, I argue that the contradictions of post-genocide ideology do not represent an impasse which paralyzes youth. Rather, these contradictions become a catalyst for working through historical forms of difference related to age, region, gender, class, and politics. Advancing conversations in studies of generations, political ideology, and transitional justice, Ideology at the Hearth illustrates how performances of post-conflict unity subvert existing silences about the past in order to create spaces for Rwandans to work through difference and imagine new political futures.