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Susan Thomson. Whispering Truth to Power: Everyday Resistance to Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. vii-258 pp. Notes. References. $27.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-299-29674-2.
Over the last five years, there has been a pronounced shift in academic knowledge related to modern Rwanda, characterized by an increasingly critical stance toward the postgenocide regime of President Paul Kagame and his party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Susan Thomson's Whispering Truth to Power represents an important contribution to this shift in the literature, offering rich, ethnographically informed insights on the ways that state power-in particular, the RPF's program of national unity and reconciliation-impacts the everyday lives of ordinary rural Rwandans, and how they, in turn, engage in subtle but meaningful acts of resistance.
Thomson begins by introducing the mechanisms through which state power infiltrates Rwandans' lives in the postgenocide period and the indirect ways that Rwandans demonstrate resistance, which she categorizes as "staying on the sidelines, irreverent compliance, and withdrawn muteness" (p. 9). She notes that Kagame is often celebrated for his visionary leadership and Rwanda's robust economic growth since the 1994 genocide. However, she warns readers that Kagame and the RPF have simultaneously earned a reputation for dominating all aspects of sociopolitical life through a program of national unity and reconciliation that on one hand is allegedly necessary to prevent the resurgence of ethnic tensions and violence, but on the other results in a nearcomplete absence of genuine political opposition, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other integral civil liberties.
In order to tease out the precise ways that rural Rwandans are impacted by state power, Thomson uses ethnographic methods, which she summarizes as comprising
living in southern Rwanda for six months in 2006; learning Kinyarwanda, the national language; participating in daily life through everyday interactions and conversations; observing events and places such as meetings, festivals, gacaca justice trials, ingando citizenship re-education camps, and so on; examining gossip, rumors, proverbs, and jokes for their underlying meaning; recording fieldnotes to produce everyday accounts of sociopolitical life; and letting trust and emotional engagement be of benefit to the research. (p. 14)
However, the self-described backbone ofher fieldwork is life history interviews with thirty-seven Rwandans, the broader social and political context of which is...