CONTEXTUALISING THE RESEARCH JOURNEY
1.4 My positionality and motivational rationality as a researcher
When the Genocide against the Tutsi erupted, I was 27 years old. I was teaching history and civics in a secondary school in central Rwanda, a region which was one of the most affected by the Genocide against the Tutsi. At the beginning of the Genocide, my family was attacked two times. Attacks stopped by mid-April when an influential person who did not manage to flee to his region of birth was obliged to join my family. I remember that one night a group of militia conducted a member of the Forces Armées Rwandaises, the official army defeated during the Genocide, to eliminate that person considered as an accomplice of the Rwandese Patriotic Front.
By chance, that military recognised the person and no incident happened. In the meanwhile, a neighbour got certificates of loss of identity cards for the visitors and some members of the larger family who were directly targeted by the perpetrators. At the end of the Genocide, some members of the larger family were killed and others fled the country. Thus, as with many inhabitants of Rwanda I endured the effects of the Genocide. Hence, my positionality is informed by my lived experience as well as being a history educator.
After the genocide, I taught not only in the same secondary school but I also joined the former Kigali Institute of Education, (currently College of Education of the University of Rwanda) in charge of teacher training. At the Kigali Institute of Education, I was involved in the preparation of the first post-Genocide history programme. This was done in collaboration with some external experts from the National University of Rwanda. The designed programme was inspired by programmes from sister institutions in the African Great Lakes region such as the former National University of Rwanda, the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de Bukavu (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Makerere University (Uganda). One of the curriculum innovations was the introduction of a course on genocides. As will be explained in more detail below I was involved in different activities related to the teaching of history in post-conflict countries including a project aimed at supporting new teachers in “developing genocide education in schools in Rwanda” (Wiesemes, 2011, p.144). Thus, my interest in the teaching of the Genocide and controversial issues kept evolving and growing. At the Kigali Institute of Education, I was also involved in a review of the history curriculum for Rwandan secondary schools. As I had participated in Facing History and Ourselves trainings, in collaboration with
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historians from the National University of Rwanda, we were requested to review the curriculum and help the curriculum developers to integrate learners’ activities. In the process, I became aware of what was expected of teachers in the field.
As explained at the outset, Rwanda suffered deeply from the Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994. I have also mentioned how after this catastrophe, history teaching was considered as one cause of the Genocide. To avoid the occurrence of such a problem, the 2008 and 2010 history curricula aimed at promoting mutual understanding; living in harmony without “ethnic” distinction; religious distinction or other forms of discrimination that can rupture Rwandan society. Thus, the promotion of a culture of peace among the learners by the employing of critical thinking became a priority of history education in the post-Genocide period. It proved not easy to achieve this in as much as Rwandan history contains different controversial issues. If the teaching of controversial issues is not well managed, it has the potential to exacerbate division in the whole society.
My interest in teaching the Genocide and controversial issues was a result of my personal interest in history. I learnt the history of Rwanda in primary and secondary school. Later on, I discovered that some topics taught in secondary school were controversial. However, teachers were using their authority to present us with only one version. At university, I was enrolled in the department of history. It was interesting to learn about the past of my country because most of the events such as the achievements of various kings were new and fascinating to me. At the university, history became even more fascinating as lecturers stressed the relevance of critical skills. Historical sources and some events were challenged resulting in interesting debates. For instance, I noticed that some historical sources, ubucurabwenge, king genealogies, or ubwiru were guided by official ideologies and contradicted unofficial sources. Another example was the king’s role in the establishment of the first Catholic missions in Rwanda. In primary school, we were taught that King Yuhi Musinga by sending missionaries - also called White fathers due to the colour of their white cassocks - to different places such as Save, Zaza, Rwaza and Nyundo had a hidden agenda. The king believed that the population of the mentioned regions, who were stereotyped by other Rwandans as bad people, would chase away the missionaries. At university we used archival documents from the White fathers’
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headquarters in Rome, including White fathers’ letters to study their actions. We noticed that they had in fact themselves requested to go to those specific places as they were densely populated and located at strategic places near the Rwandan borders. This they did to counter the Islamic and Protestantism influences from the Tanganyika Territory [modern day Tanzania], Uganda and the Belgian Congo [modern day Democratic Republic of the Congo]. Another issue which challenged what we had learnt in primary and secondary school was the settlement history of the Rwandan population. The inaugural lecture of Professor Emmanuel Ntezimana criticised the well-used different phases of migrations done by the three social groups. Another course on Introduction to Prehistory and Archaeology also rejected the above theory which explains that in this process, Twa came first and were considered as the autochthonous and were followed by Hutu migrating from Bahr-el- Ghazal region (Sudan) near Lake Chad and finally the Tutsi came from the horn of Africa. But the region of origin of the three groups kept changing considering either authors’ interests or interpretation.
When a student colleague at the National University of Rwanda wanted to write a research project on the 1959 violence in his area of origin, and the persecution of Tutsi in the post-independence period, he was discouraged by a lecturer. The lecturer told him that it would be difficult to find enough oral and centrally located primary sources related to the topic. Considering the socio-political situation of the time the lecturer told him that he could not supervise such a study. Rather he advised him to look at the socio-political evolution of that historical region and integrate some data related to the socio-political violence and Tutsi persecution. It was then that I again noticed that Rwandan history was full of controversial and sensitive topics and I became curious to know how an unimaginable topic such as the Genocide against the Tutsi which affected my country is presented to learners - specifically when it is still fresh in the minds of people.
At a professional level, after the Genocide, the recommendations from different workshops which were discussing new ways of teaching the history of Rwanda and its re-writing were misunderstood and led to a kind of unofficial moratorium of the subject. Some colleagues went on teaching history by skipping some aspects which for them were controversial. In light of the above I was surprised to see one question
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on the Genocide, one of the most emotional issues in the history of Rwanda, included in the 1998 National Examination at the Advanced Level of the secondary school. In fact, after secondary school, all learners were obliged to pass a National Examination to get a certificate in order to gain admission to tertiary education. To answer the question asked about the Genocide, I assumed that learners used their own skills and knowledge and not what they had learnt in class. I felt that there was a need to understand how teachers taught the Genocide as an issue and wanted to analyse the challenges they faced in the process.
Subsequently, I was involved in training sessions organised by Facing History and Ourselves, I noticed that some Rwandan teachers were not trained historians, while others were expatriates who were not familiar with the problems of Rwandan historiography and Rwandan society. Another group was composed of teachers who were trained before the Genocide against the Tutsi. Therefore, they were trained in a system which was considered as one source of divisions in Rwandan society. I was wondering how the use of a participatory approach, as recommended by Facing History and Ourselves for post-conflict societies, could be fruitful with these different categories of teachers all teaching history in Rwandan schools. This training for in- service teachers proved to me that there was also a need for capacity building as well as addressing the challenges of teaching the history of Rwanda. As the main concern at that particular time was about the participatory approach and controversial issues, I believed that it was important to conduct research on how teachers responded to this proposed teaching methodology while discussing controversial issues. In fact, the teacher is a key element in applying these new pedagogies and this depends mainly on her/his competences.
As stated earlier the resurgence of divisive ideologies in Rwandan secondary schools was another motivation which encouraged me to think about the teaching of controversial issues. I was interested to know if the teaching of controversial issues was not at the origin of re-emergence of divisive ideas in Rwandan schools because if not well taught controversial issues provoke anger, hatred, and other negative emotions. As my home institution was in charge of training secondary schools’
teachers, it showed concern about divisions in secondary schools. In this regard, the Kigali Institute of Education made contact with an experienced institution which was
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teaching the Holocaust in its history programmes. I was involved in a project in partnership with the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom) and the Kigali Institute of Education on Education for community cohesion.
The aim of the project was to develop teachers who could employ a range of pedagogies to promote community cohesion in both formal and non-formal educational settings. It was also envisaged that this project work should enhance peace and citizenship education in both Rwanda and the United Kingdom with a particular focus on exploring issues concerned with Genocide education and community cohesion in the Rwandan context. The project helped both academics and learners to think about their own prejudices (Wiesemes, 2011). As part of the Rwandan team I gained an interest in Genocide education and the teaching of controversial issues. I noticed that the Holocaust was still taught many years after its execution in European countries (Cavet, 2007; Rutembesa, 2011a). In Rwanda the Genocide was included in the curriculum immediately after the atrocities. I felt it was a challenging issue in as much as the topic was extremely emotional. Thus, the community cohesion project gave me insight into some of the problems faced by teachers while dealing with the Genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwandan secondary schools.
The Genocide was not the only challenging issue in teaching the history of Rwanda.
Other controversial issues are reflected in some published works or were discussed by teachers during their training. As illustration of other controversial issues is the following - when I was teaching the history of Rwanda from 1900 up to the present in my second year at the Kigali Institute of Education, I experienced a hot debate in the class. After learners’ presentation on the main political parties on the eve of independence, one learner was interested to know whether what happened in Rwanda in 1959 was a ‘revolution’ or not. The class was divided into two groups so as to debate for and against the issue. Each group argued their case and I feared they would quarrel. Fortunately, no incident happened. I realised that no guidelines to discuss such issues were given to teachers or learners and I felt it was important to develop educational strategies to guide such situations and to identify other challenging issues while teaching the history of Rwanda.
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Indeed, I was more convinced to initiate a study after presenting a paper on Challenges of participatory approach in teaching about the Genocide at a conference organised in 2010 by the Rwanda Commission for the Fight against Genocide.
During discussion time, one participant was interested to know if the question regarding the person who grounded the presidential plane on April 6, 1994, considered as the immediate cause of genocide by some authors, could be discussed in a Rwandan class. As presenter I could not give my own view as most of the influential participants rushed to provide a common official view on the question.
Consequently my interest to know, not only how such situations are discussed in secondary schools, but also the teachers’ reactions in front of such challenging questions grew even more. As different studies analysed how the Holocaust or controversial issues are taught in some post-conflict countries such as Northern Ireland (McCully, 2006) or South Africa (Wassermann, 2011) I found it very important to investigate how these concepts are perceived through Rwandan teachers’
experiences while teaching the history of Rwanda.
Consequently, I decided to undertake research on The experiences of Rwandan secondary schools’ history teachers on teaching the Genocide and its related controversial issues to gain deeper understanding of these issues in the Rwandan context by enrolling for a doctoral programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. In light of the above, in the following section, I will explain the research problem which inspired me to undertake this study.