Book Review: Memory, Intimacy, Empowerment and Exclusion: How the Present Shapes the Past in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Reviewed Book: Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: between Justice and Sovereignty. Duke Press (2025) – Delia Duong Wendel

Book review by Beatrice Morani

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Delia[Duong Ba Wendel’s Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2025) offers an original and visceral analysis of what she conceptualises as trauma heritage, understood as the spatialization of traumatic past events. Employing Rwanda’s genocide memorial landscape as a case study, the volume is a precious contribution to debates on the ‘urbanisation’ of unrecognised mass violence, the aesthetics of genocide, and the interaction between reparative justice and state sovereignty in post-conflict societies.

Wendel is a critical peace scholar and urban historian and Professor of Urban Studies and International Development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focusing her research on forms of repair after mass violence, the spatial materialisation of trauma, and reparative memory. In her volume, Wendel critically analyses the phenomenon of genocide heritage in Rwanda, consisting of the public display of victims’ remains in the sites where the 1994 genocide against Tutsi occurred. Surpassing purely commemorative purposes, this practice became an active socio-political instrument for asserting truth, demanding justice and empowering genocide survivors.

The monograph is structured into six chapters. The opening chapter, El Olor y el Dolor (The Smell and the Pain), traces the early preservation and documentation practices initiated by two of the first curators of genocide heritage, who contributed to “transform traumatic memories into history” (p.33). This chapter shows the interplay between affective memories and reparative historiography. The second chapter, Beyond State Control, situates Rwanda’s operation of memorialization within the localised human rights advocacy that proliferated globally in the 1970s. Challenging the dominant narrative framing Rwanda’s genocide heritage as a centralised state project from its inception, Wendel argues that it originated as a bottom-up experiment driven by human rights organisations, survivors, and local actors seeking to gather tangible evidence of the genocide and prevent denial. The third chapter, Witnessing Nyarubuye, examines one of the earliest genocide heritage sites located at Nyarubuye Church. Here, the author persuasively explores the dual function of memorial sites as both incontrovertible evidence of genocide and as a foundation for claims to moral authority and right to rule for the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In her view, post-genocide political order gradually institutionalised memorialization into state structures, silencing and criminalising experiences that fell outside authorised narratives. The fourth chapter, Memory Work, turns to Murambi Technical School, Rwanda’s most iconic genocide memorial. Responding to scholarly critiques that portray Murambi as a sensationalist and ethically problematic representation of mass death, Wendel humanises the processes of conservation and claims for “an ethics of viewership”, inviting visitors and readers to “watch” the profound political struggles embedded in the killing sites. The fifth chapter, Exhumation, Display, Reburial, addresses the concerns and unease expressed by communities living near memorial sites regarding the objectification of human remains. Wendel examines the frictions between residents’ perceptions and the organisers of reburial ceremonies, revealing the social and emotional ambiguities of trauma heritage. The chapter captures the dilemma between the necessity of communicating the scale and brutality of the genocide and the potentially alienating and traumatising effects on the spectators. The final chapter, Memory and Empowerment, focuses on the “uneven landscape of trauma heritage” (p.84), where memory emerges as an arena of selective empowerment and exclusion.

The book’s originality lies in its methodological and formal intimacy. Indeed, Wendel relies predominantly on personal encounters and oral interviews, particularly with two “backstage” curators of early commemorations and memorialization sites: Luis Kanamugire, Director of the Genocide Memorial Commission, and Mario Ibarra, Head of the Kibungo Préfecture Field Office of UN Human Rights Field Operation in Rwanda between 1994 and 1996. Their biographies and professional stories, accompanied by their “emotional excesses” (p.31), become the building blocks of the book. This intimacy is further enhanced by Wendel’s deep knowledge and field presence in Rwanda, which allowed her to inform her work with empirical observations and credible lived testimonies. The choice of inserting, among the pages, original photographs and visual archives, amplifies the emotional power of the book while preserving its analytical and documented rigour.

Secondly, the collocation of Rwanda’s experience within a global historical context, which Wendel terms an “era of trauma heritage” (p.306) emerging in the late 20^th century, is extremely interesting. The phenomenon is geographically delineated, as it reflects the proliferation of human rights activism in the Global South that increasingly employed the spatialization of memory to call attention to normalised and hidden state violence. Comparative cases reported in the book include South Africa’s apartheid, Mayan communities in Guatemala, Argentina’s desaparecidos, Bengalis, Cambodians, and Palestinians. This geographically focused and comparative framework is one of the monograph’s strengths, though certain pertinent cases, such as Korean memorialization of Japanese colonial violence, are notably absent.

Yet the book presents four main limitations. First, while comparisons with Argentina and South Africa enrich the scope, the specificity and uniqueness of genocide as a category of mass violence could have been more precisely addressed through comparisons with other genocides, such as those in Armenia or Bosnia. Second, despite insightful parallels with the Holocaust, seen as a historical precedent of the preservation and memorialization efforts, less attention is given to the similarity in the state sovereignty aspect, particularly between the Zionist nation-building project and the RPF’s instrumentalisation of the genocide memory as a “tool of statecraft”  (p. 320). Third, other forms of memorialization – such as in cinema, literature, and theatre – could have been explored to offer a complete picture of Rwanda’s memory landscape. Finally, Wendel’s emphasis on the national dimension of reconstruction leaves relatively unexplored the role of the international community in shaping memorialization in Rwanda. Given scholarly shared acknowledgement of international indifference in 1994, the struggle for recognition should be interpreted not only as asserting truth and justice within the Rwandan population, but also as a form of political and human affirmation towards the Global North.

In conclusion, Wendel’s volume is a compelling, original, and engaged contribution to scholarship on African and Global South politics, sociology, memory, urbanisation, and genocide studies, as well as for all those interested in understanding long-term mechanisms of reconstruction of collective identities in societies broken by mass violence episodes. By spatializing intimacy and positioning readers as secondary witnesses, Wendel honours the moral duty of documenting violence while illuminating the nuances and paradoxes between justice and sovereignty, empowerment and exclusion, objectification and education, which are present in today’s Rwanda.