In this post, Rob Coates, a former student on the MA Francophone Africa programme, recalls his recent trip to Rwanda, where he spent three months working at the Commission Nationale de Lutte Contre le Génocide (CNLG) in Kigali. Rob recently submitted his MA Francophone Africa dissertation on commemoration, textbooks and music as means of post-genocide reconciliation in Rwanda. 

My first impressions of Rwanda are a bit blurred. My flight out had been disrupted by, of all things, a leaking toilet and so, when finally I touched down in Kigali, I was only capable of forming simple greeting sentences, and watching the whirl of colour fly past the car window. Luckily, by the time I met Damas, the guy I would be working with at the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG), I had been able to sleep and came across much better for it. For the remaining three months in Kigali, I would develop enough memories to compensate for the addlement and confusion of the first few days.

Gorillas

Damas runs, almost singlehandedly, the Research and Documentation Centre at CNLG, responsible for carrying out local research projects and ensuring that Rwanda safeguards written and recorded proofs relating to the genocide against the Tutsi. There is a team of Rwandan scholars under him and a complex bureaucracy above. As an intern, I was there to lend a hand in whatever capacity required. This led to an incredibly varied workload: one week I’d be preparing documents for a conference in South Africa, the next I’d research a certain subject for inclusion in a draft paper, the week after I’d have to draft a speech for commemoration. The building itself deserves a mention: in heavy rains – and oh how it can rain – the ceiling leaked; on sunny days, eagles skittered across the roof. Every morning I would entertain the guards with my enthusiastic but rubbish Kinyarwanda.

The kwibuka flame

Beyond the job at CNLG, I had gone to Rwanda to conduct at least some measure of personal research to allow me to write my dissertation. Early ideas – i.e. everything I had thought about before flying out – had fluctuated and changed on an almost weekly basis to the (well-disguised) despair of lecturers and tutors. Once in the country, my dissertation found its feet. As a staff member for CNLG, I was shown round the Gacaca archives, the memorials at Murambi, Nyamata and Ntarama, and attended Kwibuka ceremonies in Kigali, Rubavu and at the British High Commission. Talks in clubs, bars, shops and on the hostel veranda introduced me to the Rwandan music scene, which plays a large part in everyday life, especially during commemoration. Finally, Damas, who is an expert on school textbooks and educational practice, allowed me to analyse a series of newly published history manuals to go in a book chapter we were writing. These three facets of post-genocide Rwandan life formed the basis of my new-look dissertation, which I still haven’t heard anything about yet. I’m just assuming that no news is good news.

The memorial at Ntarama

It is impossible to spend three months in a country without being affected by its people, its landscapes and its culture. Rwanda is an astonishing place and I left richer in memory and experience than I had arrived: during my stay, I was inevitably followed by the cry of mzungu, which can be sinister if it is the middle of the night and you are a little the worse for wear, or endearing if it is piped by a chorus of children in school uniforms. Every twist of the road brought a new vista, each turn more spectacular than the last, banana trees in wild profusion and goats pegged on the verges. I broke a woman’s heart, nearly died on a moto-taxi, got acknowledged in a book and ran out of the way of a charging gorilla. Throughout, there were times when you cannot imagine anything bad ever having happened here. There were also moments when the past could not be ignored, where you were personally confronted with the horror. And so I left Rwanda and its people one sunny day in April, with a solemn promise: I will always remember. Reading this blog post, I can only hope that you remember too.

Tea plantations and mountains in the mist

In this post, Dieunedort Wandji, a student on the MA Francophone Africa programme, presents his independent research project on colonial mapping and Cameroon.

As part of my MA in Francophone Africa at the University of Portsmouth, I undertook an Independent Project exploring the relationship between colonial power and mapping. For this project, I began by exploring the theoretical approaches to maps and mappings as they relate to the colonial context, precisely against the backdrop of colonial competition in Cameroon. Drawing on seminal works on critical cartography, I also attempted to recover the voices of the colonised through maps, along with assessing the post-colonial impact of colonial mapping as regards Cameroon. This blog will provide a brief overview of the theoretical underpinnings of my research, as well as the main research questions and aims, I hope to address in my project. The final project comprises of an online presentation of the visual features of maps, with conclusions derived from analyzing various maps and based on the theoretical framework developed around colonial mapping. This presentation is aimed at both undergraduate and graduate students of Francophone Africa with an interest in the colonial period and mapping, as well as those who wish to to further develop specific historical knowledge about Cameroon.

As an overview, four major colonial powers (Portugal, France, UK, and Germany) have at some point laid claim on Cameroon as colonial territory (Bouopda, 2006), and a constant trait in each of these countries’ occupation discourse was the production of maps of Cameroon. A series of arresting works in the historiography of colonial mapping (Harley, 1989; Wood, 2010) have since the 1980s articulated the use of maps by colonial powers to legitimate and advance territorial control. In fact drawing upon the Westphalian understanding of the relationship between State and territory that guided various colonial projects, Harley (2009; 1989) supports the view that maps are tools and representations of hegemonic power. So, maps of Cameroon as produced by various (in some instances simultaneous) colonial masters, constitute a unique body of historical evidence on the country and provide an opportunity to study the relationship between mapping and colonial power, especially in the African colonial context. My research focused mainly on German and French maps of Cameroon, because Portuguese and British maps are not as numerous as the former, for reasons that are detailed in the online presentation.

By electing exclusively online sources for maps, planning for a digital output and interpreting the production of the artefacts within the broader context of the politics of imperial representation in the colonial era, when Africa was unusually mapped by European superpowers (Austen, 2001), I aim to not only underscore the impact of certain colonial practices both on Cameroon and on knowledge about Cameroon, but to also highlight the placement of maps found in online archival sources as a self-reproducing post-colonial site of knowledge with a significant potential in this digital age of ours.

In other words, using the information technology principle of input/output, I start a research journey online with data collection/analysis and end it online through a recorded presentation on maps, with a view to answer the following research questions:

1. How did various maps of Cameroon shape knowledge and understanding of this contested space?
2. What is the relationship between colonial mapping and narratives of occupation in Cameroon?
3. What do the cartographic devices used on maps of Cameroon tell us about the construction and projection of power on the world stage?
4. To what extent can the artefacts studied enable us to recover the voices of the colonised?

Please click here to watch my final presentation. After watching my presentation, you will be prompted to an optional quiz.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my post and watch my presentation. Any comments or feedback would be warmly welcomed via email (dieunedortwandji@gmail.com).