Mutware’s Story: (Re)centreing Humanism via Multispecies Storytelling in Post-Genocide Rwanda.

Since the precolonial era, the practice of oral storytelling has greatly shaped Rwandan society. Ranging in style, form, and content, stories, particularly elite-driven ones, have served as a means to record and pass down histories, memorialize particular figures and events, and widely disseminate collective values, sentiments and/or ideals. This continues to be apparent in post-genocide Rwanda. As scholarship has widely shown, Rwanda’s post-genocide government has actively constructed and imposed a singular hegemonic narrative that promotes a selective memory of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsis. Yet, as with all stories, the power of this narrative is neither total nor stable. Instead, other vernacular forms of remembering and narrating the past exist alongside of and in contention to “official” ones. As such, in order to more comprehensively understand Rwanda’s post-genocide society, we must turn to these more illegible but still influential stories and practices of storytelling. This article seeks to do so with a multispecies story – Mutware’s story. Detailing the life of Rwanda’s infamous elephant, the story describes Mutware’s experiences with genocidal violence, familial separation, trauma, and, eventually, imperfect recovery. The following argues that Mutware’s story serves as a vehicle of vernacular remembering that complicates Rwanda’s hegemonic narrative of the 1994 Genocide. By situating the more-than-human other as a social actor within human relationality, Mutware’s story obscures notions of collective memory/identity, alternatively centreing relationality in Rwanda’s post-genocide processes of reconciliation and recovery. Drawing on African humanism and multispecies ethnography, I will argue that constructing, relating, and sharing the story of Mutware not only challenges Rwanda’s hegemonic narrative, but highlights and even helps realize a more inclusive, holistic, and productive journey towards post-genocide societal healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]