The Danger of a Single Story, by Shields Sundberg

When I teach the Great Lakes region in my 20th centuryAfrica course, I break the material down into four different units.  First, we study pre-colonial Rwanda, focusing on the ways tolerance and story-telling shaped the Banyarwandan society.  Then, we examine colonialism in Congo and Rwanda, looking at the paths forged by direct rule and Belgian greed in the region.  Lastly, we look at post-colonial DRC and then post-colonial Rwanda.  At the end of each of these four units, the students complete an assessment.  The assessment for the last unit has always been the most difficult to design. While I want students to demonstrate comprehension of the complex forces at work in Rwanda from the Apocalypse Revolution of 1959 to the efforts to rebuild after the 1994 genocide, it is important, too, that students understand the deeply human stories Rwandans have to tell of their own history in the 20th century.

Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie's Tedtalk has helped reframe the way many people think about Africa, and thus I thought it possible her talk might help me design an assessment that would provide an opportunity to synthesize events (content) while also tapping into the realities of pain, dignity, justice, and forgiveness.

If you have not seen it, please check it out here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story

Moving as I have found the talk, I had not used it in my 20th centuryAfrica class until this past academic year (2013-2014).  While Adichie describes her childhood in Nigeria, the message she shares struck me as an ideal one for writing about Rwanda.  She explains that "[the] single story of Africa ultimately comes [...] from Western literature" but she also explores how her own sense of a childhood domestic servant who worked for the family was shaped by another "single story."  The genocide was ultimately possible because Hutu power managed to create and make appealing a (very dangerous) single story.  I did not want my students to write the narrative in a linear, singular way, thereby possibly committing their own understanding to a singular way of writing and synthesizing the genocide (and its impact).

Thus, instead of having my students write a traditional essay about the genocide, I asked them to tell me the story of the genocide (they had, by this point, already written essays about the other three units and thus were not dealing solely with the genocide itself).  In the story, they needed to avoid "the danger of a single story" and instead tell it from multiple perspectives.  Students found the assignment very challenging, and they had many (fair) questions about how to proceed:  do we describe one event from multiple perspectives?  do we start with one perspective and then switch to another?  how far back in time do we begin?  Do we need to inhabit the voice of actors, and if so, do we give equal weight to Hutus and Tutsis, French and UN actors?

So, we broke it down.  How would one tell the story through the lens of General Bagosora? or a host on Radio Mille Collines?  And what of a Hutu woman married to a Tutsi man?  What might Kagame's story have been, before and then after he crossed the rubicon and stepped into a position of leadership? How do we lend humanity to these multiple voices without attempting to inhabit them?

The answer, it seemed to me, was to read and research.  Thus, the project grew.  After doing all of the work I had already assigned, they were now seeking specific voices--the voices of the Rwandans. Testimony from the Gacaca Courts proved invaluable.  As the work grew, so did their understanding. As I fretted over what to cut from the course in order to make room for this, a few students took the lead and began to explain to others how the assignment eventually "clicks."  Students started writing their stories jointly.  That was unexpected and seemed like another hurdle:  how do I grade this?

In the end, the students wrote beautiful stories, and almost all of them "got it."  What did they get? They seemed to realize how hard it is to refract the multiple voices of a deeply complicated event (they were therefore "doing history")  as well as how desperately important it is to guard against "the danger of a single story," perhaps most especially so when it comes to Africa generally and the Rwandan genocide specifically.    Rwandans do not want their story to be one of genocide; they want to tell their own stories, and we ought to listen as we teach about the history the world has named and even, to some extent claimed, of genocide.