A significant challenge within scholarship about Rwanda is a lack of diverse Rwandan voices, with an array of these voices across generations and experiences of violence. In Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty, Delia Duong B. Wendel offers a perspective on Rwandan memory-making that extends beyond the recent explorations of memorials and survivors. Wendel not only navigates sensitive divides but also offers a rich, actor-centred, scaled analysis of trauma-shaped memory in Rwanda. The foundations of Rwanda’s memory infrastructure and ethos around the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda are surfaced through the accounts and witness of Rwandans and international actors supporting this early work, in the immediate aftermath of the genocide.

Wendel’s lengthy exposition of the early foundations of Rwanda’s genocide heritage is grounded in robust qualitative methods, including ethnographic work in the country and with early leaders of the emergence of genocide heritage, as well as interviews and surveys. The attention paid to two figures in particular offers a micro-level foothold into what is now a huge memory industry hinged in Rwandan politics. Louis Kanamugire, a survivor and the first head of the Genocide Memorial Commission, and Mario Ibarra, a Chilean UN human rights official working in the aftermath of the genocide, demonstrate an early and ongoing, rare international collaboration in shaping memory in Rwanda. Access to and integration of these individuals’ personal archives enhances the insights presented in Wendel’s analysis. This particularly includes dozens of black and white photographs of the immediate post-genocide work of preservation and conservation. The demarcations of the journey undertaken by these two evidence gatherers and memory makers occur alongside ordinary Rwandans attending to the remains of loved ones and neighbours. Highlighted in chapters 1 and 2 is the hybridisation of these acts of memorialisation and evidence gathering in doing reparative history. Such work created a key pillar of the Rwandan government’s enduring approach to state-run memorials, providing evidence to the world, still demanding recognition of a genocide denied by the international community in 1994.

The geography and sites of memory are attended to in this book first through Kanamugire and Ibarra’s work, and then through the survivors themselves as curators of human remains. In chapters 3 and 4, these actors are portrayed side by side in the larger, national-level sites of Nyarubuye and Murambi. These places became shaped by the desire of the state to show visiting politicians and journalists the scale and visceral nature of the massacres around what were thought to be places of sanctuary by victims and survivors. Bodies were specifically brought from localised burials back to these sites of massacre for display. Wendel particularly shows the unique Rwandan approach to witnessing this violence before the Aegis Trust implementation of a Holocaust-shaped model in the national Kigali memorial (p. 124). Simultaneously, in these immediate months of reconstruction, the intellectual and conceptual work was taking place at international conferences hosted in Rwanda, bringing together Palestinian and Chilean experiences and forming a Working Group on Memory and the Genocide Memorial Commission. This culminates in the early iteration of the renowned annual memorials and reburials of genocide victims.

The array of voices attended to in this book are present elsewhere where researchers take the time to spend beyond politico-economics elites running the country. Of particular interest to this reader, thinking regionally about memory and politics, are the silences, or in Wendel’s rendering of her participants’ perceptions, memorials that are established in line with official memory, and memorials that capture ‘hidden narratives to hidden ones of which it is prohibited to speak’ (p. 259). The latter memorials are thus unfixed and without a place in state-run memory infrastructure. Chapter 6 discusses not only Kanamugire’s own family but also others who experienced what many Rwandans refer to generally, but powerfully as victims of ‘war’. Working in north-western Rwanda, Wendel captures here the fallout and civilian targeting by the government in a counterinsurgency campaign in 1997. These excluded memories are juxtaposed alongside the grassroots reconciliation Rwandan’s work at everyday outside of the capital.

Missing from this culmination of long-term ethnographic work are voices excluded from Rwanda, outside of the country itself. In the decades that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has maintained its power both at home and abroad through a watchful network of expats, dissidents are increasingly surveilled, harassed and silenced by the regime. The glaring absence here, as in many other works on memory, are voices of those living with trauma, constructing memory, holding memorials and surviving outside of the state.

The conclusion offers an underscoring and broadening of the book’s relevance. This is done by reminding the reader of the core concepts and the definition of genocide heritage and then taking a global view of similar South-bounded trauma memory and its architecture. This latter element, and the appendices’ Atlas of Trauma Heritage, diverges from other post-genocide Rwanda-focused work, situating it within a global linking of memory and violence. Overall, Wendel captures the foundations and promise of Rwanda’s unique human rights-focused national unity era of memorialisation, creating a Rwandan genocide heritage. However, the latter is specially treated as being popularly owned by a variety of actors stratified across Rwanda’s rigid socio-economic hierarchy. In an age of increasingly state-controlled memory, Wendel pulls back the curtain on a deep, locally produced coalescence of genocide heritage.