8th June 2015
Cite this chapter:
Breed, A. (2015). Gender-based Violence and Human Rights: Participatory Theatre in Post-Genocide Rwanda. In: Luckhurst, M., Morin, E. (eds) Theatre and Human Rights after 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362308_10
Abstract:
During the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda over one million Tutsi and Hutu moderates were massacred, and an estimated 350,000 women and girls were raped, often in public locations. Anti-Tutsi propaganda demonized Tutsi women as traitors and prompted a sexual and gendered form of genocide involving, as Usta Kaitesi reports, ‘[r]ape, gang rape, being raped with objects, sexual mutilation, forced sexual intercourse with dead animals, sexual captivity, forced public nudity, intentional transmission of HIV/AIDS, the mutilation of breasts, the cutting open of wombs and removal of the foetus, and forced intercourse between victims’. The public dimensions of sexual violence and rape and the correlation between an increase in gender-based violence and the 1994 genocide have attracted close scrutiny. In this chapter, I contextualize some of the challenges facing applied theatre practitioners in relation to human rights issues and the navigation of the agendas between international donor relations and domestic justice. I will focus on Ukuri Mubinyoma (Truth in Lies), a participatory theatre project designed to encourage the debate on gender-based violence that toured Rwanda in 2006. I contributed as co-writer of the grant and also functioned as a consultant and artistic collaborator. My perspective on gender-based violence in Rwanda is indebted to Article 2 of Law N◦59/2008 of 10 September 2008 relating to the prevention and punishment of gender-based violence, and defining it as ‘any act that results in bodily, psychological, sexual and economic harm to somebody just because they are female or male’.