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Discordant Narratives in Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts

In this chapter, Breed analyses ten gacaca court transcripts selected from over 507 case files, originally transcribed and documented through the gacaca monitoring programme of Avocats Sans Frontières (ASF) between 2008 and 2009. Of the ten transcripts, three illustrate narratives that are discordant from the government script. Although the National Service of Gacaca Courts claims that the gacaca established justice and reconciliation, forty percent of the 507 case files document prison sentences of twenty-five years to life imprisonment. The article analyzes the impact of the sentencing and court jurisdictions in terms of narratives that emerged during the court proceedings, and assesses their effect on Rwanda in the future. Gacaca trials from 2005-2006, and a research trip to Rwanda in April 2010 provide further research. Gacaca has been researched through a range of disciplines including law, human rights, anthropology, and sociology, but this study provides a unique theorization within performance studies, reading gacaca as a performance for particular audiences that is staged within ordained scripts through the gacaca courts and enforced by the government.