title: Dynamics of Domination? Rwandan Survivor-Witness Agency and Representation in Collaborative Testimonial Writing.
Creators: name: McInally, John
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2026

description: This thesis examines six French-language testimonies of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda published from 2011 to 2019. Testimony writing provides an avenue for survivor-witnesses of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda to communicate to a wide audience their experiences of the horrors of 1994. As most Rwandan writers of these testimonies have no prior experience in writing and publishing, most of these works have been written in collaboration with a professional Western co-author. Until now, most of the limited research conducted on these writing partnerships has focused on the mediation undertaken by the Western co-author with negligible or no consideration of the contributions of publishers and the Rwandan survivor-witnesses. The collaborative writing relationships have thus been largely interpreted in terms of a dominating/dominated power dynamic. However, such conclusions effectively divest the Rwandan survivor-witnesses of agency in the production and publication of their testimonies. To address this issue, I seek to uncover in this thesis the extent and the outcomes of Rwandan survivor-witness agency in these processes, and the dynamics and circumstances that facilitate or restrict their active involvement. Thus, my analysis involves examination of the power dynamics between Rwandan survivor-witness, publisher, and collaborator(s) as well as their contribution to the framing, content, and narrative form of the works. To examine these aspects, my methodology involves close scrutiny of the testimonies’ paratextual elements in conjunction with narrative analysis and consideration of the context behind their genesis, production, and publication. Furthermore, underlying my analyses is consideration of the following key areas of inquiry: how French/Western hegemony of the publishing industry affects the marketing, framing, and form of the testimonies; the extent of influence of cultural ‘norms’ on these aspects in the form of existing models of representing genocide; how other genocides are evoked in the works; the circumstances that facilitate a shift away from a recourse to Eurocentric models; and the ways in which the Rwandan survivor-witnesses claim or assert their ownership of their works. I examine the six testimonies of my corpus comparatively in separate chapters. In the first chapter, I show how co-author and publisher knowledge of Rwanda is a key factor behind Pauline Kayitare’s Tu leur diras que tu es Hutue (2011) being written in a way that concomitantly facilitates understanding of the work for a predominantly Western readership and foregrounds Kayitare’s Rwandan identity and agency. Subsequently, in the second chapter, I demonstrate how Élise Rida Musomandera uses her relative authorial autonomy over her testimony, Le Livre d’Élise (2014) to confront her reader and challenge dominant Western views on Rwanda, genocide, and war. Jean Hatzfeld’s Englebert des collines (2014) forms the subject of my third chapter in which I examine the steps taken by Hatzfeld to underscore Englebert’s involvement in his testimony’s production. In chapter four, my analysis of Marie-Chantal Nyiraneza and Gérard Netter’s testimony written from a Hutu perspective, Témoignage d’une petite fille rwandaise (2017), brings to light the potential for conflict over ownership when authorship is shared and publisher involvement is minimal. In my subsequent scrutiny of Albert Nsengimana’s Ma mère m’a tué (2019) in chapter five, the cruelty and barbarism suggested by the title forms the basis of a discussion on how Nsengimana uses his relative authorial autonomy to challenge colonial stereotypes. Finally, in chapter six, I examine the ways in which Charles Habonimana tackles the issues of the perceived hierarchy of genocides in the Western imagination and French implication in the events of 1994 in his testimony, Moi, le dernier Tutsi (2019).