Building a Nation: Gender, Labor, and the Politics of Nationalism in Colonial Rwanda Restricted; Files & ToC
Brunner, Georgia (Spring 2024)
Published
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the ways that the Belgian colonial state forced Rwandan women into labor for the state and how women’s labor became a political flashpoint during decolonization. The exploitation of women to build roads and commercial coffee farms in the context of mass male migration would have profound implications for Rwanda’s history, igniting class, gender, and regional divides among Rwandans and shaping the development of nationalism. I argue that women were integral to the function of the colonial state and that women’s labor resulted in backlash from Rwandan men who sought to force women back into the domestic sphere after independence.
My dissertation begins its narrative with the evolution of labor under imperial control
in the early 1900s. Disputes over colonial power between Germany, Belgium, and Britain created
legal chaos and violence in the first decades of colonialism in Rwanda. I argue that first
German and then Belgian colonial administrators used early twentieth-century famines to legally
force men into labor for the state, primarily in agriculture and infrastructure construction. When
men subsequently left the territory to avoid those labor demands, forced labor fell to women.
While women were not legally responsible for forced labor, they faced brutal punishment if they
resisted. In the 1950s, women’s forced labor became a politically charged issue. Belgium
eventually reformed the labor system due to international pressure, but gendered forced labor had
already become a central complaint of non-elite Rwandan men. In 1962, when Rwandan men
gained control of the country, they forced women back into domestic spheres and revoked their
right to vote. Using multi-sited archival research, I reimagine women's role in empire by illustrating how decolonization movements failed to provide legal gender parity.
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