Mice, Cows, and Real Rwandans

Abstract As an alternative to NGO- or state-initiated arts, this chapter explores traditional oral performance genres mobilized by Kinyarwanda-speakers from DR Congo resettled in a Rwandan refugee camp. Storytellers and poets find ways to unite their communities, obliquely re-narrate their histories, endure amid “emergency conditions,” and assert their agency in an environment otherwise bent toward defining them as passive refugees and victims. Close linguistic attention to the moments and manner in which these stories and poems are performed reveals that oral traditions are not simply sources of automatic authenticity in which to couch development messages, but rather the very means by which substantive demands for development can be articulated and promulgated. Like any other foreign intervention, arts projects initiated amid humanitarian crises would do best to begin by listening to local voices.