Sara Marloes Loning

SARA LONING, then a graduate student at University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, was awarded a grant in May 2019 to aid research on ‘Generation After: The Reconstitution of Kinship and Family Relations in Everyday Post-Genocide Rwanda,’ supervised by Dr. Fiona Ross. This research examined how kinship works in the afterward of violence by exploring the social worlds of young people born from rape during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Through ethnographic fieldwork carried out throughout Rwanda and remotely during Covid-19, the study sought to uncover how relationships that derive from violent circumstances are brought into the everyday; what forms of relationships become possible, impossible, enabled or dismissed, and with what consequences for young people born of rape and their families? The research shows that (broken, fractured and productive) kinship relations are dependent on where young people live, their mothers’ experiences, and the support received from organizations. Young people themselves take an active role in the reconstitution of kinship, particularly with their biological fathers’ family, mothers’ family, and stepfathers. Local organizations play an important role in creating ‘families’ of support and solidarity and provide assistance with the disclosure of young people’s inkomoko (origin, inception), which revealed to be significant in mending strained relationships between mothers and their children. Additionally, while being born from rape holds complexities in the context of marriage, having children and starting a family of their own transformed young people’s place and experiences within their communities.