Parsing the Rwandan urban question: Toward ‘minor histories’ of urban space

It is an honor to be in conversation with this incredible set of reviewers, each with their own exceptional work on African studies, Rwanda studies, and the urban within the African context. I feel spoiled by the wealth of insights and critiques they provide in these reviews, and thank them for their time and profound engagement with my work. Not only do each of these reviews make a part of my monograph more visible, engaging with my book (Hudani, 2024) in different ways, but they also make clear that transferring vision between parts of the city in Rwanda renders it perceptible in a thought-provoking and prismatic manner.

In a recent paper on urban divides in two African cities, Maputo and Luanda, Schubert and Sumich (2025) focus on the technique of unseeing as key to bringing into focus and yet pushing farther away the fragments of each city. They draw on fiction by novelist China Mieville to argue that unseeing is a ‘social practice’ that enables this toggling between moments of clearer vision or ‘breach’ and those moments of blurring out city life ‘as a central facet for making urban life bearable, comprehensible’ (3). I situate the larger pedagogy of the post- conflict city – and the work in my monograph – in relation to such techniques of ‘partial sight’ that need to be parsed with care, as interchangeable prisms of sorts, so that engaging with urban space is necessarily an exercise of active viewing. With an increasing amount of scholarship focusing on the African city (including Goodfellow's and Gastrow's own, excellent urban work), capitals such as Kigali and Luanda are fast becoming hubs on the African continent for scholarship on African urbanism, and the myriad ways these cities as ‘hubs’ interconnect with other prisms of study that make yet more perspectives visible: such as circuits of post-conflict cities, or post-socialist cities. Scale and interconnection become important tools for seeing the city here.

My book suggests that scalarity is a key component of techniques of seeing Rwanda's post-conflict urban space. Post-conflict repair in Rwanda on a national scale needs to be seen as tied into the fabric of the city, with its necessary spatial proximities, its dense social relations, and the central role of rebuilding the city to remaking political futurity on the national scale. A key focus of the book is that it also sees Rwanda's ‘urban question’ as extending beyond Kigali, sutured into the way material and social repair connect urban and rural life, even though they are oriented in relation to the city as a key locus of control and opportunity. In this light, I particularly appreciated Tom Goodfellow's (2025) thoughtful review of my work, as it illuminated the various scales the city operates through and its connections to the post-genocide nation-state. His review also highlights how the book's exposition of the Rwandan ‘urban question’ underscores the variable temporalities that connect the capital, Kigali, to questions of stage leaping and speeded-up progress amid ‘the fierce drive transform, almost for its own sake’. Goodfellow's question about the ethics of repair in urban space, and its relation to the politics of repair – often imbricated with state dictates for reconciliation, as seen in gacaca court proceedings and state calls for unity – shows there is room for further exposition of the entangled relationship between planning, capitalism, and repair at various scales, and particularly in this complex context.

I also benefited from reading David Mwambari's (2025) creatively written piece on the interconnections between the spaces of the living and the dead in contemporary Rwanda. Drawing on Masabo's song ‘Kavukire’, Mwambari elicits the role of movement and mobility in Rwanda today and probes us to think about the ongoing nature of these ‘repetitive ruptures’, as they are termed in my book. Forced mobility, sometimes in the service of urban speculation or for political violence, is in essence an ongoing project in Rwanda over time, with different costs and dividends for those affected. Mwambari's review draws attention to those in the capital benefiting or suffering from the costs of urban development, or to those Rwandans moving from Kigali to Bugesera District (my Chapter 6), where the layered political geography of the conflict is overlaid by growing urban speculation. Like his probing question on the ‘normal’ or ‘everyday’ dead in Rwanda today, and what role they occupy in spatial planning in the capital, Mwambari forces us to see that questions about mobility and death in Rwanda are multilayered. I would suggest that these themes show us that space in Kigali and urban Rwanda functions dually, because sedimented histories of political violence, exile, and loss interact with ordinary events and daily life in a growing urban space. Like the ‘unseeing’ I describe in the beginning of this review, we need to toggle between these expressions of Kigali as both a post-conflict city and a growing African city; as an extraordinary space of the aftermath of violence, and as an ordinary space of everyday encounter, transgression, imagination, and ordinary death.

Claudia Gastrow's (2025) review focuses on the everyday stakes and the contradictions of the master plan – in this sense, the Kigali Spatial Master Plan for 2050. Here, master plans are situated in relation to the political objectives of the state but are also necessarily unfinished projects, shadowed by dissent, transgression, reimagination, and subversion. While I do examine the aspirational reach of the master plan in my chapters, including its anticipatory effects and its necessary incompleteness – for example, as demonstrated in my chapter on the Bannyahe settlement, involving expropriation, eviction, and relocation to Busanza (the focus of Chapter 5) – I concentrate on the role of local, place-based dissent in a broader context, and concede that this does not always consider the full range of everyday opposition and reimagination that takes the Kigali 2050 plan (‘Kigali yacu!’) as its primary object. Aiming to connect the imperatives of post-conflict transition and urban transformation in my work meant that I often focused less on the Kigali spatial master plan itself and more on urban processes involving social memory and contestation across a wider range of contexts. My book's argument is that the new Kigali master plan is one of multiple attempts at ordering space, memory, and ways of life over time (which is the way I define ‘master plans’ in the book). For an accounting focused on the moment of master planning and the Kigali 2050 plan, Samuel Shearer's forthcoming book on Kigali presents a more detailed interrogation of contestation in the capital. Gastrow's attention to the ‘political nature of planning and space’ in my book is much appreciated, however, and draws attention to her own illuminating monograph on the political aesthetics of reconstruction in Luanda and their contestation.

And so finally, to ‘minor acts’, which appear both as ‘embodied agitations’ through the course of the book, as Brittany Meché (2025) trenchantly determines them – as forms of material resistance to orderliness, and everyday acts of subversion brought forward through the dictates of hygiene and greening in the city – as well as modes of repair and coexistence in post-conflict urban space, occurring between neighbors and fellow residents. Meché's focus on scale and reach in terms of violence and dispossession leads her to question whether we don’t also need equal range for forms of redress and repair. This is an important question for further thought, as it brings to the fore the need for greater attention to the scale of trauma and subsequent repair in planning theory and in terms of planning practice. This focus holds both in planning post-conflict contexts and for engaging with sites of longstanding dispossession and historical memory, where questions of voice and access to power often predetermine planning outcomes (Knapp et al., 2022; Poe, 2022). While not attempting a full resolution to this question of macro redress, particularly in a sensitive political environment controlled by a strong state, I wish to dwell in closing, on the multiple possibilities of ‘minor acts’, not at all as small, trivializing, subsidiary, or irrelevant in their scale – as could be suggested – but as a source of multiple narratives and alternative political histories, and therefore as alternative apertures for redress.

In his book on Rwanda's political master narrative and its social histories of memory, Mwambari (2023) draws attention to the multiple ways in which memory around the genocide is crafted at the grassroots level and in various social arenas, by different groups of people. Similarly, both gacaca and material processes of rebuilding highlight the nature of multiple experiences of Rwanda's political past and the meanings of redress for differently positioned groups of individuals. Rather than just small-scale histories, these minor modes of accounting for the past might be thought of as alternative modes of narration: ‘minor’ in the way that Cindy Katz writes of ‘minor theory’ of the discipline, involving feminist, ‘situated’ or occluded forms of knowledge (as Katz (1996) theorizes, ‘of work that reworks marginality by decomposing the major’). These minor histories are necessarily partial and situated in their scope, engaging with techniques of viewing the city and ‘unseeing’ its constituent narrations as an active urban process, tied into particular spaces and daily routines. Such histories of ‘minor acts’, encoded through material rebuilding, might also be thought of as subaltern modes of recounting: they create openings for histories of possibility, questions of alternative presents and political futures, and the potentiality of greater hope on the horizon, even if generationally. It is these minor histories of repair that I see as undergirding the wider urban question in Rwanda, intertwining present projects of rebuilding with a material accounting of the past.