Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I think through the Rwandan state as a temporal formation predicated on continuous and compulsory improvement. I show how the official future of the state detaches itself from the time of its subjects, and the country itself becomes a humiliating future in which they play no part.

Paper long abstract:

The 2015 Rwandan Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey (EICV4) became the object of scandal when a change in its methodology for measuring poverty was revealed, erasing what would have been a statistical increase in the number of poor people. In this paper, I take this episode as a provocation for thinking through the Rwandan state as a temporal formation predicated on continuous and compulsory improvement.

The Rwandan state lays claim to time through its continual invocation of the 1994 genocide as its primary claim to legitimacy and an apocalyptic break, erasing history. This erasure of history entails a claim on the future: everything is better now. This future is conjured through a kind of commercial time, where 'time is money', appropriate to a 'country hurrying towards development' — a future explicitly aimed at disciplining Rwandans and detaching them from an autochthonous 'African time' of inefficiency. These claims to the future are built into urban space, formed into slogans, and, ultimately deployed as judgements.

For ordinary Rwandans, this official future stands in an uneasy relation to their experiences of time's passage. The state creates class-bound development in the form of tall buildings, bright lights and sealed roads as though by magic, while the space-time of personal development, keyed to the rhythms of reproduction and the growth of families, is erased. As a result, the state's future seems to detach itself from the time of its subjects, and the country itself becomes a humiliating future in which they play no part.