Paper short abstract:

Analyzing practices of patience, acceptance and compliance in Rwanda, and the agency expressed in these modes of being, the paper argues that there are important aspects of how subjects relate to power which we omit when we emphasize the ways people subvert political control.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes practices of patience, acceptance and compliance in Rwanda, and the agency expressed in these modes of being. It is motivated by the concern that although multiple actors practice both overt and covert resistance in Rwanda, there are important aspects of how subjects relate to power and violence, which are omitted in the analytical tendency to emphasize the ways people subvert political control. The paper analyzes situations where radical acceptance, which entails not only obeying orders but feeling calm in doing so, is framed as an essential attitude for surviving extreme hardships. In other situations, patience and compliance are described as responses to the cunning of political and other forms of authority, who wanted to trick my respondents into making themselves arrestable. Patience, in general, may be understood as a way to navigate the infinitely possible futures of a political context marked by the often arbitrary exercise of sovereign violence. To understand these shifts in relations to sovereignty, the paper ends by reading Ashis Nandy’s fragmented selves together with Seyla Benhabib’s narrative model to characterize patient subjectivities marked by adaptability to drastic and radical change. Agency in this view is expressed in control over ones narrative, even if this narrative is contradictive or exhibits attachment to sub-ordinating structures.