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Paper short abstract:

This paper traces shifting conceptions from the making of Africa’s first national park and its Indigenous inhabitants as conservation objects to “non-ethnic” conservation subjects in the post-genocide reimagining of the nation.

Paper long abstract:

Mountain gorilla conservation and post-genocide state formation have intimately shaped conceptions and identities of the indigenous Batwa community in Rwanda. Shifting representations of the Batwa as part of “nature” during the colonial period, as poachers under Dian Fossey’s tenure, and now as “historically marginalized” in the post- genocide period have dispossessed the Batwa of their identity and denied their representational sovereignty. At the same time, imaginaries of what is now Volcanoes National Park as an “international laboratory” (De Bont 2015), a militarized border region, and now a gorilla sanctuary have facilitated post-genocide nation-building ambitions to transform Rwanda into a “clean-green-safe” eco-tourist destination. Meanwhile, transitional justice efforts have eliminated ethnic designations and refused the recognition of indigenous identity, thereby preventing claims to rights and resources by the Batwa. Representational rhetorics (West 2016) of “nature,” nation-building, and Indigenous peoples have both obscured and justified dispossession while remaking Batwa identity in relation to state (re)formation and conservation. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Rwanda, this paper traces the shifting conceptual identities of Batwa from conservation objects to conservation subjects in the making of a “new” Rwanda.