The Complexity of Collectivity

Rwandan society, like much of the east African community, is based around a collective social identity rather individualism which is the foundational social identity in the western world. The phrase “it takes a village (or umudugudu in Kinyarwanda) to raise a child” is very much a reality here. Children are fed, disciplined, instructed and herded by the entire village and not just the biological mother or father. In fact, there is no word in Kinyarwanda for the sister of my mother, she is simply called mama wacu-our mother.
Likewise, there is an expectation that any surplus in the household budget to go towards a neighbor’s hospital bill, sister’s children’s school fees or brother’s schooling. In the wonderfully insightful book “Africa Friends and Money Matters” the author lays out the stark differences between the American/western economic system and the African one. He argues that the African system is structured so that everyone has just enough and does not reward growth or innovation as more valuable than subsistence of the whole. Western capitalism on the other hand is structured such that growth is the ultimate goal and without growth there is great civil unrest. The African economic system based on the collective social identity incentivizes generosity and community solidarity. The western system based on individualism and growth can incentivize greed and amassing of individual wealth.
At first glance, it can appear that Africans have got it right when it comes to a socially just, equitable and generous economic system. It may not be growing rapidly or driving the most innovative progress but at least everyone is taken care of equally right? I think my mindset has been that Africans have the social mindset of economics on the right track and just needed to work on the innovation, investment side of things a little more so that there would be more wealth for everyone. Three weeks into my Rwanda experience, I am thinking that things are much more complicated than they first appeared. It is more complicated because the collective social identity that makes Africans so wonderfully generous and community minded is the same thinking that binds their hands when it comes to innovation and development. The collective social identity that encourages solidarity also incentivizes conformity. It becomes highly undesirable to be different in anyway. From how you dress, to how you clean, to how you make money, different is seen as bad.
Rwandans are quick to criticize a person who chooses to shirk social expectations. This holding each other accountable can be good when it helps make a city cleaner (for example on the monthly day of nation wide community service called umuganda), but it can be destructive when a person trying to increase efficiency by doing an old thing in a new way is ostracized by their community.
I think this spirit of conformity is what I am struggling most with right now. I want to integrate fully into Rwandan community, to be accepted as part of the umudugudu. To do so I must conform to the unspoken rules of dress, behavior and interactions. My very existence here, however, is an oxymoron. I am here to make a change, to facilitate progress because there is a need for change-otherwise Peace Corps would not have sent volunteers here. Change and progress require a breaking with a status quo and a shift in the way things have always been done. Thus my life is lived in the tension between conforming to the pressures to behave, dress and interact like my Rwandan friends and challenging the way they do things in a humble attempt at making things better.
I have never been one to go with the flow of popular opinion or one to conform to the wishes of others. I am having difficulty swallowing the necessity of conformity for the sake of progress. This unforeseen personal challenge is an interesting microcosm of the difficulty of development in east Africa. And like development in east Africa, it requires a great deal of humility, listening, patience and a long long time to see progress. I must learn to swallow my western ideals of individualism and independence if I wish to enter in to the fabric of the collective. If I want to make change I must first make myself nothing, taking on the posture of a servant so that I might work from within to move the collective forward in solidarity instead of conformity. That is why I am here, and that is what I must remind myself on days when I think having a wrinkly shirt is not such a big deal or I don’t feel like greeting everyone in the neighborhood on my way to work or I don’t want to bow to the strict hierarchy in Rwandan schools. I must live in the tension between integration and change, and between solidarity and conformity. I pray for strength to be ready for such an existence, for humility to sustain it and for love to endure it.

In solidarity but never conformity (and of course in shalom)
cg