The goal of the Maymester in Rwanda is to directly expose students to the political culture and development trajectory of an African country with particular focus on the country’s political history, the institutional dynamics in the making and execution of geocide, and post-conflict reconstruction. As an independent country, Rwanda has had the political misfortune of experiencing incessant identity conflicts since its official independence from Belgium in 1962. These identity conflicts culminated in the genocide of 1994 which, compared to other genocides like the Armenian genocide, the Jewish holocaust, Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavian states including Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia, is reckoned to have been the fastest genocide of the twentieth century. In the Rwandan genocide, an estimated 800,000 people were wantonly killed in one hundred days between April and July 1994 in a genocidal frenzy whose geographical scale and mass participation stunned the world.
Thirty years since the genocide, Rwanda is a stable, secure, and progressive society that is almost unparalleled on the continent. In terms of its political stability, socioeconomic transformation, and diplomatic positioning, some analysts and observers now style Rwanda variously as the Switzerland of Africa, or the Singapore of East Africa. With an economy growing at an average rate of 7.2% in the post-genocide period according to World Bank statistics, Rwanda is poised to become a middle-income country by 2035. The genocidal madness of the one hundred days of 1994 has been more than matched by the radical nature of the post-genocide reconstruction agenda. An interesting political fact about Rwanda is that in the entire post-genocide period, the country has remained the leading in the world in terms of women representation in the national legislature. As of June 2024, Rwanda led the world in this regard with women constituting 61.3% of the national parliament followed by Cuba (55.7%), Nicaragua (51.7%), Andorra (50%), and Mexico (50%). Following the general election of July 15, 2024, the proportion of women in parliament went up to 63.75% in the Chamber of Deputies and 53.8% in the Senate. It is this sense of unique transformation that the program seeks to expose students to in a practical, experiential way.