Terry Riversong - Under The Gacaca Tree

Under The Gacaca Tree: Restorative Justice In Rwanda

by Terry Riversong

Aftermath of Genocide

In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, Rwanda was left not only with unimaginable grief but also with a question that had no easy answer: How do neighbors who once shared fields, schools, and markets learn to live alongside one another again? The country’s path to reconciliation was neither simple nor uniform. While international tribunals and conventional courts addressed many cases, Rwanda also turned to its own traditions, reviving the ancient practice of Gacaca. This community-based restorative justice system invited survivors and perpetrators to sit together in the open air and confront the truth—one story, one confession, one judgment at a time. What emerged was an ambitious and often imperfect effort to stitch back the torn fabric of society, anchored not only in accountability but in the possibility of healing.

The Scars That Remained

In the weeks after the killing stopped, Rwanda was a landscape of stunned silence—bodies still unburied, houses burned out and looted, the smell of smoke and decay carrying on the wind. Over a million people, roughly one in every seven Rwandans had been slain, most with farm tools, clubs, or homemade weapons wielded by neighbors and even relatives. Violence was chillingly intimate: killers called their victims by name, pointed out hiding places, or forced families to murder loved ones before they themselves were butchered. This intimacy left survivors not only bereft but fearful of the very people with whom they shared fields, markets, and pews.

Sexual violence was wielded with equal deliberation. An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women and girls were raped in just one hundred days. Many assaults were gang rapes accompanied by mutilation; perpetrators sometimes boasted of being HIV-positive, turning rape into a slow-moving death sentence. Years later, doctors still trace countless infections and more than 20,000 children born of those rapes to that brief, brutal spring. Women who survived often faced rejection from spouses or families on top of chronic illness and trauma.

The magnitude of loss was immeasurable. Rwanda awoke to more than 400,000 orphans, villages stripped of elders and skilled workers, and a nationwide case of collective post-traumatic stress. Entire judicial archives had been burned; over two-thirds of judges and lawyers were dead or in exile. The formal courts—barely functioning—could manage only a trickle of cases.

A Justice System in Gridlock

By 1998, over 100,000 genocide suspects were jammed into prisons built for 18,000. Conditions were so dire that prisoners sometimes suffocated in standing room only cells. At the conventional trial pace of the late 1990s, outside analysts estimated it would take well over two centuries to process every suspect. Even after new prisons were built, official tallies in early 1999 still hovered around 150,000 detainees, 135,000 of them on genocide charges.

Against this backdrop of grief, disease, and institutional collapse, Rwanda embraced the village-based Gacaca courts. Their purpose was as much spiritual as legal: to decant the nation’s sorrow into testimony, confession, and—when possible—acts of reparation performed in the very communities where the crimes had occurred. Only by turning outward, facing one another “in the shade of the Gacaca tree,” could survivors and perpetrators begin the long, unfinished work of becoming neighbors again.

to move from punitive justice to restoritive justice.

Ubumwe - our shared humanity

In the language of the philosopher Edith Stein, which Timothy Snyder draws on in On Freedom, there is a distinction between two kinds of “body.” There is the Körper — the body as an object, a thing that can be used, categorized, or destroyed. And there is the Leib — the living, feeling, experiencing body, the body that carries fear, hope, memory, and meaning. During the genocide against the Tutsi, this distinction marked the boundary between life and annihilation. To commit genocide is to reduce a person to Körper, stripping away the inner life that makes them a subject. A mother becomes only a category. A child becomes only a target. The human being — with a center of feeling, with a name and a story — disappears behind the mask of dehumanization.

In the aftermath, Rwanda had to find a way to restore not only truth and accountability, but the recognition of each person as a living subject again. This is where Gacaca began its work. Under the shade of the Gacaca tree, justice was not an abstract procedure. It was an encounter between Leib and Leib — between bodies that trembled, cried, shook, confronted, confessed, forgave, or refused to forgive. Survivors spoke with voices that cracked under the weight of memory. Perpetrators stood and told their stories, sometimes collapsing into silence or tears. The truth was carried not only in words, but in gestures, pauses, and the visible strain of trying to speak the unspeakable. Rwandan moral language already contains this embodied understanding. Ubumuntu — deep humanity — is the recognition that every person possesses an interior life, a moral core. Ubuntu or ubumwe speaks to the shared nature of that humanity: I am because we are. These traditions align with Snyder’s argument that freedom begins only when we acknowledge the interiority of others. Without seeing the other as Leib, there can be no genuine equality, no empathy, no political community, and no moral repair. Gacaca was therefore more than a system to process cases. It was a national attempt to restore the moral visibility of the Rwandan people, one testimony at a time. Seen through the lens of Leib, Gacaca becomes a process of returning subjectivity to those who had been reduced to objects. It allowed neighbors to see one another not as categories — not as “survivor,” “perpetrator,” “Hutu,” “Tutsi” — but as human beings with vulnerable, feeling bodies. The work of restorative justice in Rwanda was grounded in this embodied recognition.

Healing was not metaphysical; it was lived. It took the form of trembling hands, downcast eyes, slow confessions, and the steady rebuilding of trust in shared spaces. The body carried trauma, but it also carried truth — and truth, once spoken, became the doorway back to moral agency. In this way, Rwanda’s path after genocide illustrates what Snyder calls the foundation of freedom: the refusal to let any person be seen as an object.

Freedom begins with the return of the living body — with the recognition that every human being is a center of experience, memory, and moral possibility. This is the work that happened beneath the Gacaca tree. This is where a broken nation began to rebuild itself: not by abstract principle, but by restoring the dignity of the Leib — the fragile, feeling bodies who survived, the bodies who confessed, and the bodies who still stand together in the long shadow of 1994.

“Forgiveness is not forgetting. It is choosing to live again.”

— Thérèse, survivor from Bugesera

Today there is no more Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa in Rwanda. All are considered Rwandans now.

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