Ménages d'enfants sans parents au Rwanda. (Re-)création d'une structure familiale après le génocide perpétré contre les Tutsis?
(2011) Cahiers de Psychologie Clinique — Vol. 2, n° 37, p. 11-46 (2011)
Files
MénagesdenfantssansparentsauRwandaUWERABRACKELAIRE.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 197.78 KB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- (en) Households in Rwanda by children without parents. (Re)building a family structure after the rwandan genocide? The phenomenon of “child-headed households” or “children households” emerged in Rwanda in the wake of the 1994 Tutsi genocide. No form of family organization could be set up or planned for these children, who ended up living alone in households without parents or other adults. At their head was another, slightly older, child – the oldest - who assumed the role of a parent or a sibling without there being necessarily any blood ties. Childhood and the transition to adulthood, experienced without parents, but with a background of parental disappearance and the mark of the unmentionable, proved to be difficult and a source of suffering, while the causes of such a fate were different for each child. The authors examine how this situation came about, what caused, at a certain moment, the act of creating a new “household” or “family,” what was the deciding factor in building a children household, what enabled them to succeed and manage to live together, but also what they had to give up and what life in a children household meant to them. One hypothesis is that, for these children, living in a children household was a singular attempt to create a new family and to live in it by rebuilding the underlying structure of the family. It was thus a desperate attempt to re-create a kind of personal and social home, a place in which to live, or rather initially to survive, in the ashes of what had been lost, dismembered and annihilated by the genocide and its accompanying devastation. An analysis of interviews with 16 children talking about their own life reveals how they were torn away from their childhood and hurled into a life of heavy responsibility, an early parenthood, which they took on by being “like parents,” without being real parents. They relate how words, gestures, hopes and internalized ways of being, inherited from their parents, proved invaluable for the children of these households by leading them to assume a personal position and role in creating groups in which they were family members.
- Affiliations
Citations
Uwera Kanyamanza, C., & Brackelaire, J.-L. (2011). Ménages d’enfants sans parents au Rwanda. (Re-)création d’une structure familiale après le génocide perpétré contre les Tutsis? Cahiers de Psychologie Clinique, 2(37), 11-46. https://doi.org/10.3917/cpc.037.0009 (Original work published 2011)