Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Telesphore Ngarambe, “Practical Challenges in Customary Law Translation: The Case of Rwanda’s Gacaca Law” (OSSREA, 2015)
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Telesphore Ngarambe, “Practical Challenges in Customary Law Translation: The Case of Rwanda’s Gacaca Law” (OSSREA, 2015)
The unprecedented crime of the 1994 Rwandan genocide demanded an unconventional legal response. After failed attempts by the international legal system to efficiently handle legal cases stemming from the genocide, Rwandans decided to take matters into their own hands and reinstate Gacaca law, which had been the sole legal system in Rwanda prior to colonization.
Gacaca, a Kinyarwanda word referring to a type of grass or traditional lawn, is also a metonym for place and mediation. Gacaca law allows perpetrators and victims to resolve their differences before the community, and a panel of eminent persons, inyangamugayo. Gacaca seeks not simply to punish crime but to repair the social fabric rent by crime.
In his book Practical Challenges in Customary Law Translation: The Case Of Rwanda’s Gacaca Law (Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa, 2015), Telesphore Ngarambe uses a fusion of cultural and translational studies, with emphasis placed on cultural contextualization, to make a unique contribution to the study of Gacaca law.
Ngarambe argues that as law is embedded in culture and society, of which language is an integral part, legal language of necessity reflects the culture and society in which it is embedded. Rwanda’s three official languages mean that Gacaca law, articulated in Kinyarwanda, must now also find expression in the colonial languages with which it coexists, namely English and French.
Though modern Gacaca law has come in for criticism, it has also been hailed as a model for indigenous responses to crimes of mass violence in Africa and other parts of the world.
Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She can be reached at [email protected].
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
View all episodes
By Marshall Poe
4.3
3232 ratings
The unprecedented crime of the 1994 Rwandan genocide demanded an unconventional legal response. After failed attempts by the international legal system to efficiently handle legal cases stemming from the genocide, Rwandans decided to take matters into their own hands and reinstate Gacaca law, which had been the sole legal system in Rwanda prior to colonization.
Gacaca, a Kinyarwanda word referring to a type of grass or traditional lawn, is also a metonym for place and mediation. Gacaca law allows perpetrators and victims to resolve their differences before the community, and a panel of eminent persons, inyangamugayo. Gacaca seeks not simply to punish crime but to repair the social fabric rent by crime.
In his book Practical Challenges in Customary Law Translation: The Case Of Rwanda’s Gacaca Law (Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa, 2015), Telesphore Ngarambe uses a fusion of cultural and translational studies, with emphasis placed on cultural contextualization, to make a unique contribution to the study of Gacaca law.
Ngarambe argues that as law is embedded in culture and society, of which language is an integral part, legal language of necessity reflects the culture and society in which it is embedded. Rwanda’s three official languages mean that Gacaca law, articulated in Kinyarwanda, must now also find expression in the colonial languages with which it coexists, namely English and French.
Though modern Gacaca law has come in for criticism, it has also been hailed as a model for indigenous responses to crimes of mass violence in Africa and other parts of the world.
Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She can be reached at [email protected].
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
More shows like New Books in Genocide Studies
View all
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
3,987 Listeners
More or Less
883 Listeners
New Books in Philosophy
112 Listeners
History Extra podcast
3,191 Listeners
New Books in History
211 Listeners
New Books in Military History
161 Listeners
New Books in Economics
27 Listeners
New Books in Religion
30 Listeners
New Books in Psychoanalysis
186 Listeners
New Books in African American Studies
164 Listeners
New Books in Environmental Studies
23 Listeners
New Books in Native American Studies
103 Listeners
New Books in Intellectual History
61 Listeners
The Dig
1,569 Listeners
Secrets and Spies Podcast: Espionage | Global Issues | Current Affairs
268 Listeners
The Atlantic Interview
2,127 Listeners
WW2 Pod: We Have Ways of Making You Talk
1,378 Listeners
Time To Say Goodbye
412 Listeners
In Moscow's Shadows
362 Listeners
For Heaven's Sake
444 Listeners
The Rest Is History
14,606 Listeners
Gone Medieval
1,826 Listeners
On the Nose
234 Listeners
School of War
447 Listeners
Past Present Future
321 Listeners