Colonial Othering, Fractured Identity, and the Ethics of Reconciliation, A Re-reading of Veronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Hearts of Rwanda.

This study re-reads Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda through the interconnected concepts of colonial Othering, fractured identity, dehumanisation, memory, and reconciliation. It argues that Tadjo’s representation of the 1994 Rwandan genocide challenges explanations that reduce the violence to primordial ethnic antagonism by drawing attention to the historical processes through which colonial administration racialised and institutionalised distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi. Drawing principally on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theorisation of the Other, and supported by Edward Said’s account of colonial representation, Frantz Fanon’s analysis of psychological alienation, and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, the article examines how colonial categories of difference became embedded in social consciousness and were subsequently mobilised to produce fear, exclusion, dehumanisation, and violence. It further examines the psychological and communal fragmentation produced by genocide, particularly the loss of trust, belonging, familial bonds, and a stable sense of self. The article argues that Tadjo does not represent memory merely as an act of preserving the past but as an ethical response to historical violence. Through survivor testimony, memorial spaces, writing, and the recovery of suppressed experiences, the narrative transforms witnessing into a form of resistance to historical erasure. Drawing on the scholarship of Pierre Nora and Paul Ricoeur on memory, the study finally argues that Tadjo locates the possibility of reconciliation in the confrontation of historical truth, the preservation of collective memory, and the rejection of inherited structures of Othering. The article therefore presents The Shadow of Imana as a text that connects the historical production of difference to the destruction of human relationships while also imagining memory and witnessing as foundations for the recovery of shared humanity.