Scholarship on youth in Africa has mostly focused on unemployed young people, portraying them as a lost generation and exploring how states have failed them. Literature on young employed Africans has been conspicuously absent. This research portrays how a group of young professional Rwandans who define themselves as “diaspora” living in post-genocide Kigali, are redefining national belonging in economic terms. Many young professionals have moved from the diaspora to Rwanda because the state offers them a platform where they can find employment or start their own business: an entrepreneurial citizenship. The city of Kigali is experiencing physical and social transformation, and these young professionals are driving such change. The young people in this study see Rwanda as a place where they can belong by being cosmopolitan, and especially by becoming entrepreneurs. They feel that in Rwanda they are able to be global citizens more easily than in the Diaspora. This feeling of global citizenship is, ironically, what inspires in them a sense of national identity. This research explores the youth in the broader sense of economic activity and time and their sense of belonging in everyday life, in the capital city of Kigali.

After the Rwandan genocide in 1994 which irrefutably imposed itself as a reference in history, many books (researches and fiction) were published exposing varied opinions and views. It is an important source which is studied by different fields of knowledge, such as linguistics, literary studies, sociology, psychology and politics. Our study aimed to analyse ties between post-genocide fictional novels on Rwanda and the history of Rwanda. The main objectives of this dissertation (La réécriture de l’histoire du Rwanda à travers la littérature post-génocide. Etude de cas de trois romans africains d’expression française) are to study how knowledge of the history can help to understand these narratives and how these narratives can shed new light on history. In order to analyse this, we did a case study of three representative novels from Francophone Africa which we analysed confronting them to some historical sources. The novels are: - Ndwaniye, Joseph, (2007), La Promesse faite à ma soeur. Bruxelles: Les impressions nouvelles; - Monénembo,Tierno, (2000), L'Aîné des orphelins. Paris: Seuil, and - Diop, Boubacar Boris, (2000), Murambi, le livre des ossements. Paris: Stock. This study is a literary analysis and used a qualitative research method though an interpretive paradigm. As a main output and an answer to one of our research questions about common points between the post-genocide literature on Rwandan and the History of Rwanda, we discovered that in fact by the treatment of time and other writing processes used by the writers, they actually rewrote six important periods in the history of Rwanda: Pre-colonial absolute monarchy, the colonialism, the first and second Republics, the genocide and the post-genocide. These periods are clearly represented in the three novels, even if this may not be the intension of the writer and may be independent to his point of view on history. Matching the present with the past helps to revisit history. It shows how the historical context plays an important role in understanding post-genocide literature on Rwanda, and seen that this literature is discussing the genocide, it ends up delivering some points of view which are important for historians. This may assist in using literature for historical purposes and vice-versa. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.