RE Log - Fall 2023

20 Ransom Everglades LOG FALL 2023 Facing unacknowledged complexity One of the driving questions of Fiacre Bienvenu’s career as a scholar of politics emerged when he was just 14 years old. He and his family were Tutsi, an ethnic minority group in Rwanda who faced discrimination under the Hutu-led regime. Between April and July of 1994, between 500,000-662,000 Tutsi were killed suddenly, brutally, and en masse by Hutu gangs. Bienvenu lost several members of his immediate family. With his mother and his siblings, he managed to escape to a humanitarian camp run by U.N. peacekeeping forces, but the event would remain a formative trauma with difficult, irresolvable questions at its center. “What makes people build a strong social cohesion, and what breaks them away from whatever system they built for a long time?” said Bienvenu, now a humanities faculty member at Ransom Everglades who earned his PhD and taught at Florida International University. “I became interested in that after witnessing the destruction of the social fabric of Rwanda as a society – how one group, in an almost perfectly coordinated and ubiquitously executed collective consciousness, went after and butchered the other. What led up to that? These are people who we shared everything with. We understood each other. I still wrestle with that question.” After decades spent studying political theory, teaching at the college level, and working for NGOs, Bienvenu still doesn’t have a satisfactory answer. But he does have a unique appreciation for irresolvable social and political problems – the kind for which no one explanation will ever be sufficient. Africa is defined by such complexities, and they are at the center of Advanced African Politics, a first-year offering at Ransom Everglades. “The way an African thinks, imagines, and conceives of the world is actually built from complexity,” Bienvenu said. “There is a lot of material for our intellectually curious students to understand that.” Advanced African Politics represents a new kind of humanities course in several ways. First of all, like Advanced American Studies, it is a completely home-grown, year-long, 500-level seminar – not based on any AP, nor even based on any particular college course. It is the product of Bienvenu’s own knowledge and experience of the region, as well as his political science expertise. It is also the first politics course in RE history that focuses exclusively on Africa, a continent often flattened and disregarded by Western media and political scholarship. “Africa is not this peripheral place which we tend to think of in a more caricatured way, as the museum of misery in the great chain of human evolution and change,” Bienvenu said. “There’s actually agency to the people of Africa.” Early projects in the course are allowing students to confront those misconceptions head-on – first by conducting interviews in which they gauge what the average American knows and thinks about Africa, and then by exploring the many ways in which what we tend to think of as “Western” history was shaped by African influence. Middle school students enjoy RE’s new Virtual Reality course under faculty member Pedro Silva