Romeo & Juliet In Rwanda: How A Soap Opera Sought To Change A Nation

In 1994, the Hutu-led government of Rwanda led a systematic campaign to wipe out members of the Tutsi minority. At first, the people participating were tied to the government—military leaders, local mayors and police. But soon, thousands of ordinary people were encouraged or bullied into taking part in the killing. Shopkeepers and farmers, fathers and husbands slaughtered their own friends and neighbors, using basic farm tools like hoes and machetes. Often they killed in broad daylight, in the most public of settings, like churches, hospitals, and even schools.

By the time the Rwandan Patriotic Front defeated the Hutu government, just 100 days after the mass executions began, the country was in ruins. As many as one million people were dead, including about three quarters of the Tutsi population.

For Ervin Staub, a Jewish psychologist who had narrowly escaped the Holocaust in Hungary some 50 years earlier, it all seemed eerily familiar. A genocide had unfolded, and yet again, the world had sat on its hands and done nothing. And now, after a lifetime of studying genocide and how to work toward reconciliation, Ervin felt he had to act. He wanted to know, how do you convince people who once slaughtered each other to join hands and make peace? Is it possible to change a person's deepest beliefs?

His answer would take him to the Rwandan capital of Kigali. There, with a team of Rwandans, they would try an unusual social experiment on a national scale: a radio soap opera.

Additional Resources:

The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Conflict, by Ervin Staub, 1989

Musekeweya is produced by Radio La Benevolencija, an NGO that works in Rwanda to help with post-genocide reconciliation, and to build a more tolerant country.

Reducing Intergroup Prejudice and Conflict Using the Media:A Field Experiment in Rwanda by Betsy Levy Paluck, 2009 [Copyright 2020 NPR]