Nicki Hitchcott
Biographic Data
| ID | 218607 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicki Hitchcott |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicki |
| FAMILY NAME | Hitchcott |
| SIGNATURE | HITCHCOTT N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5416-8747 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Reclaiming Motherhood and Resisting Erasure in Belgian Colonial Rwanda: The Story of Perusi Kagaju
This article brings to light the overlooked experiences of Rwandan mothers of colonial Métis whose mixed-‘race’ children were forcibly removed under Belgian colonial rule and who remain largely absent from both public memory and feminist scholarship. Focusing on the life of Peruth (Perusi) Kagaju, a Rwandan mother whose two sons were taken without her consent and adopted by a white Belgian family, it explores how the Belgian colonial authorities …
Sammy Baloji, dir. L’Arbre de l’authenticité. 2025. 85 minutes. French and Dutch, with English subtitles. No price reported. Twenty Nine Studio.
Sammy Baloji, dir.L'Arbre de l'authenticité.2025.85 minutes.French and Dutch, with English subtitles.No price reported.Twenty Nine Studio."When will humans finally unlearn their quest for sovereignty?"So asks the 300-year-old Lileko tree at the end of Congolese artist and director, Sammy Baloji's award-winning film essay, L'Arbre de l'authenticité [The Tree of Authenticity].Starting with the discovery of a decaying collection of notebooks in the …
Telling stories that cannot be told: Remembering mothers and daughters in métis narratives from Rwanda
On the eve of independence in Ruanda-Urundi, hundreds of Métis children were taken from Catholic missions and flown to Belgium where they would be fostered, adopted, or sent to local boarding schools. These illegitimate children of white European fathers and Black African mothers were viewed by the colonial authorities as ‘children of sin’. Most of the Métis never saw their birth mothers again and remained illegitimate, unacknowledged by their wh…
Re-centring the Mothers of Rwanda's Abducted "Métis" Children
In April 2019, the Belgian prime minister publicly apologised for the segregation, deportation and forced adoption of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during Belgian colonial rule in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. Known as the “métis”, the children were rarely acknowledged by their white European fathers. The apology took place against a backdrop of increasing calls for accountability for colonial crimes…
Seeing the Genocide against the Tutsi through someone else’s eyes: Prosthetic memory and Hotel Rwanda
Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’ suggests that memories are not ‘owned’, that is they do not depend on lived experience, but rather they can occur as a result of an individual’s engagement with a mediated representation (e.g. a film, a museum, a TV series, a novel). One of the best-known mass cultural responses to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda is Terry George’s 2004 feature film, Hotel Rwanda . While the film was a…
Rwanda Since 1994: Stories of Change
Over the past 25 years, Rwanda has undergone remarkable shifts and transitions: culturally, economically, and educationally the country has gone from strength to strength. While much scholarship has understandably been retrospective, seeking to understand, document and commemorate the Genocide against the Tutsi, this volume gathers diverse perspectives on the changing social and cultural fabric of Rwanda since 1994. Rwandan Since 1994 considers t…
The (Un)Believable Truth about Rwanda
Since the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, a proliferation of fictional and non-fictional narratives has appeared, many of them claiming to represent the truth about what really happened in 1994. These include a small but significant number of Rwandan-authored novels which, this article suggests, invite the reader to accept what I call a “documentary pact”. While there is no single version of the truth about what happened in Rwanda, one of t…
I am Rwandan’: Unity and Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Drawing on a corpus of ten oral interviews with survivors and perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, we examine how the government’s policy of unity and reconciliation has shaped post-genocide identities and intergroup relations in local Rwandan communities. By focusing on the relationships between individuals and the national post-genocide narrative, we show how the socio-political context in Rwanda influences how people …
Visions of Civil War and Genocide in Fiction from Rwanda
On 1 October 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda in a military invasion that launched the Rwandan civil war. The RPA was the military wing of the opposition movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), composed mainly of Tutsi exiles who had previously fled Rwanda during the series of bloody pogroms that had taken place since the so-called Rwandan social revolution in 1959. 1 The RPF attacked President Ju…
Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994
During what has become officially known as the genocide against the Tutsi, as many as one million Rwandan people were brutally massacred between April and July 1994. This book presents a critical study of fictional responses by authors inside and outside Rwanda to the 1994 genocide. Focusing on a large and original corpus of creative writing by African authors, including writers from Rwanda, Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994 examines th…
Can people experience posttraumatic growth after committing violent acts
The concept of post-traumatic growth refers to the positive psychological changes that some people experience as a result of their struggle with highly stressful and often traumatic circumstances. Research into post-traumatic growth has typically focused on survivors of violent victimisation or other uncontrollable and tragic circumstances. However, emerging research into service members in the armed forces has shown that post-traumatic growth ca…
Francophone Afropean Literatures
What does Afro-Europe signify? This volume explores the concept and possibility of a black European community by analysing the ways in which contemporary Francophone African writers articulate and interrogate their complex relationships with European society, culture and history. Readers will discover the symbiotic ways in which Africa has transformed/been transformed (in/by) Europe and in turn how Africanness has (re)defined Europeanness. To thi…
Between Remembering and Forgetting: (In)Visible Rwanda in Gilbert Gatore's Le Passé devant soi
Nicki Hitchcott, Between Remembering and Forgetting: (In)Visible Rwanda in Gilbert Gatore's Le Passé devant soi, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 44, No. 2, (In)Visibility in African Cultures / Zoe Norridge, Charlotte Baker, and Elleke Boehmer, Guest Editors (Summer 2013), pp. 79-90
Benjamin Sehene vs Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka: The Fictional Trial of a Genocide Priest
The first francophone Rwandan novel published since the 1994 genocide, Benjamin Sehene's Le Feu sous la soutane (Fire Beneath the Cassock) is a fictional exploration of a Catholic priest's involvement in the genocide. Published in 2005, the novel is inspired by the true story of the infamous Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka who, despite indictments and a conviction for crimes against humanity including genocide and rape, lives and works with impunity…
Travels in Inhumanity: Véronique Tadjo's Tourism in Rwanda
Africans, particularly women, rarely assume the travel writer's gaze. The traveller is generally assumed to be white, Western and male. In 1998, Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo travelled to Rwanda with a group of other African writers to reflect upon and write about the 1994 genocide. This article focuses on L'Ombre d'Imana: voyages jusqu'au bout du Rwanda (2000), the travel narrative she published as a result of this trip. It analyses the ways in…
Writing on Bones: Commemorating Genocide in Boubacar Boris Diop's Murambi
During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an estimated 50,000 people were slaughtered at the Murambi technical school in Gikongoro province. The school buildings now house a memorial museum where the exhumed bodies of some of the victims are displayed in memory of the Rwandan genocide. Four years later, Boubacar Boris Diop visited Rwanda under the aegis of the Ecrire par devoir de memoire project. Diop's trip led to the publication of the novel Murambi: …
Emerging Perspectives on Aminata Sow Fall: The Real and the Imaginary in Her Novels , ed. Ada Uzoamaka Azodo
Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration
Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration
The most successful female writer from Francophone Africa, Calixthe Beyala occupies an unusual place in French literary and popular culture. Her novels are bestsellers and she appears regularly on French television, yet a conviction for plagiarism has tarnished her reputation. Thus, she is both an ‘authentic’ African author and a proven literary ‘fake’. This book considers representations of Beyala in the media, critical responses to her writing,…
Calixthe Beyala: Prizes, Plagiarism, and ?Authenticity
In 1996, Calixthe Beyala was twice accused of plagiarism. One of the accusations led to her being found guilty in the High Court in Paris. Pardoxically, in that same year she was awarded the highly prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie Française for one of the novels in which she had allegedly plagiarized. Focusing mainly on Beyala's responses to the allegations of 1996, this essay considers the consequences of what has become known as th…
Calixthe Beyala: Black face(s) on French TV
As president and spokeswoman of the French black rights movement, Collectif ÉgalitÉ, Cameroonian-born novelist Calixthe Beyala is committed to pushing for an improvement in the representation of black people on television in France. This article discusses the ways in which the Collectif has attempted to draw the French public's attention to the lack of 'visible minorities' on French TV. It takes as a test case the controversial figure of Beyala h…
Comment Cuisiner Son Mari à L'africaine: Calixthe Beyala's Recipes for Migrant Identity
Women Writers in Francophone Africa
The Politics of (M) Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature
Minh-ha Mother's Talk Charles Sugnet Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga's Feminist Reinvention of Fanon Ousseynou B. Traor'e Why the Snake-Lizard Killed His Mother: Inscribing and Decentering Nneka in Things Fall Apart, Peter Hitchcock The Eye and the Other: The Gaze and the Look in Egyptian Feminist Fiction Uzo Esonwanne Enlightenment Epistemology and Aesthetic Cognition: Mariama B^a's So Long a Letter Julianan Nfah-Abbenyi Calixthe Beyala's femme-…
African Francophone Writing: A Critical Introduction
Seeing the Genocide against the Tutsi through someone else’s eyes: Prosthetic memory and Hotel Rwanda
Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’ suggests that memories are not ‘owned’, that is they do not depend on lived experience, but rather they can occur as a result of an individual’s engagement with a mediated representation (e.g. a film, a museum, a TV series, a novel). One of the best-known mass cultural responses to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda is Terry George’s 2004 feature film, Hotel Rwanda . While the film was a…
I am Rwandan’: Unity and Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Drawing on a corpus of ten oral interviews with survivors and perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, we examine how the government’s policy of unity and reconciliation has shaped post-genocide identities and intergroup relations in local Rwandan communities. By focusing on the relationships between individuals and the national post-genocide narrative, we show how the socio-political context in Rwanda influences how people …
The (Un)Believable Truth about Rwanda
Since the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, a proliferation of fictional and non-fictional narratives has appeared, many of them claiming to represent the truth about what really happened in 1994. These include a small but significant number of Rwandan-authored novels which, this article suggests, invite the reader to accept what I call a “documentary pact”. While there is no single version of the truth about what happened in Rwanda, one of t…
Between Remembering and Forgetting: (In)Visible Rwanda in Gilbert Gatore's Le Passé devant soi
Nicki Hitchcott, Between Remembering and Forgetting: (In)Visible Rwanda in Gilbert Gatore's Le Passé devant soi, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 44, No. 2, (In)Visibility in African Cultures / Zoe Norridge, Charlotte Baker, and Elleke Boehmer, Guest Editors (Summer 2013), pp. 79-90
Calixthe Beyala: Black face(s) on French TV
As president and spokeswoman of the French black rights movement, Collectif ÉgalitÉ, Cameroonian-born novelist Calixthe Beyala is committed to pushing for an improvement in the representation of black people on television in France. This article discusses the ways in which the Collectif has attempted to draw the French public's attention to the lack of 'visible minorities' on French TV. It takes as a test case the controversial figure of Beyala h…
Re-centring the Mothers of Rwanda's Abducted "Métis" Children
In April 2019, the Belgian prime minister publicly apologised for the segregation, deportation and forced adoption of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during Belgian colonial rule in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. Known as the “métis”, the children were rarely acknowledged by their white European fathers. The apology took place against a backdrop of increasing calls for accountability for colonial crimes…
Benjamin Sehene vs Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka: The Fictional Trial of a Genocide Priest
The first francophone Rwandan novel published since the 1994 genocide, Benjamin Sehene's Le Feu sous la soutane (Fire Beneath the Cassock) is a fictional exploration of a Catholic priest's involvement in the genocide. Published in 2005, the novel is inspired by the true story of the infamous Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka who, despite indictments and a conviction for crimes against humanity including genocide and rape, lives and works with impunity…
Travels in Inhumanity: Véronique Tadjo's Tourism in Rwanda
Africans, particularly women, rarely assume the travel writer's gaze. The traveller is generally assumed to be white, Western and male. In 1998, Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo travelled to Rwanda with a group of other African writers to reflect upon and write about the 1994 genocide. This article focuses on L'Ombre d'Imana: voyages jusqu'au bout du Rwanda (2000), the travel narrative she published as a result of this trip. It analyses the ways in…
Writing on Bones: Commemorating Genocide in Boubacar Boris Diop's Murambi
During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an estimated 50,000 people were slaughtered at the Murambi technical school in Gikongoro province. The school buildings now house a memorial museum where the exhumed bodies of some of the victims are displayed in memory of the Rwandan genocide. Four years later, Boubacar Boris Diop visited Rwanda under the aegis of the Ecrire par devoir de memoire project. Diop's trip led to the publication of the novel Murambi: …
Calixthe Beyala: Prizes, Plagiarism, and ?Authenticity
In 1996, Calixthe Beyala was twice accused of plagiarism. One of the accusations led to her being found guilty in the High Court in Paris. Pardoxically, in that same year she was awarded the highly prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie Française for one of the novels in which she had allegedly plagiarized. Focusing mainly on Beyala's responses to the allegations of 1996, this essay considers the consequences of what has become known as th…
African Francophone Writing: A Critical Introduction
African Oedipus
Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa
African Francophone Writing: A Critical Introduction
Contents: L. Ibnlfassi and N. Hitchcott, Introduction -- Part I: North Africa -- A. Judge, The Institutional Framework of La Francophonie -- A. Hargreaves, Writers of Maghrebian Immigrant Origin in France: French, Francophone, Maghrebian or Beur? -- C. Owen, Points of View: Looking at the Other in Michel Tournier's La Goutte d'Or and Rachid Boudjedra's Topographie ideale pour une agression caracterise -- L. Ibnlfassi,Chraibi's Le Passe simple and…
The Politics of (M) Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature
Minh-ha Mother's Talk Charles Sugnet Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga's Feminist Reinvention of Fanon Ousseynou B. Traor'e Why the Snake-Lizard Killed His Mother: Inscribing and Decentering Nneka in Things Fall Apart, Peter Hitchcock The Eye and the Other: The Gaze and the Look in Egyptian Feminist Fiction Uzo Esonwanne Enlightenment Epistemology and Aesthetic Cognition: Mariama B^a's So Long a Letter Julianan Nfah-Abbenyi Calixthe Beyala's femme-…
African Francophone Writing: A Critical Introduction
Women Writers in Francophone Africa
Comment Cuisiner Son Mari à L'africaine: Calixthe Beyala's Recipes for Migrant Identity
Calixthe Beyala: Black face(s) on French TV
As president and spokeswoman of the French black rights movement, Collectif ÉgalitÉ, Cameroonian-born novelist Calixthe Beyala is committed to pushing for an improvement in the representation of black people on television in France. This article discusses the ways in which the Collectif has attempted to draw the French public's attention to the lack of 'visible minorities' on French TV. It takes as a test case the controversial figure of Beyala h…
Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration
The most successful female writer from Francophone Africa, Calixthe Beyala occupies an unusual place in French literary and popular culture. Her novels are bestsellers and she appears regularly on French television, yet a conviction for plagiarism has tarnished her reputation. Thus, she is both an ‘authentic’ African author and a proven literary ‘fake’. This book considers representations of Beyala in the media, critical responses to her writing,…
Calixthe Beyala: Prizes, Plagiarism, and ?Authenticity
In 1996, Calixthe Beyala was twice accused of plagiarism. One of the accusations led to her being found guilty in the High Court in Paris. Pardoxically, in that same year she was awarded the highly prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie Française for one of the novels in which she had allegedly plagiarized. Focusing mainly on Beyala's responses to the allegations of 1996, this essay considers the consequences of what has become known as th…
Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration
Travels in Inhumanity: Véronique Tadjo's Tourism in Rwanda
Africans, particularly women, rarely assume the travel writer's gaze. The traveller is generally assumed to be white, Western and male. In 1998, Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo travelled to Rwanda with a group of other African writers to reflect upon and write about the 1994 genocide. This article focuses on L'Ombre d'Imana: voyages jusqu'au bout du Rwanda (2000), the travel narrative she published as a result of this trip. It analyses the ways in…
Writing on Bones: Commemorating Genocide in Boubacar Boris Diop's Murambi
During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an estimated 50,000 people were slaughtered at the Murambi technical school in Gikongoro province. The school buildings now house a memorial museum where the exhumed bodies of some of the victims are displayed in memory of the Rwandan genocide. Four years later, Boubacar Boris Diop visited Rwanda under the aegis of the Ecrire par devoir de memoire project. Diop's trip led to the publication of the novel Murambi: …
Emerging Perspectives on Aminata Sow Fall: The Real and the Imaginary in Her Novels , ed. Ada Uzoamaka Azodo
Benjamin Sehene vs Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka: The Fictional Trial of a Genocide Priest
The first francophone Rwandan novel published since the 1994 genocide, Benjamin Sehene's Le Feu sous la soutane (Fire Beneath the Cassock) is a fictional exploration of a Catholic priest's involvement in the genocide. Published in 2005, the novel is inspired by the true story of the infamous Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka who, despite indictments and a conviction for crimes against humanity including genocide and rape, lives and works with impunity…
Between Remembering and Forgetting: (In)Visible Rwanda in Gilbert Gatore's Le Passé devant soi
Nicki Hitchcott, Between Remembering and Forgetting: (In)Visible Rwanda in Gilbert Gatore's Le Passé devant soi, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 44, No. 2, (In)Visibility in African Cultures / Zoe Norridge, Charlotte Baker, and Elleke Boehmer, Guest Editors (Summer 2013), pp. 79-90
Francophone Afropean Literatures
What does Afro-Europe signify? This volume explores the concept and possibility of a black European community by analysing the ways in which contemporary Francophone African writers articulate and interrogate their complex relationships with European society, culture and history. Readers will discover the symbiotic ways in which Africa has transformed/been transformed (in/by) Europe and in turn how Africanness has (re)defined Europeanness. To thi…
Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994
During what has become officially known as the genocide against the Tutsi, as many as one million Rwandan people were brutally massacred between April and July 1994. This book presents a critical study of fictional responses by authors inside and outside Rwanda to the 1994 genocide. Focusing on a large and original corpus of creative writing by African authors, including writers from Rwanda, Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994 examines th…
Can people experience posttraumatic growth after committing violent acts
The concept of post-traumatic growth refers to the positive psychological changes that some people experience as a result of their struggle with highly stressful and often traumatic circumstances. Research into post-traumatic growth has typically focused on survivors of violent victimisation or other uncontrollable and tragic circumstances. However, emerging research into service members in the armed forces has shown that post-traumatic growth ca…
Visions of Civil War and Genocide in Fiction from Rwanda
On 1 October 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda in a military invasion that launched the Rwandan civil war. The RPA was the military wing of the opposition movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), composed mainly of Tutsi exiles who had previously fled Rwanda during the series of bloody pogroms that had taken place since the so-called Rwandan social revolution in 1959. 1 The RPF attacked President Ju…
I am Rwandan’: Unity and Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Drawing on a corpus of ten oral interviews with survivors and perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, we examine how the government’s policy of unity and reconciliation has shaped post-genocide identities and intergroup relations in local Rwandan communities. By focusing on the relationships between individuals and the national post-genocide narrative, we show how the socio-political context in Rwanda influences how people …
Rwanda Since 1994: Stories of Change
Over the past 25 years, Rwanda has undergone remarkable shifts and transitions: culturally, economically, and educationally the country has gone from strength to strength. While much scholarship has understandably been retrospective, seeking to understand, document and commemorate the Genocide against the Tutsi, this volume gathers diverse perspectives on the changing social and cultural fabric of Rwanda since 1994. Rwandan Since 1994 considers t…
The (Un)Believable Truth about Rwanda
Since the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, a proliferation of fictional and non-fictional narratives has appeared, many of them claiming to represent the truth about what really happened in 1994. These include a small but significant number of Rwandan-authored novels which, this article suggests, invite the reader to accept what I call a “documentary pact”. While there is no single version of the truth about what happened in Rwanda, one of t…
Seeing the Genocide against the Tutsi through someone else’s eyes: Prosthetic memory and Hotel Rwanda
Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’ suggests that memories are not ‘owned’, that is they do not depend on lived experience, but rather they can occur as a result of an individual’s engagement with a mediated representation (e.g. a film, a museum, a TV series, a novel). One of the best-known mass cultural responses to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda is Terry George’s 2004 feature film, Hotel Rwanda . While the film was a…
Re-centring the Mothers of Rwanda's Abducted "Métis" Children
In April 2019, the Belgian prime minister publicly apologised for the segregation, deportation and forced adoption of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during Belgian colonial rule in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. Known as the “métis”, the children were rarely acknowledged by their white European fathers. The apology took place against a backdrop of increasing calls for accountability for colonial crimes…
History (15 works) · Art (14 works) · African history and culture studies (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts (9 works) · Genocide (8 works) · Literature (8 works)