“Teacher, do you think I have a bright future?” - Anxiety and uncertainty in a Rwandan Catholic Secondary Boarding and Day School

This thesis offers an ethnographic account of the lives of a handful of Rwandan twelve to fifteen-year-olds over their first two years as students at a Catholic-led, public secondary boarding school on the outskirts of Kigali. The wider context is Rwanda as both a post-conflict state, in which schooling is thought of as a tool for shaping collective memories and constructing a shared civic identity in the name of ‘reconciliation’; and as a developmental state, in which schooling intends to make young people useful human capital for accomplishing national development goals. The focus of the thesis is on how the young Rwandans in the study (re)interpret and appropriate the discourses they encounter in the school and beyond as they perform their identities and imagine their futures. Told in the students’ own words, with particular attention to the creative production of alternative (non-elite) discourses at grass-roots, the thesis tells a story of anxiety and uncertainty as students struggle to navigate the many ambiguities in their lives and to truly believe the government’s promise of a bright future