Kinship ‘matters’: Continuity and change in children’s family relations across three generations in Rwanda

Studies of children and youth in Africa increasingly document fundamental changes in young people’s lived experience. However, most studies neglect to locate children’s experiences and actions within their broader historical, social and institutional context. Drawing from 10 consecutive months of historical and ethnographic fieldwork in Rwanda, this article examines how young people have reproduced and changed their kinship relationships across three generations as they live at the interface of multiple rule systems, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’