In a rural village outside Rwanda’s capital city, Kigali, about 3,000 people are arrayed on a steep, rubbly dirt road. They’re working loose sand and gravel into the road’s deep, wheel-swallowing holes, making the path smooth, their shovels and picks swaying almost in unison. They are all working for free, yet the vibe is far from penal. The workers are chatting happily with one another, pausing to laugh and shake hands.
This is Umuganda, a centuries-old cultural practice in which Rwandans join together to work — and to listen to political speeches — from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. on the last Saturday of each month, in gatherings of varying size in cities and villages nationwide. A mainstay of precolonial Rwanda, Umuganda is now state policy in the tiny East African nation. Every household must provide one worker from age 18 to 65 for public-service initiatives such as tree planting, weeding and other forms of tidying.
Umuganda, a new documentary from the 26-year-old filmmaker Zion Sulaiman Mukasa Matovu, is an unwavering 57-minute paean to the monthly ritual. Tranquil in spirit and visually beautiful, it argues that Umuganda has been central to Rwanda’s remarkable renaissance by fortifying both esprit de corps and infrastructure. In 1994 the nation’s majority Hutus killed about 800,000 of its 7 million people in a genocide, most of them members of the Tutsi minority. Today, Rwanda is a clean and orderly country with a rapidly growing gross domestic product and a population of more than 14 million.
In the film, one Rwandan after another delivers testimonials with hushed reverence. An unnamed mother speaks of finding the “courage” to go to Umuganda when she thinks of “a neighbor who needs me” and of “how my children need a paved road while going to school.”
“Whoever does it will benefit,” one young man says.
Although Umuganda is the subject, the star of the film is Paul Kagame, a one-time Tutsi general who became Rwanda’s president in 2000. Kagame is still in office today, having won 99.2% of the vote in the 2024 election. In his 26 years in power, he’s been reelected three times, never with less than 93% of the vote, having essentially outlawed political opposition. Critics of the president have accused him of transforming the country through a combination of ruthless efficiency and a relentless crackdown on dissent.
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A 2024 review of Rwanda’s human rights record by the US State Department cites “significant” human rights issues, including unlawful killings, arbitrary arrest and censorship. Kagame has also long been accused of fueling conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, which has killed and displaced millions over the course of decades. Rwanda-backed rebels, along with Rwandan soldiers, have been accused of gross human rights abuses including extrajudicial killing and rape. Rwanda has denied any killings and says it plays no role in the Congo conflict.
Rail-thin, with a gentle speaking manner, Kagame, who’s now 68, is presented as Umuganda’s wise and beneficent captain. When he came into office, Mukasa says, “Umaganda was dead.” The Hutus had used its postwork rallies to build support for their genocidal slaughter. But Kagame was looking for ways to heal, and in 2009 he made Umuganda attendance mandatory. “Now,” Mukasa says, “Umuganda is rebuilding our country.”
In the film, Kagame tells a crowd, “If people work together as a team, they achieve more.” He wields a shovel (in dress shoes, no less) and waves grandly to admirers. The last line of the film is his: “We are not trying to survive. We are trying to live, and living has standards.”
Like his president, Mukasa is a slender and soft-spoken Tutsi. He wears designer glasses and a stylish black wrist watch and sports a goatee and tattoos. He was born in neighboring Uganda and relocated to his mother’s homeland when he was 18. Growing up, he regarded her stories about Umuganda as “unreal.” He wondered, “How can an entire nation stop what they are doing to dig and clean and plant trees when nobody is forcing them?”
When he settled in Rwanda in 2018, Mukasa was a budding filmmaker, having already studied the art form in both India and Uganda. He enrolled in Kigali’s IBTC Film School and made mostly thrillers and horror films. Gradually, he tuned in to the genocidal “pain that Rwandans went through and are still going through.” In 2025 he produced a documentary, Beyond the Genocide, featuring interviews with survivors. That film has screened in Israel, Germany and France, and Mukasa says that working on it led him to think about “the tools survivors use in order to heal and regain who they are. Umuganda was one of the strongest.”
Big Umuganda projects often happen in Rwanda’s remote, under-resourced hinterlands. On a recent Saturday, Mukasa and I drove half an hour out of downtown Kigali and onto rain-ravaged dirt roads. During the three hours of Umuganda, the roads are often eerily empty. Driving is forbidden, and the ban is so strictly enforced that “sometimes you will see a group of mototaxi drivers stopped by the police, weeding flower beds,” Mukasa says.
After quitting time in Jali, one of the city’s 35 administrative sectors, workers in cast-off American T-shirts flooded the streets bearing shovels that clanked on the road as they walked. They made their way to the courtyard of Cream Land Academy, a grade school, for an hourlong community pep rally organized by the Jali government. Residents gathered under tents, on the playground and in the school’s two levels of al fresco corridors.
A police chief spoke in Kinyirwanda, along with numerous local leaders; each speaker hailed the assembled throngs as “Intore,” or warriors. The villagers, so praised, raised their arms in uproarious assent and engaged in an intricate call and response. They referred to Kagame as “the supreme coach.” Later, when one speaker proclaimed, “A chosen one does not complain,” the congregation responded, “They look for solutions.”
Another speaker explained that morning’s work was part of a larger scheme: to maintain 15 feeder roads leading to a silky, half-finished 4.5-kilometer (2.8-mile) paved road that’s already brought public transit to four villages and will soon bring it to three more. Another speaker delved into social commentary, opining, “We have a problem of youth who don’t understand what it means to be clean.” The meeting ended with upbeat music pouring over the loudspeakers, and the multitudes danced.
As we drove away along the dirt roads and then into the heart of Kigali, we passed Kagame’s vast walled residence. “Sometimes in the evening,” Mukasa says fondly, “you can see him out walking with his family.” I noted that in the US, presidents can only serve for two terms. With the very calmness that pervades Umuganda, Mukasa explained why Rwandans don’t want their leader to leave: “Young people here grew up being told that their mothers and fathers could be dead. And they are not dead. If President Kagame is the one who saved your mother, if you have a home because of him, you will love him.”
Bill Donahue is a writer in New Hampshire. His book, Unbound , is about endurance sports.