The first decades of the twenty-first century were very different from the manufacturing revolution of the twentieth, when whole new industries, such as making cars, televisions and a myriad of new household appliances, created huge numbers of new, well-paid, skilled jobs. Instead, recent times have been more like the early stages of the industrial revolution two centuries ago, when living standards and life expectancy both fell. Around twenty years ago we started sending emails instead of letters, following news online rather than buying newspapers, ordering goods online rather than going to high street shops. Following the hollowing out of the old industries from the 1980s onwards, well-paid careers in imposing factories, familiar shops, banks and traditional post offices ended up being replaced by low-paid jobs staffing anonymous call centres, packing online orders, delivering take-away meals and driving Amazon vans. Not quite the dark satanic mills of 200 years ago, but not glad confident morning either. Previous generations assumed that steady growth would ensure better lives for their children. That confidence has evaporated across Western Europe and North America.

The services sector has been the centrepiece of Rwanda’s development strategy since 2000. This chapter describes the evolution of the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s (RPF) goals of transforming its landlocked disadvantages into an opportunity through becoming land-linked. In particular, the goal involves Rwanda becoming a regional hub for transport, tourism, sports and finance. The chapter begins by providing a critical overview of services-based strategies, highlighting their merits and limitations. It then describes the contradictory tensions emerging within Rwanda’s services-based strategy, particularly because the progressive image the RPF attempts to portray is often at odds with domestic realities. The evolution of Rwanda’s tourism strategy is discussed, which focuses on attracting high-end tourists and transforming Kigali into a hub for transport, high-profile events and conferences. The chapter describes how services strategies have evolved in line with Rwanda’s political settlement: at first, providing opportunities to private Rwandan capitalists but then gradually relying on foreign investors and government-affiliated investors. The chapter highlights that Rwanda’s strategy failed to prioritise linkages, which is a result of the elite vulnerability shaping domestic state–business relationships.

This chapter explores the role of poetics in theorizing blackness. That is, if the question of being is an abiding issue in black studies and if that question figures through discourses about black writing, how does poetics contribute to this study? Rather than engage blackness as a content in poems, the chapter considers poetry as an intervention in language. This attentiveness to language characterizes a kind of thinking that is manifest in poetics and that generates possibilities for engaging the philosophical relationship between expressiveness and blackness.