On a recent Sunday after lunchtime, I turned off the television and, along with thousands of other souls, lined up on the streets near the Rwandan Parliament. We were there for the annual “Walk to Remember,” to commemorate 25 years since the genocide against the Tutsis.
We wore black T-shirts marked “Kwibuka 25,” or “Remembrance 25.” We were a diverse group, which is both a testimony of what has been achieved by the post-genocide Rwanda and a unique human spectacle. “It sounds unreal, yet true,” let out a reporter. Rwanda has become a beacon of unity and integration. President Paul Kagame’s government’s vision of rebuilding “One Rwanda” where people live and form a nation together, killers and survivors, is an extraordinary achievement. I cannot remember any precedent for it in modern human history.
Beginning in April 1994 more than 800,000 people — mostly Tutsi men, women, and children — were methodically hunted down and brutally murdered in just 100 days. The world stood by and watched and let the bloodbath happen.
To bring culprits of the genocide to justice, the United Nations has conducted over 70 tribunal cases. Rwanda’s courts have tried up to 20,000 individuals, and the country’s popular Gacaca courts have managed some 1.2 million additional cases. Amazingly, Tutsis and Hutus, survivors and former killers, now live side by side.
Two things move me to write this: Rwandans ought to hold firm to their reconciliation. And other African nations, like my home country of Nigeria, have a lot to learn from them. Many authors have written that the Rwandan model should be praised with caution; that it is still early to consider it really a success; that generations must first pass. But living in Rwanda, I can assure you that the more generations pass, the more a young generation of Rwandans, who did not experience the genocide, will move on together. In pursuing the “One Rwanda” dream, they will prove wrong those who call this unity transient and a “government imposition.”
The most difficult job was breaking with the massacre and vengeance, and restoring national order. That has been beautifully achieved.
In the nineteenth century, English explorer John Hanning Speke wrote The Discovery of the Source of the Nile. In it, he cooked up the idea of two racial groups, the Bantu Hutus and the Nilotic Tutsis. This was known as the Hamitic hypothesis. Speke described on the one hand the flat-nosed, flat-lipped negro, and then on the other waxed euphoric about the supposedly superior, Aryan-looking Ethiopic types. This view became influential. Speke’s theory became, in many ways, the underpinning of all the theories that were used by the Belgians to divide Rwanda when they ruled it as a colony in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, it came to influence Rwandan peasants in the hills as they killed their neighbors in 1994.
Are there no lessons for the rest of Africa and the world? Was it just another national event in Rwanda? A history in the making? Another laying of new wreathes?
In South Sudan, the United Kingdom has said that the violence “is now a genocide” that is being perpetrated along tribal lines. In Cameroon, the crackdown on English-speaking minority has over the past two years spurred violence along a linguistic split and brought Cameroon to the brink of civil war; in South Africa, xenophobia remains entrenched, with many South Africans requesting that foreigners return to their home countries. In Nigeria, the recent presidential elections again reveal a country split along ethnic and religious lines, added to the mayhem of Boko Haram in the north and the Fulani herdsmen in the Middle Belt. In Mali, al Qaeda, tribal rivalries, and banditry have brought misery to the north.
When will the leadership of these countries inspire their citizens, like Rwandans, to say: “It’s our obligation, it’s our duty, it’s our necessity, it’s the only way we can survive and we will forgive always?”
As I take part in the 25th Remembrance, I recall Gourevitch saying somewhere in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Rwanda: “Maybe, if you’re reading this in the future – five, or ten or 50 years from now – you’ll be taking this book with you as you plan your vacation in Rwanda.” People are actually reading his book as they arrive here on holiday and, yes, Rwanda is one of the safest countries in the world.
Kevin Eze is a Nigerian writer and author of “The Peacekeeper’s Wife.”
