Hundreds of Photographs of victims are displayed inside the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Gisozi- Kigali City, Rwanda. PHOTO | FILE | NMG
No African country invokes as much passion and divides opinion as Rwanda. Many people in Africa and the rest of the world think it is proof that miracles are possible and that the continent can reach for and touch the sky. In some places in the world, President Paul Kagame is feted like a rock star.
On the flip side, several also think Rwanda is some kind of little evil empire ruled by an iron-fisted former guerrilla leader, which they accuse of building its fortune from plundering its mineral-rich neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo which is 95 times its size.
Bashing President Kagame and his ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), and genocide denial, have become what from Kigali is seen as a small thriving cottage industry, especially in parts of western Europe, North America and Francophone Africa.
President Kagame is mostly a practical man who tends to think and act like an engineer, but he often plunges into philosophical introspection.
Reflecting on Rwanda’s place in the world, the untiring efforts of the genocide deniers, and the critics of its development and political model, in October 2021 he asked: “I always wonder if we hadn’t made progress or if we had not survived at all, what would be the criticism today?”
30th anniversarry
As it marks the 30th anniversary of the Genocide against the Tutsi in which nearly one million people were killed by the majority Hutu extremist militia and state army, it’s remarkable just how much Rwanda has survived.
But also, that it is its biggest sin; that it survived. It cheated the African disaster playbook. There is a view that holds that civilisations whose image of their success is partly constructed on their being superior to black and African peoples, had to scramble to explain this, one of the few exceptions.
I was among a small group of journalists who covered the return-to-the-motherland campaign by the RPF/RPA when they launched it from Uganda in October 1990, through its highs and lows, to victory, and after. A few weeks before the shooting of President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane over Kigali, sparking the major phase of the genocide on April 7, 1994, I interviewed President Kagame at his bush headquarters in northern Rwanda.
Weeks earlier, the peace agreement between the Rwanda government in Kigali, and the RPF, known as the Arusha Accords named after the Tanzanian city where they were inked, had been signed and early steps were being taken towards establishing a new national unity government.
He was sceptical that the extremists in Habyarimana’s government, who saw the Accords as capitulation and humiliation would see it through. However, he mostly spoke at some length and worryingly about ongoing massacres of Tutsis and opposition Hutu, wondering how much of the country would be left if the killings didn’t stop.
He didn’t have long to wait for the answer. In the orgy of murder that followed over the next 100 days, some RPA commanders and RPF officials would wonder what kind of creature a Rwanda inhabited by Hutu and Tutsi would be. RPF hardliners were clear; the solution was to have separate Tutsi and Hutu states.
RPF won the war
Looking over the ruins after the RPF won the war in July 1994, in a country where the smell of decomposing bodies hung heavy in the air, it seemed both Rwandas were not possible. But the hilly nation saved its best surprising act for last; it emerged like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes.
Thirty years later, there are bright feathers in Rwanda’s cap that can’t be denied. It has the world’s largest share of women in its parliament, at nearly 62 percent. It has the highest proportion of female civil servants in the world. It’s one of the few countries in Africa where state-funded public schools outclass private ones by a mile.
It’s one of Africa’s least corrupt countries. It has ranked the 7th most effective government globally by the World Economic Forum. It consistently topped East Africa in the World Bank’s now-discontinued Ease of Doing Business rankings.
It gets low scores in democracy and freedom rankings but makes the case that its controlled political model is the best way to keep the genocide demons at bay, and the RPF is one of the world’s largest and inclusive ruling coalitions, with seven other parties. The capital Kigali is one of the cleanest and safest cities in Africa.
Yet, to appreciate how far Rwanda has climbed out of the grave is to look beyond those scores. The notably thoughtful and even-handed Jean-Paul Kimonyo, currently regional director at Levy Mwanawasa Centre for Democracy and Good Governance in Lusaka, Zambia, is one of Rwanda’s most important intellectuals today.
Author of “Transforming Rwanda: Challenges on the Road to Reconstruction”, and “Rwanda’s Popular Genocide: A Perfect Storm”, he argues that the collapse of Rwanda didn’t happen in 1994 with the genocide, or start in 1990 when the RPF launched its armed struggle.
Writing in the Rwandan paper The New Times on July 7, 2015, in an article titled “A strong man building strong institutions in a weak society?” he wrote of famines in which thousands of Rwandans were dying. By 1990 it had fallen to the poorest country in the world.
And perhaps most shocking, “After a long period of increase, in 1984 life expectancy dropped sharply to reach 33 years in 1990. This was the lowest rate ever recorded in Africa since 1960, lower than any country at war or even a failed state.”
To come away from that, to where it is today, he said, shows just how much the country made “a more miraculous recovery than you may think”.
When the RPF took power in 1994, it had more doctors in its rebel ranks than the country that it had seized control of. With Mauritius and Ghana, today it has one of Africa’s most extensive national health coverage, at over 96 per cent, almost double Ghana’s. Nearly 95 per cent of Rwanda women give birth in a hospital or health centre.
From 2000 to 2011 the absolute number of child deaths per year fell by 62.8 percent, despite the population increasing by 35.1 percent. Rwanda’s average annual rate of reduction in child mortality of 11.1 per cent for that period was the world’s highest.
From 30 years of life expectancy in the aftermath of the genocide, last year it stood at 69.6 years, the highest in the East African Community.
It has bred a citizenry that knows no pain. Away from the solemn events marking the genocide (Kwibuka), the rest of especially young middle class Rwandans go about their happy lives in benign oblivion of the genocide tragedy.
I was in Rwanda during the Kwibuka in 2022, and with a journalist friend, we went to a place where there were hundreds of young people. They were celebrating wildly without a care in the world.
“These young people don’t dwell on the genocide. They were born after it, and some of them don’t care. Some of the best of them can’t imagine that this city and country, were once hell”.
To many of them, Kagame is not the president. He is a demi-god, and they proceed on the basis that he will always be there to take care of business. The elders worry that forgetting the lessons of the genocide makes repeating the mistakes that led to it in the future almost inevitable.
At the RPF Congress in February where he was nominated as its candidate in the July election, President Kagame, who has been president since 2000, made his most forceful call yet for the party to choose a successor, to avoid the less palatable alternative of him imposing one on them. Many could be comforted in his continued presence, but he clearly is looking at the door.
So, Rwanda is today at a place where, of the many things he and the RPF have bequeathed, the most unusual and unexpected might be the freedom for so many of the country’s young people to live their lives without the genocide being its soundtrack.
Commemoration
For one week from April 7, flags will fly at half to begin the 30th three-month-long commemoration of the genocide. The flag, blue, yellow, green, and yellow sun with 24 rays representing enlightenment, was adopted, together with a new anthem, in October 2001. It replaced the previous one, a red-yellow-green tricolour with a large black letter “R”, which was tainted by the genocide.
It was launched at a ceremony in Amahoro Stadium in Kigali, a modest open-air facility with a troubled past. Many times in history people had been killed by the state there. During the genocide, thousands of survivors sought sanctuary in the stadium, which was guarded by a besieged United Nations Peacekeeping force.
The Rwandan army regularly bombed the stadium, and on April 19 killed 60 people there.
That old stadium wouldn’t recognise what sits there today. It has been pimped into a swanky, glittering, and covered stadium and later in the year will host the Veteran Clubs World Championship. Over 150 legends of world football, including Brazil’s Ronaldhino, England’s Michael Owen, and Cameroon’s Roger Milla, will rock up to show the little magic that is still left in their legs.
Amahoro Stadium could just be the best summary of post-genocide Rwanda told by one place.
