Rwanda

I never posted this and feel I should share the photographs and thoughts of my few days in Rwanda.  Rwanda still lingers with me and is a beacon of hope, whilst also glares a flare of warning for future generations.


The Rwanda of 2011 offers so much more than the drama of "Hotel Rwanda" would allow your mind to anticipate. Seventeen years post-genocide. Rwanda. Seventeen years democracy. South Africa. The visit to Rwanda allowed me many reasons to compare the complex state of SA to a place that has found a positive groove post-conflict.  It's not really fair to compare the two, but that 17 mark is inevitable.  Rwanda is small and whilst it experienced an absolute wretched, traumatizing horror in one year - South Africa is many times the size in area and people and cultural diversity and she had over 40 years of slow, debilitating, and deliberate oppression and overhaul.

But for the eventual tourist, Rwanda escapes the African cliches.  Dirty.  No.  Unsafe.  No.  Untimely.  No.  Full of beggars.  No.  Chaotic.  No.  It was clean, well-ordered, traditional, deepest dark at night and still, safe and filled with the spiritual warmth of good people.

But the funny thing that still remains: prisoners dressed in pink serving out their sentence from local tribunal, Gacaca court hearings for certain genocide contributors.  It's a thin waft on the air, but they are there.  And the ghastly historical museum full of skulls...  Not to mention the issue of avoiding any attributions to the past "faux" cultures of Hutu and Tutsi.  Because if you know anything about Rwanda, you will know that the cultural divide of Hutu and Tutsi was based on colonial Belgian artifice. A brief understanding from Wikipedia states: 

The definitions of "Hutu" and "Tutsi" people may have changed through time and location. Social structures were not stable throughout Rwanda, even during colonial times under the Belgian rule. The Tutsi aristocracy or elite was distinguished from Tutsi commoners, and wealthy Hutu were often indistinguishable from upper-class Tutsi. When the European colonists conducted censuses, they wanted to identify the people throughout Rwanda-Burundi according to a simple classification scheme. They defined "Tutsi" as anyone owning more than ten cows (a sign of wealth) or with the physical feature of a longer nose, or longer neck, commonly associated with the Tutsi. A person could change from Hutu to Tutsi by obtaining enough cows to acquire the status. Full article here.

Now, to avoid future conflict, students, children, and youngsters, no longer reveal (or even know) their cultural identity.  This erasure of the past could come to haunt.

For now, Rwanda is on the up and up.  They are training their varsity students overseas and building their nation from the ground up.  They have resources and they are applying them to the correct channels, at least it seems for now.  It is stunningly beautiful and hilly.  They have the sweetest tea and most toxicly sinful hot sauce imaginable.  To plan for 2012 touring, certainly.  But for 2020, I'd say keep watch on the Truth and Reconciliation in this country.  It is not popular to present a dissenting voice in popular politics and I imagine that will take a long time to improve.