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Whenever the torpor and not infrequent sense of hopelessness in Tanzania seemed to be wearing us down, people would tell us “Go to Rwanda.” So we did, for five days over a long Easter weekend. Unfortunately, the blog has backed up a little, so I’m going to release several entries at once so you can read them as a whole, if you wish. I’ll post the individual entries in reverse order — each with a photo or two — so they can be read from the top of the page down.
The bottom line: Rwanda is an extraordinary place. Its contrast to Tanzania is particularly striking, but it is extraordinary on its own merits too. It deserves attention and respect. I can see why, after the 1994 genocide, people asked whether a country the size of Maryland crammed with 10 million people divided artificially into two groups, one of which had just tried to exterminate the other, could even function as a nation. Now the only question is whether it can sustain its remarkable progress and mature into a de facto, and not just de jure, democracy. People kept telling us that even on a short visit we would pick up on a sense of purpose and direction, and they were right. The economy is among the fastest-growing in the world. The ambitious president, Paul Kagame, is trying unapologetically to copy East Asia, where entire countries grew themselves out of deep poverty in a generation — even if civil liberties were not always the top priority. Surely none of its neighbors would trade their pasts for Rwanda, but they are jealous of its present and future.
Don’t get me wrong — there is still much appalling poverty and unhappiness here. But you can tell there is also a critical mass of people here who are determined to redeem themselves in the eyes of the world. Buildings are going up everywhere. The government focuses relentlessly on development goals it has set for 2020. There is a sparkling new science and technology university in Kigali, a massive program to clear up land titles and facilitate property privatization, plans for a major new airport and even a small government program to train business people to improve customer service. Corruption appears to be much less endemic than in neighboring countries, red tape substantially less thick. And the genocide seems, on balance, to be dealt with in as healthy a way as is possible under the circumstances. It does not come up constantly but neither is it ignored or glossed over. There is a very impressive and dignified monument and museum in Kigali, and in nearly every town there are memorials and signs of the “Never Again” variety. The day we departed was the national holiday marking the 16th anniversary of the start of the genocide, and all of Kigali seems to come to a halt. In the countryside we drove quickly past an open-air “Gacaca” trial — the citizen courts, set apart from the formal legal system, where accused genocide perpetrators continue to stand trial before their local communities. A few senior members of the village, clad in an official sash, sat at a table in an open field, the defendant in a chair beside them, and a few rows of village residents and witnesses facing them. The number of genocide perpetrators would have overwhelmed the regular criminal justice system, so these community-based courts have been set up instead. Despite some initial misgivings, outside observers have praised the system as a generally successful way to bring healing and accountability. (Meanwhile, the alleged organizers of the genocide are very slowly being brought to trial down the road from us here in Moshi, in Arusha, Tanzania, at the International Criminal Tribunal).
And yet, for all these positives, Rwanda is still an unsettling place to visit. It is not just that it remains extremely poor, but also that the history is hard to escape and rears its head at odd moments. In the streets of Kigali and along roads in the countryside, you notice yet another person walking with a limp. Severe eye injuries are eerily common. Many of Rwanda’s virtues have a creepy flip side: Kigali is extremely clean, in the grocery store attendants wash down the shopping carts after every use, and plastic bags are illegal. But the more you read about the genocide the more you latch on to a variant of that same obsession with cleanliness and purification — the Tutsis called “cockroaches” who must be “cleaned away” on the hate-filled radio stations that provided the only source of news for many citizens and whipped the Hutu militias into action (a potential lesson in what can happen when people get their news from only one source, and in the power of journalism to fuel conspiracy theories). In short, to visit Rwanda is to wonder how the cultural DNA that made all this remarkable progress and energy possible is the same cultural DNA that made all of that possible, too.
