The time is 11:45hrs, 20th October, 2016.
I’m writing this piece from a cold hotel room in central Kigali, Rwanda which has been my home for almost a week now.
Across the road one is able to see at close range the iconic and world famous Hotel des Mille Collines from where the equally famous blockbuster movie – Hotel Rwanda was shot.
As an African country Rwanda clearly has an amazing story to tell the world. This is a tiny country that a little over twenty years ago was in the middle of genocidal madness that shocked the world.
The human tragedy in Rwanda exposed not only the helplessness and impotence of the world against mankind’s crude and base instincts but also a cold detachment in the face of man’s heartless brutality and barbarism against his very own.
If the movie Hotel Rwanda is not all fiction it was here at Hotel des Mille Collines that 1200 souls were saved as the other million was being butchered across the country.
Where was God, one might ask when all the madness gripped Rwanda leading to over a million deaths of innocent people within a week of savagery and unmitigated bloodbath.
Kigali is an immensely beautiful and attractive city with a remarkably beautiful scenery and infinitely kind-hearted people. Which is perhaps why it is all the more puzzling just how these same people were able to kill over a million of their countrymen in a wave of genocidal savagery with which the world conscience is unlikely ever to come to terms.
But for all the country’s difficult recent history Rwanda is clearly on a path to reconciliation.
That path will be long and infinitely difficult.
Yet already positive signs are beginning to show.
The streets for example are remarkably clean and well kept, even better so than in Namibia, a country which until this week was the neatest African country to exist in my mind.
Rwandese public services are efficient.
Public transport easily compares with the best in Europe.
Infrastructure is way above Africa’s average
And service, especially in restaurants will match many of countries in south East Asia.
Botswana often attracts accolades for massive investments in public infrastructure.
Rwanda is significantly ahead of us.
And this does not only apply to their roads which by the way do not have potholes but also to a fast and functional internet broadband.
Citizens of Rwanda say the Genocide left all the public infrastructure they had at the time completely decimated. After the genocide the country had to start afresh, so to speak. Twenty years down the line the pace at which the country has been able to mount a comeback is breathtaking.
But still for all their achievements the genocide continues to loom this nation’ psyche. That moment casts a dark shadow which from the peoples behaviour many do not really know how to face up to it.
Genocide is for the Rwandese still a clearly difficult topic the mere mention of which still stifles every conversation especially when brought up by us the outsiders.
It is not clear whether that is so because genocide is a word that the Rwandese want to erase from their vocabulary or it is because the word fills them with so much guilt and a sense of shame that they’d rather not mention it by name.
Professor Anastase Shyaka, a key figures in the Government of Rwanda tells us that the word Rwanda means a very big land with a thousand smiles and a million opportunities. A bizarre irony indeed. Just where were the smiles during a week of madness that led to a million innocent lives perishing?
There is no underplaying the fact that since the genocide of 1994 Rwanda has made big strides in its process of reconciliation.
To say there is still a long way to go is to understate the debased levels to which this country had sunk.
Yet there is no way ven a visitor could miss the fact that institutions of governance in this country are functional.
Botswana often receives delegations from across Africa that descend on our country to learn from us on many aspects of governance.
Our government shoot seriously consider sending a high level delegation to Kigali to learn how this country has so quickly been able to put up such massive infrastructure even as it was at the same time just rising out of the ashes.
As Batswana we often overplay our humility and modesty, yet we see nothing wrong exaggerating our place in Africa’s rankings.
It is a paradox that is very much a result of our innate but subtle snobishness as a people to which we never want to own up.
For example Rwanda is so clearly ahead of us. Yet this is something that we can ever accept.
Another thing worth talking about for the Rwandese is personal discipline.
In Rwanda there are no state enforced alcohol related curfews. Yet I have not come across people imbibing in the streets – a commonplace eyesore in our country despite a rigorously enforced alcohol regiment.
If it doesn’t make me envious, Rwanda makes me motivated that Africa can work.
I have asked Joseph Ailonga, a colleague from Namibia what in his view lies behind Rwandans impeccable success story. “Political will,” Ailonga has said as a matter of fact. And I cannot agree with him more.
Ethnicity and tribalism are the twin evils that Africa has to fight – and fight to win. Rwanda has especially learnt the hard way what happens when simmering embers of ethnicity and tribalism are left unaddressed for far too long.
In that regard Rwanda is an irrefutable proof of the fact that humanity’s excesses know no bounds.
It is exactly because of those human excesses and the resulting emotional and psychological scars that the country today finds its public discourse contaminated by an epochal division of pre and post Genocide that that though unwanted still permeates every public conversation.
A visit earlier during the day to the Kigali Genocide Memorial left many of us misty-eyed by stories of mass atrocities of man against man narrated by survivors.
From those stories it is clear that genocide has irreversibly snatched away a sense of innocence from many Rwandese children.
We observed a minute of silence as our head of delegation laid a wreath at the site of close to 300 000 unmarked mass graves, a tiny proportion of such similar graves spread across this country.
That painful moment drove home and equally painful truth that a wealth of diamonds such as Botswana’s or a beautiful scenery such as Rwandans means absolutely nothing to a section of the population if that part of the population feels deliberately marginalised by public policy.
