The weighty wheel of liberation rumbles on in Rwanda, if slowly, relentlessly. From the skies or from any of the mountaintops dotting the borders of this land, when you cast your eyes at its ‘physique’, Rwanda is a transformed country, and yet a country in a permanent state of transformation.
You see the morning mist wafting lazily in the valleys, decidedly but gently contrasting with the soils of the swamps, hillsides and hilltops that are busily nourishing the sprouting life-seekers (plants and animals, including humans). The lakes are sleepily breastfeeding the land, while the rivers swiftly fill up a depleted lake here, and relieve an over-laden one there, occasionally overdoing it and losing its precious waters and soils to the outside. Sometimes the skies chip in with a donor-gift when the lakes and rivers face impending hunger, but other times end up making matters worse! Rwanda wears an aura of coordinated tranquility, indeed, as if “protected by the two crescents of the moon”.
For a hundred years, however, Rwanda had gone to the dogs – metaphorically and literally! It had gone to a succession of packs of dogs, one pack led by the likes of Haroy, another by Kayibanda, and yet another by Habyarimana (May God bless their souls, if they ever reached Him!). Sons and daughters of the land saw that their motherland had been adulterated and they were grieved. In their mourning, they sat down to think and by 1990, they had set the wheel of liberation in motion. From a bloodbath the land had to be cleansed, from barbarians the people re-humanized. The stoppage of the genocide in 1994 and removal of the dictatorial machine in Rwanda were remarkable indeed. However, what the elections of the last days demonstrated was such a phenomenal metamorphosis that it may not have been appreciated, for its significance!
“Ni kibi cyacu!” That a Munyarwanda could vote without that guiding principle says volumes about the miraculous effect of the liberation effort. If I talk in hyperboles about ‘wheels of liberation’, it is because I am truly flabbergasted, to choose another hyperbole! The magical Kinyarwanda phrase above, to a Munyarwanda, does not actually mean what it says, much as the double-entendre should not be lost on anybody! Loaded as it is, in reference to a candidate in elections, like Faustin Twagiramungu, for instance, that phrase, in a few words, means: “The candidate in question may be having no agenda about what he will do for our country and its people, but he is one of us and I cannot for the world of me imagine voting for anybody else!” Which long sentence itself simply means that a Munyarwanda had been taught to spit at ideas that were for national benefit, much less for regional. The hundred years in the kernel, under Haroy, Kayibanda and Habyarimana respectively, were used to inculcate into a Munyarwanda another phrase: “Mbeshejweho n’umubyeyi!”
It is this 100-year mubyeyi dogma that had eaten into the fabric of the Banyarwanda so much that their resilience was at a point of snapping. The leaders of the time had twisted the erstwhile positive meaning of agasozi into the dirty meaning of continually smaller groups of praise-singers and favour-seekers. However, the less favours they got to dole out, the less praises the leaders received. Fewer praises in turn made them suspicious of all but increasingly smaller circles of family members. From division into Hutu-Tutsi-Twa groups, the Banyarwanda were divided along clan lines, regional lines, hill-based lines until even akazu, family, started showing cracks! Colonialism and its successive regimes had created a monster that was feeding on itself and the last bit of its tail, the head of the main kazu, went down in a plane-crash in Kanombe, in his compound!
The elections of the last days showed that the Banyarwanda were waking up to the fact that they are the sons and daughters of Rwanda. They showed that the Banyarwanda now want what is good for them and their country and will not settle for less. Divisionism is dying and being extricated from the system of Rwanda! It is the realization of this that drives to tears misguided agents of neocolonialism and their running dogs, masquerading as neutral electoral observers! The wheel of liberation, however, is slow but relentless and will, as a matter of course, deliver the likes of Ms. Collette Flesch out of their mind-sets. If not them, young though some of them are, then their offspring.
It is true what somebody said: revolutions are born of obscure and seemingly impossible situations. Who could believe it when one Rwandan talked to his compatriots? To a scattered and desperate, ragtag surviving group of ‘inyenzi’ ready for flight, one afternoon in the northern bushes (plains?) of Rwanda: “Success – or failure – is in our heads. If we are convinced that we will win, then we sure will!”
Habyarimana must be spinning, not turning, in his perplexed grave!
