Another problem is the current government of Rwanda. To its great credit it has taken steps to stop the identification of anybody as a Hutu or a Tutsi. In many parts of Rwanda today it is now considered rude to discuss somebody’s heritage, and this is a good thing. But the changes have gone no further. Rwanda is a country that has still never known democracy. The current president, Paul Kagame, was the general of the Rwandan Patriotic Front army that toppled the génocidaire regime and ended the slaughter, and for this he deserves credit. But he has exhibited many characteristics of the classic African strongman ever since taking power. In 2003 he was reelected with 95 percent of the vote. There is nobody in the world that can call results like that a “free election” and keep a straight face.
Moreover, the popular image persists that Rwanda is today a nation governed by and for the benefit of a small group of elite Tutsis. Kagame’s government has done little to show the world a different picture. The Parliament is widely known to be a rubber stamp for the will of the president. Those few Hutus who have been elevated to high-ranking posts are usually empty suits without any real authority of their own. They are known locally as Hutus de service, or “Hutus for hire.” So there is no real sharing of power. What exists now in Rwanda is a new version of the akazu, or the “little house” of corrupt businessmen who have long surrounded the president. The same kind of impunity that festered after the 1959 revolution is happening again, only with a different race-based elite in power. We have changed the dancers but the music remains the same.
I said earlier that what my country needs most of all is to sit together around a table and talk. Perhaps we will not talk as the best of friends, not yet, but at least as people with a common history who can respect each other. That discussion never happened, not once in Rwandan history. The dictates of the mwami were followed by the plunder of the country by Belgians and then the corrupt ethnic visions of Habyarimana, with the balance of power always bouncing back and forth between the races, and neither side learning anything from the ashes and the bodies. We never talk about it; we just steal what we can whenever our turn comes around.
The way that modern nations have that discussion around a table is through the democratic process and the civilized exchange of ideas in a respectful format. But Rwanda has a cosmetic democracy and a hollow system of justice, and this is why I think it is far too soon to say Never Again for my country.
We are not binding up the wounds of history. And I can assure you of this as a Rwandan: History dies hard.
I was not the only one who said no. There were thousands of other people in Rwanda who were also unimpressed by the propaganda and put their lives in jeopardy to shelter fugitives. Individual acts of courage happened every single day of the genocide. Some were partial killers, it is true, showing compassion to some and murdering others. But there were many who refused completely, and there would have been almost no survivors of the genocide without the thousands of secret kindnesses dispensed under the cover of night. We will never know the names of all those who opened their homes to hide would-be victims. Rwanda was full of ordinary killers, it is true, but it was also full of ordinary heroes.
There was a Muslim man, for example, who concealed up to thirty people in his sheds and outhouses. One of his guests reported the following: “The Interahamwe killer was chasing me down the alley. I was going to die any second. I banged on the door of the yard. It opened almost immediately. He took me by the hand and stood in his doorway and told the killer to leave. He said the Koran says if you save one life it is like saving the whole world. He did not know it is a Jewish text as well.”
There was also Father Célestin Hakizimana, who presided over St. Paul ’s Pastoral Center in Kigali. He stood in contrast to those other priests and ministers who either condoned the genocide or slunk away when danger came. Father Hakizimana turned his church into a shelter for over two thousand people and refused to budge to the demands of the militia.
There was Damas Mutezintare Gisimba, who received four hundred hunted children into his orphanage. Many of them were hidden in chambers in the ceiling, along with prominent politicians. Gisimba also roamed around Kigali poking through the stacks of dead bodies piling up all around. He found several people not yet dead and took them into his care.
There were so many others. A farmer saved people by hiding them in trenches on his land and covering them up with plants and banana leaves to make it look like an ordinary field. An elderly woman pretended to be a sorceress and threatened to call down the power of the gods on any killers who tried to harm the people in her protection. A mayor used his own police force to fight the Interahamwe and was killed for his actions. Schoolteachers hid their hunted students in sheds and empty classrooms. Some of the names of these heroes are known, but most are not. Their good deeds are lost to history. The murders were anonymous and irrational, but the kindness and the bravery were there in scattered places too, and that is a big part of what gives me hope for the future.
What did these people have in common? I believe they all shared the long vision. They had an ability to see through the passing moment and to understand that the frenzy that had gripped Rwanda was a temporary condition at best. They acted decently, as was appropriate for decent times, and did not believe the world to be anything less than an essentially decent place, despite the onset of a collective insanity. Their body temperatures did not fluctuate with the changing environment. All these ordinary heroes believed that balance would one day be restored.
Let me explain a little more. The English scholar and theologian C. S. Lewis was a veteran of the trenches of World War I and also the air blitz against London by the Nazis. He took note of a common delusion that comes in times of war: We have a tendency to believe that the horrors we are seeing are the unvarnished real state of mankind, an animal condition without a shred of true love or kindness to be found anywhere, a life of nasty, brutish shortness. Six thousand years of civilization somehow becomes nothing but a painted shell covering up an ugly “truth” about man.
Lewis described the attitude this way: “In hatred you see men as they are; you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a ‘real’ core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty are ‘really’ horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments.”
He disagreed with this view of reality, and I disagree as well. Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule. The true resting state of human affairs is not represented by a man hacking his neighbor into pieces with a machete. That is a sick aberration. No, the true state of human affairs is life as it ought to be lived. Walk outside your door and this is almost certainly what you’ll see all around you. Daily life in any culture consists of people working alongside each other, buying and selling from one another, laughing with each other, ignoring each other, showing each other courtesy, swearing at each other, loving each other, but hardly ever killing each other as a matter of routine. In the total scope of man’s existence collective murder is a rare event and should never be considered the “real” fate of mankind.
I do not at all mean to downplay the role of politicized mass murder. It is a pathology of civilization and it will certainly happen again, probably before the decade is out. My point here is to say that it is not-and should never be seen as-the default state of mankind. These things are not supposed to happen, and when we write them off as Darwinist spectacles, inevitable by-products of war or worse, to ancient tribal animosities, we have lost sight of the most important thing: the fundamental perversion of genocide. We will have played into the hands of those who excite racial hatreds as a device to acquire more power. We will have been duped by the cheapest trick in the book. Human beings were designed to live sanely, and sanity always returns. The world always rights itself in the long run. Our collective biology simply refuses to let us go astray for long. Or as the French philosopher Albert Camus put it: “Happiness, too, is inevitable.”