Rwanda - cleaning up

This is the sign every community has the shows Rwanda's vision and 'commandments'. The numbers show the number of families in each 'self-help' group

I’ve probably built up my Great Disclosure about Rwanda. In reality, I just got a bit edgy about censorship*. It all started when I was cycling on the edge of Gisenyi and suddenly a crowd of around 100 people came towards me – at the heart of the group were 2 boys (must have been 10 years old?) with slaughtered pigs round their necks. At first I thought it was a protest and then someone told me the boys had been caught stealing bananas so the community were frogmarching them to the police station. Something about the medieval-type humiliation (of children no less) made me really uncomfortable – and so at odds with the perfect-community feel I’d had in Rwanda so far.

So I googled ‘thieves with pigs round their neck’...
... not expecting to find anything. But it turns out that mob punishment of petty criminals involving dead animals as humiliation is not uncommon (esp in the western province where the Congolese border makes things a little more vigilante. 


I read that the trip to the police station usually ends in severe beatings (no evidence of the crime needed and certainly no access to justice for the accused) or even murder – either by police or the community.


The price of reconciliation?

My conclusion (and I am really not expert – just a combo of a few HRW papers and feeling) is that such treatment of outliers is the price Rwanda is paying for its remarkable post-genocide success (mentions of Hutus and Tutsis is strictly forbidden and in any case, it seems no one wants to think along those lines anymore; but they do openly speak about the genocide in a way that feels very healthy). In 25 years, Kagame’s leadership has been pretty incredible. 


Success seems down to this unique community structure he has created – starting from unity at the top (62% women in parliament, good anti-corruption record), to every village having to support Rwanda’s vision and to abide by what I can only call commandments (not to steal, not to miss school etc). Ok, It’s kind of slave morality but I guess in extreme situations like a genocide, you can’t be vague about the way forward. The sense of connection to the community is really quite enviable  - in every village, town and city, households are grouped into sort of self-help groups to discuss issues and support one another. And each community must submit a collective new year’s resolution.


Services are relatively excellent for Africa – I asked a few people what they can do in an emergency and they reeled off phone numbers for ambulance, police and even anti-corruption, as well as the speed with which they’re responded to. A welfare system means the rich pay more and the very poor never get forgotten. However, what I failed to get to the bottom of was the complete absence of ‘street people’ – kids, homeless, druggies, disabled. Again, were these societal outliers just eliminated from view?


In other words, in Rwanda’s Big Clean-Up, is social ugliness also being swept away like plastic? I’m sure I’m being unfair and if I dug deep, I would hope support mechanisms are in place. 

Write to Roam: Lake Kivu

Ecolodge Kivu

From my room, Kivu

Hike along the lake

Each day the fishermen would head out singing at sunset and stay in a line like this all night

*It turns out one of the blemishes in the ‘Rwanda show’ is human rights, notably freedom of speech and routine ‘disappearances’ of journalists that aren’t Kagame’s mouthpiece – the record is pretty appalling. I’m not exactly a dissenting journalists, but I’m not one to rub African officials up the wrong way.