Two ‘G.’ words

98% of our genetic code is the same as human beings. Our population has been on the increase, lately

A memorial to the genocide, in Kybuye

A lot has been written about the  ‘F...’ word. How about ‘G...’ words? For many people in the world, Rwanda is about two ‘G...’ words: ‘Gorillas’ and ‘Genocide’, they do not know anything else about the country. The risk of stereotyping is huge and very dangerous: ‘Rwanda people kill their gorillas and then kill each other...’  Nothing could be further from the truth.  One step in the right direction would be to say (i) a few uneducated, desperate, greedy people used to kill gorillas, with the same frame of mind as some executives decide to cut rain forests to clear land  for mining and (ii) under the ‘right’ circumstances, after a ‘well’ orchestrated campaign of building up hatred, any ethnic group can suddenly start slaughtering another ethnic group along a similar scenario: Jews were the victims of such treatment in Nazi Germany, Armenians in Turkey, Ordinary Cambodians were killed by Cambodian Khmer rouges, Serbs were hunting for Kosovars not so long ago.

There are some encouraging signs about the two ‘G...’ words in Rwanda today: (i) the gorilla population is on the increase, gorilla trekking is the number one source of foreign income in Rwanda... so they are preciously protected from poachers, (ii) the dividing line between Tutsis and Hutus is slowly but surely becoming blurry. Soon you won’t know if your neighbour is a Tutsi or a Hutu. It is no longer required to have such a label written in your ID card (the Belgian colonial power introduced this concept of ethnic labelling on ID cards, as it served their colonial purpose well).

So, more gorillas, Tutsis and Hutus merging into one Rwanda, people moving forward!

We know what the ‘f-word’ stands for... What does the ‘h-word’ stand for...? ‘Hope’?