When the issue of “human cloning” first arose in the 90s, Rwanda’s Reverend Jean Baptiste Mazarati was completing a PhD in molecular biology at Georgetown University in the USA. As someone who was studying human tissue engineering, blood and bone marrow processing, he expected to be associated to the conversation on whether creating human beings from a laboratory was ethical and moral.
As the debate evolved, opinions of all peoples of the world were petitioned: Asians were consulted, Indians, Europeans, Americans, etc. Some countries even passed laws precluding the ‘ungodly’ practice. Dr. Mazarati waited for the African position to be asked but the call never came. The good Jesuit had also read “Moral theology”. He decided to publish a paper on “African Bioethics”.
It is an emerging concept among African scholars canvassing for a say in collaborative research in fields such as biology and science in general. It is a response to perceived ‘ethical imperialism’ in global research, offering an ethical school of thought that is ‘indigenous’ to Africa and reflective of ‘African identity’, as an alternative to imposed ‘Western Principlism’.
Admittedly Africa isn’t a country with common beliefs and I won’t mimic western commentators in essentializing an entire continent only to deny its people of an opportunity to express their position on questions of universal magnitude, or to project on them some materialistic ulterior motive…
Mine is to reframe and reorient the conversation around the agreement between Britain and Rwanda, by pointing out that it is consistent with our very essence as “uRwanda”: which means (the expansive nation-state); the attitude of our polity as former refugees and a response to the genocide that killed a million of our people.
Following pogroms of the 60s, the Tutsi community fled to countries neighboring Rwanda, namely Zaire, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and even further afield, including in Britain. They spent the next thirty years asking to return home, but the government of the time rejected them, saying that Rwanda was small: “like a glass that’s full, and that one extra drop would spill it all…” It is those politics of exclusion that led to the genocide against the Tutsi.
The government that defeated genocide perpetrators, embraced pre-colonial mores of tolerance and humanity, enshrined them in its constitution and continue to practice them in all its international action to date. The eighth pillar of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the ruling party in Rwanda is: “Eliminating all causes of refugee status”.
Today Rwanda is known to walk the talk in offering support and sanctuary to people in distress, irrespective of their religion, origin or color of the skin.
Rwanda is the custodian of the “Kigali Principles on the Protection of Civilians in UN peacekeeping”, which stem from another Rwanda-induced norm, namely the “Responsibility to Protect”. But as is the practice in international law, texts with no action remain just texts, to cite another physician, Alfred Adler, “It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.” As such, Rwanda is a major contributor of troops to peacekeeping globally:
As the people of Cabo Delgado in North-East of Mozambique faced displacement and killings by an islamist group, Rwanda deployed one thousand troops to secure the area and return the population to their homesteads. Before the deployment in Mozambique, Rwandan troops were serving in South Sudan, the Darfur region of Sudan, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Mali, Liberia and Haiti.
Rwanda is not too full, too small or too poor to take in new people, as genocide perpetrators used to say, and as some commentators are saying now.
The advent of fellow humans looking for sanctuary will make us richer indeed, only in ways that materialistic societies cannot comprehend. Because they chose to see migrants as a problem, they might have missed out on the inner wealth with which they travel. Migrants who risk their lives, cross deserts, oceans and warzones to attain their destination have a strong will to survive, so do people who faced exile, war, a genocide and fought their way back to life. Together we can shape a beautiful country.
“Rwanda” by essence means: “The expansive”. While expansion used to mean wars of conquest until a century ago, today it is translated into a philosophy of integration. We do not fear the “other”, the “stranger”, because we are confident in our Rwandanness which has endured for two millennials. In fact, it is us who should have compensated Britain, for what they see as the unwanted, are a treasure to us. In Kinyarwanda we would say: Twibarutse imfura. We have gained special people.
Ancient Rwanda had a dynasty of kings only dedicated to hospitality and Rwandanness fellowship. While King Kigeli (the conqueror) expanded Rwanda in size and in population, it was the role of his successor, King Yuhi (the pacifier) to orchestrate peace and cohesion between the indigenous and the newcomers, initially brought in captivity, to ultimately form one united Rwandan people. He did so by organizing beauty pageants, games, poetry and art competition, song, dance, etc. He made sure the new comers discovered the delights of Rwandanness before the next expansion circle.
No doubt Rwandans will have a role to play in making our guest feel at home, and who knows, perhaps among those “illegal migrants” being sent to Rwanda are the next Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein…
As a secular state, we won’t subject refugees to nationalistic propaganda, we won’t impose religious beliefs upon them, we won’t stigmatize them. We will introduce them to our rich culture, our dance, our song, our history, as they enrich it with theirs. We will teach them Rwandanness by stealth, so we can tap into their rich complexities. I look forward to tasting new cuisine, new spices, learning new dances, hearing new accents and seeing new faces, for as a child of Rwanda, the expansive nation-state, I am by essence, driven by curiosity and empathy towards others.
You see migration – economic, political or otherwise is constantly practiced in Africa, but western media would have you believe that migration is expected to be from the south to the north. Those who come to the south from the north are called “expatriates”, “experts”, and those from the south who go to the north: “Illegal migrants”. Rwanda is changing that belief system.
The backlash to the refugees’ relocation deal, is just a result of a counter-intuitive paradigm ship between the north and the south – the type that only Rwanda is known for; it is a little like the Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain’s football advertising deals…
Western media will attempt to paint a dystopian picture of our country to justify their prejudice, but in reality, Rwanda is a decent place. We live here. It is clean and perfectly safe, it is corruption free and known to be a champion of the ease of doing business globally. Rwanda leads the world in gender equality and women’s right. Healthcare and twelve years basic education are universal, free and compulsory. The poor receive a monthly stipend from the government.
Within our material deprivation, we are rich in our politics, our beliefs and in our way of life, or as Bob Marley would say: “the rich man’s wealth is in the city, the righteous’ wealth is in his holy place. Yes, they have gone for so long with their love for vanity, they have got the wrong interpretation, mixed-up with vain imagination, but we won’t let them deny us of our simplicity, our spontaneity and our humanity . -Confrontation (1983), “Stiff necked fools”.
Western journalists and politicians alleging malice in the deal are negating Rwanda’s agency in pursuing an ethical end, just as they are denying migrants the right to live where they please.
That said, let the migrants or Africans at large not miss their target. Rwanda did not prevent anyone to go overseas and seek asylum. Migration is a normal mankind’s activity since time immemorial and it will continue, in all directions. Their quarrel is not with us. All we are saying is that migrants shouldn’t be denied of their dignity, if they do, our doors are open, visas are offered on arrival and we will receive them now, as they did us thirty years ago.
Three fallacies need debunking here: One, there is no such thing as “illegal migrants.” A person is only illegal if they have done something wrong. A human being found in his legitimate pursuit of safety mustn’t be labelled illegal – it is the migration law that’s skewed not the humans it underserves.
Two: There is no migration problem in Europe, in fact, Britain is currently facing a labor shortage. “Illegal migrant” is just code for unwanted black and brown people. While racism fuels European politics, unity and tolerance are what define the post-genocide Rwanda.
And three: Rwanda was not compensated for this deal. A relocation fund was directly allocated to the refugees for their initial resettlement with no alleged windfalls to the government or the people of Rwanda. To put things in perspective, on the same day the Rwanda-UK refugee deal was announced with an accompanying budget of £120m, earlier that morning a regional bank had invested Six Billion dollars in regional SMEs. That’s 50 times bigger. Perhaps we can facilitate these refugees to benefit from that SME fund.
Rwanda receives and resettles refugees routinely and often with no foreign aid. We’ve all heard journalists and politicians using this deal to settle domestic political scores, now, as my big sister, Author Scholastique Mukasonga writes in the guardian this morning, it is time to hear from refugees themselves:
Following the crisis in Libya, Rwanda received 30 thousand refugees of all nationalities. More recently, when Kabul was falling into the hands of the Taliban after the sudden departure of the Americans, an Afghani All girls’ school was airlifted, in extremis, with their teachers and their extended families and relocated in Rwanda. As of 09/2021, Rwanda hosted 127,163 refugees and asylum seekers: 77.116 Congolese and 49.546 Burundians. These figures represent a fraction; those registered with the UN Refugee Council, most neighbors living in Rwanda are what European politicians and media would qualify as “Illegal migrants”, to us, they are just guests and brethren.
When Cameroonian Author Yann Gwet first visited Rwanda, he wrote: “Rwandan Renaissance: I went, I saw, I believe”, after the trip he went back, took his wife Donnie and their two children and relocated to Rwanda. Yann quit his job as a journalist for French newspaper “Le Monde” to take one as a lecturer in the faculty of journalism at the University of Rwanda, and it did not take long before he received Rwandan citizenship.
A year before the Gwets, Nima Yussuf, originally from Djibouti, educated in Paris had quit her job at Goldman Sachs in London to relocate to Kigali. She is now a household name in the world of finance in Kigali. In this video is the story of Teklay, an Eritrean who started as a small trader in Rwanda only a few years ago and now owns a chain of supermarkets in the capital Kigali. The list is endless..
The doctrine of the Rwandan government, army and police are not to turn a blind eye on people who are facing oppression anywhere on the planet. Memories of foreign armies abandoning Tutsi in the hands of their killers are still vivid with us, especially in this month of April, when we remember and commemorate the victims of the Genocide Against the Tutsi.