The Fourth of July was celebrated with all the usual pomp and swagger in the United States, but less attention across the news media was given to another Fourth of July celebration right here on the African continent.
This has become a day of national commemoration of the arrival of liberation forces in the wake of the unspeakable genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The Fourth of July has become Rwanda’s most important national holiday.
Floating down out of the clouds of East Africa, surrounded by the green hills of the country, its red dirt and people swathed in cloths of many colours, and riding into the heart of the capital city of Kigali, it is impossible to imagine the origins of the violence of that period that took almost a million lives in the space of a few weeks.
We were, after all, consumed by the euphoria of our first democratic elections, and the elevation of Nelson Mandela to the presidency. The news in the background, of the spectacular assassination of both the Rwandan and Burundian presidents when their executive jet was shot down over Kigali, and the explosive, brutal events that followed it, was hard to take on board.
This was one of the most critical events of recent African history. We were, quite rightly, studying our own navels with glee while hundreds of thousands of black people, Hutus and Tutsis, were slaughtering each other with guns, knives and especially machetes 1 000km away. None of it made much sense.
The Rwandan genocide of 1994, and others that had preceded it, both in Rwanda and Burundi, can only be seen as signposts of Africa’s supposedly post-colonial condition, just as South Africa’s long-delayed liberation from apartheid was. It is hard to avoid linking the two.
And then, of course, there was the inevitable overspill into the Congo, then known as Zaire, which is itself slowly, finally, sluggishly coming to some sense of closure with the advent of the country’s first democratic elections in 30 years.
The slaughter of almost a million Tutsis in Rwanda by the supposedly disenfranchised and historically excluded Hutu majority tumbled over the invisible borders of the Great Lakes region, bringing instability, turmoil, war, but also a sense of a new beginning for how the entire area would see itself. The scales of colonial history were being forcibly lifted, with unspeakable brutality, from the region’s eyes.
Walking into Kigali today, it is hard to see how any of this could have happened.
Courtesy and elegance are the order of the day. There is no sense of a hidden threat of violence that could explode at any moment. People brush shoulders with each other on the crowded streets or stand aside, but there is no sense of racial aggression. There is no black and white. No one can tell who is Hutu and who is Tutsi. How did this racial genocide come about, then?
We will probably never get to the bottom of it. There are all sorts of theories. Most of them point to the way the colonising Belgians chose to create a kind of caste system that would make it easier for them to rule — tall Tutsis ruling over short Hutus. Easy street. Imagine how that would have made life in many other parts of the world, including our own.
The celebration of this national day of liberation here in Kigali was a quiet triumph for President Paul Kagame, who had steadfastly followed the road to liberation to its bittersweet end.
Trucks full of chanting and singing Rwandans roared into the national stadium, filling it to the brim. There was no sullenness here, but a dignified attentiveness to the solemnity of the proceedings. The sun was blazing. The people were amazingly patient. Dancers, singers and praise poets did their thing.
Then the president spoke, referring repeatedly, and fearlessly, to the genocide that had previously separated Rwandans from each other, leading to the events that made neighbour kill neighbour and go out hunting for more blood. There was no attempt to hide away from the past.
The president went right to the heart of the matter, and the people, ranked up in the massive stadium, listened, almost holding their breath.
It was a celebration of the fact that Rwanda had come through that terrible period and was ready and able to look towards the future.
You could see it in the streets. You could feel it, vicariously, in the heartbeats of those hundreds of thousands gathered in the sweltering stadium. The silent attentiveness of a drum beating like a heart in motion.
The genocides of the past can never be repeated.
The country is growing before your eyes, buildings rising into the smoky sky above Kigali in unprecedented numbers, people moving, the television screen filled with images of the best that the country can offer.
There is a clear sense of purpose that is enviable. The butchery and bloodletting of the past has not been forgotten, will not be forgotten. But you get the sense that the hatred that fuelled it could, should, might possibly be laid to rest. Rwanda, possibly, has moved on.
So while America, the world’s biggest empire, celebrated its Independence Day, which inherently had its own moments of drama and contradiction, Rwanda, the tiniest country in Africa, celebrated its own day of liberation.