The PANAFRICAN Review
Rwanda ' s Liberation and Ingabire ' s Incompatible Vision For Society
Lonzen Rugira
The RPF liberation would not have succeeded if it didn ’ t have a worthy moral cause . At the core of that cause was the desire to rescue Rwandans from a politico-military quasiindependent outfit that had , for 30 years , held them captive to the Belgian colonial era divide-and-rule philosophy of governance , with Dominique Mbonyumutwa and Gregoire Kayibanda fashioning themselves as the heirs to that philosophy and Juvenal Habyarimana posturing as its military custodian .
The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi only radicalized the RPF and underscored its conviction to craft a new society with a different value system . At the symbolic level , it set out to rid society of everything reminiscent of that captive past : the flag , the anthem , and all other symbolic reminders and vestiges of pain and suffering . In addition to the painful memory of the symbols , the political parties most responsible for fomenting the carnage , Kayibanda ’ s MDR and Habyarimana ’ s MRND , were deemed to represent an existential threat to Rwandan society and were , to that effect , permanently banned from Rwanda ’ s political scene .
The RPF also thought it would inculcate a new moral culture whose value system was diametrically opposed to that past by accentuating what Rwandans shared in common and de-emphasizing their perceived differences . RPF promoted the idea of equality of everyone in the eyes of the state : a public space that treated everyone equally even when it could not be realistically expected that people could immediately overcome their biases in the private spaces .
Unifying programmes like Ndi Umunyarwanda were created to inculcate a new moral culture that elevates a common national identity over other forms of parochial identities . The RPF bets that gradually the young Hutu generation would compare the two approaches and come to the conclusion that a “ glorious past ” never existed ; it was , in fact , a dark past that they ought to dissociate themselves from and denounce anyone seeking to speak on their behalf using it as an inspirational reference point . It is betting that this will serve as sufficient reassurance to rescue a young Tutsi generation from the recurrent trauma of the past repeating itself . It is betting that this shared view of the inglorious past will lead the two groups to become one and live in a compatriotic embrace in pursuit of an indivisible common future .
A resilient ideology
The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi demonstrates the extent to which the custodians of the ideology that the RPF was fighting are willing to go to preserve their warped vision of the state . Further , the subsequent
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