Liberation Special | Page 34

The PANAFRICAN Review
cide masterminds . For this reason , the descendants of the architects of genocide have no criminal relationship with their forbearers . It is therefore unfortunate the members of JAMBO-ASBL , an association of young people in Belgium that pushes the denialist narrative , have failed to disentangle themselves from that legacy of criminality .
On the surface , these descendants are genocide deniers . In fact , they are hostages of the ideology of their forbearers that sought to link their tribe to criminality . They were the true enemies of the tribe for which they claimed to speak , a dishonor and burden being carried forward by their offspring .
Rather than conceive criminality as the common denominator of the architects of genocide , they are choosing to see ethnicity as the common denominator . Prejudice has conditioned their self-perception rendering them unable to decipher that criminality is a horizontal ( across ethnicities ) activity whose responsibility perpetrators seek to evade vertically ( within an ethnicity ).
Fighting unity
As noted above , ethnic entrepreneurs seek to assign criminal responsibility to groups rather than individuals . On the contrary , architects of national unity must conceive criminality as a horizontal endeavor . For this reason , the promoters of Ndi Umunyarwanda ( Rwandan rather than tribal identity ) must underscore that people ’ s ethnicities do not carry criminal culpability . For genocide , they must also explain that it is the criminals who weaponized Hutuness into criminality because they believed their entrepreneurship to be threatened .
Ndi Umunyarwanda will only manage to nurture national unity if it is able to delink criminality from any group . In so doing , it will leave behind only the goodness of a people ready to conceive one another as compatriots . Only by de-weaponizing ethnicity can you cut the fingers from the trigger of ethnic entrepreneurs , leave them emasculated with the only option available to them being to consider national unity , even if reluctantly .
If successful , the legacy of Ndi Umunyarwanda will be the kind of cooperation that colonialists said Africans are incapable of , an idea that tribal entrepreneurs bequeathed and carried forward at independence . A common identity would be the shield under which every Rwandan , or indeed every African , can find protection in return for patriotism , compatriotism , and solidarity .
This is an unimaginable threat to tribal entrepreneurs ._

Rwanda Works Because Women Have Remained Central to the Country ' s Liberation

Nathalie Munyampenda

What we tend to see is that after liberation struggles have been successful , women are relegated back to the ‘ kitchen ’. Women then have to fight their brothers in arms for equal status . In Rwanda , this was not the case . Why ? It ’ s the story of a receipt .

Recently , someone told me a story about the late Aloisea Inyumba . In 1991 , the liberation struggle was just beginning . The Rwandan Patriotic
Army ( RPA ), which would later stop the Genocide of the Tutsi in 1994 , had suffered heavy casualties including of its leader in the first offensive .
Off the battlefield , the RPA was also suffering . Morale was low and the financial situation was precarious . In this environment , Inyumba and countless other women and men went across Uganda , Zaire , Burundi , Tanzania and many other countries , all over the world , to collect funds and in-kind contributions . They also went to recruit young men and women for the war .
Late one night in Kampala , Inyumba met a man to collect his pledge . The person was not an RPF ( Rwandan Patriotic Front ) member yet . Inyumba , with much emotion after seeing the amount in the envelope , told him that he could not understand what he had just done , and promised him a receipt . The person lived very far

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