I was recently asked to share my perspective on how the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi is affecting many post-Genocide Rwandan youngsters.At first, I didn't know where to begin but then I decided to take my own experience as a base, so here goes.
I recall the first time I came face to face with the issue of Genocide. I watched images of mutilated bodies being carried by the Akagera river and thrown over the Rusumo falls to continue into Lake Victoria.Funnily, in my 4-year-old mind, I don't know where I fetched the idea that those were crocodiles.
Shortly thereafter I started learning about it in school but it wasn't until my 14th year (2009) that I really started to understand the reality and the horrific impact of the Genocide in the Rwandan society. As a member of AERG (a Genocide Survivor Students Association) and studying in a boarding school, I came across fellow youngsters who had grown up without knowing their parents who were victims of the Genocide. Others were so shaken by the horrors they had witnessed that their nights were just a long succession of nightmares. At various memorial events, I saw kids affected by trauma, and rightly so. How can you not when you are staring at hundreds of skulls and bones smashed to bits, when you look at those empty eye sockets and seem to catch a last expression of horror in them as they saw their death coming; when you read thousands upon thousands of names on a wall and you understand that every last one of them had a life, dreams, aspirations, and hopes for a future they were never to know as their lives were put an end to in an instant by the blow of a club, or a bullet to the heart, or a machete tearing through the flesh? How can you no be traumatized when you try with all your might to think it is all just a bad dream but your heart keeps telling you it is damn real?
After such encounters with the past, I saw kids letting so much anger, hatred and resentment build up inside them that they couldn't bear to sit with a Hutu kid they had shared everything with just days before.I gotta confess this happened to me too. I watched others become so ashamed of their parents' sins that they chose to live in denial or considered themselves at the bottom of the social order.
So when you ask me if the post-Genocide generation is dealing with the consequences of the Genocide; well yes it is.Very much. And it's not just that. Think of all the kids born in the jungles of the Congo and raised to become fighters of the FDLR in a war whose origins and reasons they hardly know the truth of (if they do at all). Think of the youth across the world whose opinion is being misled by so-called political refugees who only chose exile as a better alternative than facing justice for their crimes.
But another thing I came to learn was that if knowing one's history is absolutely necessary, we should also avoid being enslaved by it because then we're bound to make the same mistakes again or make new ones that are even worse. I understood the necessity of saying "Sorry" and the importance of forgiving if we are all to go forward and rebuild a better, stronger nation; risen from its ashes, having learned from its mistakes.