Transcriber: Claudia Cesetti Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
I'm sitting at the bar of the Hotel Rwanda,
a place that I studied extensively in graduate school
when I was a master's student focused on trauma theory
and the atrocities of the Rwandan genocide.
And I'm wondering,
how is it that this place,
which sheltered more than a thousand Tutsi refugees
during its nation's darkest hour,
how has it become a hot spot for cocktails,
highlighted by The New York Times?
And even weirder,
how am I the writer who decided it deserves that honor?
It's been more than two decades since the Rwandan genocide,
when nearly one million Tutsi civilians were brutally slaughtered
in an uprising that lasted 100 days
by the country's Hutu majority.
Two decades.
Bill Clinton was president during the genocide.
The World Wide Web - it was barely a thing.
And yet, ask anyone in this room
what they think of right now when you hear the word "Rwanda,"
and I guarantee you, for most of you, the answer will be "genocide."
So in May 2017,
when a friend told me I should check out Rwanda
as an upcoming tourist destination,
I was intrigued.
I'm a journalist,
and while I did study the genocide extensively,
I've also been hearing a lot at the time about the new Kigali,
with its clean streets and its hip new bars.
Rwanda is an African success story,
and journalists like me,
we like success stories.
They're easy to sell to editors,
and they give readers hope,
which makes them powerful.
Rwanda has more women in government than any other nation in the world.
It has the lowest crime rate in Africa.
It's progressive and friendly.
So I bought a ticket, and I went there.
And while I did find a number of great stories
about Rwanda as a tourist destination,
what amazed me about the country
was not its great new food scene
or its environmental gains,
like a nationwide ban on plastic bags.
What amazed me about Rwanda
was how open everyone was about the genocide
and how honest they were, regardless of what side they were on.
What amazed me was how clearly Rwanda has realized
that it will only triumph over its trauma if it keeps on talking.
On my first full day in Kigali,
I hired a driver named Charles to take me around.
Charles is tall and slender and elegant looking,
the typical physical traits of a Rwandan Tutsi.
Charles is also 28,
which means that he was born in 1990,
which means that he was four years old during the genocide
and he survived a childhood trauma
more horrific than anything I could ever possibly understand.
But I wasn't thinking about any of this
when he opened the door of his car and he asked me where I wanted to go.
I'm primarily a travel journalist,
and I was focused on seeing the sites.
After a full day of touring, we stopped at a chic Kigali coffee shop,
and Charles waited in the car while I went inside to get some caffeine.
I wanted to be friendly, so I ordered him a coffee to go.
I didn't know how Charles took his coffee, so I ordered a plain cappuccino,
and when I came back to the car, I said,
"Here, I got you a coffee.
I hope you don't mind, I didn't add any sugar."
What he said next, it floored me:
"I usually take sugar in my coffee,"
said Charles,
"but during the genocide,
I walked with my family all the way to Uganda,
so I can handle drinking a coffee unsweetened."
(Laughter)
It was at this moment
that I realized I was foolish to think
I could parachute into Rwanda and write about its bright future
without properly understanding its past.
If you want to understand the Rwandan genocide,
it's important to know it didn't happen overnight.
Rwanda has always had two distinct ethnic groups:
the Hutu, who are the majority,
and the Tutsi, who are the minority but long ruled over the Hutu.
Centuries of European colonizers favored the Tutsi,
and they furthered the rift between the two.
In 1994, the airplane carrying the Hutu president
was shot down,
and it was blamed on a group of Tutsi rebels,
and it was that act
that took this simmering pot of hatred that had been boiling for centuries
and caused it to bubble over.
That's when the murders began.
What happened in Rwanda was an entire nation began killing itself.
Hutu men picked up machetes
and they murdered women and children next door.
Husbands turned on the families of their own wives.
After 100 days,
when the killing finally stopped,
the bloodshed was so widespread and the devastation so horrific
that there was no precedent on earth that could be applied to recovery.
How do you bring criminals to justice when there are more killers than courts?
How do you heal from trauma and get better
when the very people
who are supposed to help you do that work -
the doctors, the nurses,
the trauma specialists, the social workers -
they are as shell-shocked as everyone else?
It seemed too big to solve.
Indeed, in the days and months following the genocide,
journalists who went to Rwanda sent back the bleakest possible reports:
"Rwanda is finished," they wrote.
The international community all but resigned itself
to Rwanda being yet another anonymous African failure,
one whose scars would always define it.
But Rwanda had different ideas.
The transformation of that country
from a battered series of killing fields into Africa's most progressive nation
is something that all countries can learn from.
A decade after the genocide,
the very idea of ethnicity in Rwanda was outlawed.
Identity cards that listed people as either Hutu or Tutsi,
they were torn up,
and they were replaced by new cards
with only one word in the line for ethnicity:
Rwandan.
The school books, which for centuries had been teaching students
about all these differences between the two groups,
those were thrown out, and new books were written.
And while it's true that 20 years after the genocide,
it's still relatively easy to tell from the way someone looks
if they're likely Hutu or Tutsi -
remember, I could tell Charles was probably Tutsi
before he told me anything about his own story.
I was warned before I went to Rwanda
not to ask people about their ethnic background
and not to expect people to share it either.
The entire country
has banded behind an idea of "We are all Rwandan now."
And it was a critical first step to moving forward
and putting centuries of hate behind it.
And what about justice for the killers?
Following the genocide, Rwanda was facing a legal tsunami.
So many people
had participated in the killing
that if they'd tried all the cases in traditional courts,
it would have taken Rwanda 200 years to hear them all.
So instead,
the country turned to a form of community justice called "Gacaca"
in which village elders heard testimony, both from survivors and killers,
and they decided sentencing on their own.
The key difference between traditional courts and Gacaca courts
is that while traditional courts are focused on punishment,
Gacaca courts are focused on reconciliation
and the uncovering of truth.
Yes, many killers were sentenced to prison through Gacaca courts,
but more importantly,
many others were offered forgiveness in exchange for confession.
It was not a perfect system by any means
but what it did was it offered an entire country a chance for catharsis
and a way to move forward.
And as a direct result of the Gacaca court system,
today in the Rwandan countryside,
there are reconciliation villages
in which Tutsi survivors and Hutu perpetrators
live side by side.
They share water,
they share land,
they share painful memories.
And these villages are doing the impossible:
they're working.
And then you have Paul Kagame.
Kagame has been the de facto leader of Rwanda since 1994,
and he is both complicated and controversial.
Under his guidance,
Rwanda has never been cleaner or stronger.
It's never had a higher economic standing
or a better place in the international world.
But he has also been accused of being authoritarian,
of censoring the press
and of propping up a sham democracy.
But even Kagame, once a year, leaves his workplace
and goes into the streets for a national day of service,
where every single Rwandan works together:
cleaning, sweeping, building, digging ditches -
doing the physical work of building the country.
The day is called "Umuganda,"
and it translates to "coming together for a common purpose."
And Umuganda is perhaps the most poignant example today
of how strongly all Rwandans -
from the president to the people who collect trash -
believe that their future will only be bright
if they all play an equal part in it.
I went back to Rwanda a few months later,
this time on assignment
to write that travel story for The New York Times,
and I realized,
as I once again flew into Kigali's bright and shining airport
and I was greeted by a smiling customs agent,
I realized that what Rwanda has done,
it isn't natural.
It's not natural to respond to extreme hatred
by tearing down the boundaries between people.
It's not natural to face extreme trauma and react with compassion and community.
And this has been the secret to Rwanda's success.
It has held on to its history while letting go of hate.
It has faced extreme trauma and moved on
but refused to forget a single terrifying detail.
It has triumphed against the odds of human emotion.
In graduate school, I studied trauma theory
and the ways in which the human brain processes horrifying events.
You see, a trauma is an event that is so massive in scope
that the brain can't process it all at once,
so it continues to reprocess it
over and over
until it's fully worked through.
This is where the flashbacks from PTSD come from,
and this is why collective trauma -
in which an entire group or an entire country
is all shell-shocked together -
this is why it can be so difficult to overcome.
I am fascinated by how openly Rwandans speak about the genocide.
On my second visit there,
I hired a fixer named Annie to do translation for me,
and she told me quietly over dinner, just a few hours after we met,
that she was abandoned by her mother at birth
and she didn't meet her until she was 18.
You see, Anne is Tutsi,
and when her mother was pregnant, she knew the genocide was coming.
So she went to the countryside and gave birth to her
and left her with a relative,
hoping she'll be safer there.
It took both mother and daughter
nearly 20 years to realize they were both alive
and to find each other.
My friend Heppo,
who has dedicated his life to a mission he calls "Be the peace,"
he was seven years old
when he watched his own father be brutally murdered and fed to dogs.
He told me this, calmly and with clarity, at a steak restaurant
before adding
that he is insistent that his generation be the last one in Rwanda
to be transmitted hate from its parents down to its children.
So while, yes,
today in Rwanda,
it is taboo to ask someone about their ethnic background;
the reality is it's also taboo to keep silent.
And so as I sat there at the Hotel Rwanda,
marveling at how this building,
which has seen so many painful things,
is now once again just a lovely hotel,
I realized,
if there's something you and I can learn from Rwanda, it's this:
the truth may not set you free,
but it will absolutely help you rebuild.
And if other nations want to learn from Rwanda,
the simplest path to beginning
is to find their truth and speak it.
Thank you.
(Applause)