My three-year old daughter Lisa inspired this article. A while ago she was selected to be one of the maids at her aunt’s gusaba (marriage introduction ceremony). They made her a little ‘umushanana’ (Rwandan traditional attire for women) and she walked in front of the bride. She had a good time but its what she did in the subsequent days that got me thinking. She wanted to wear her umushanana everyday. She was so proud of it. That was when it hit me; we box our culture. We put our culture in compartments of our lives, and small ones at that.

I imagine a day when everyone will dress Rwandan, eat Rwandan and drink urugwagwa (Rwandan beer) and dances to authentic Rwandan music with the same relish, if not more, than that with which we drink Heineken and dance to rap and hip hop. A period when imishanana are worn as much as, if not more than, Western shirts, suits, dresses and skirts, on a daily basis and not just during traditional  wedding ceremonies.

I know that this seems like a day dream and maybe it is. But think about it, people all over the world wear their cultural attire as they go about their day-to-day business. You can easily recognise a Nigerian in his ‘agbada’, an Indian in his ‘sari’, a Japanese kimono, Arabs in their ‘kanzus’ and ‘buibuis’ or closer to home a Maasai in his ‘shuka’. Indeed we now buy these outfits to complement our apparel too. Shouldn’t this be normal for us too? After all it is who we are. So why do we act like we have nothing to offe r?

There are very many benefits for Rwanda if we could think and live Rwandan.

The biggest benefit is identity. We need to reaffirm our identity to ourselves. We can only be better by being better versions of ourselves and not by trying, as we seem to do, to be someone else. A simple thing like dressing like a Rwandan and eating and drinking Rwandan makes one grounded and aware of who they are. It makes it easier to keep and nurture values that make us and transmit these to our children. There is an old colonial myth that associates development with everything Western. The Japanese, Koreans, Indians and others have made such thinking inconsequential.

We need this awareness and consciousness to step into the international arena confidently and competently, and not as some prolific copycats.

There are obvious economic benefits too. To enable this country take-off economically, we have to work very hard at mostly consume what we produce locally. If we wore imishanana, build using more local materials and drank urugwagwa, these local industries would develop and the accompanying multiplier effect, from increased employment to tax revenues, would be huge. But if we, almost exclusively, wear clothes and drink beer made in foreign countries then we have no reason to moan about our unemployment levels. We are the architects of our own situation.

There are myths out there about who and what Rwandans are. These were the building blocks upon which genocide ideology and, eventually, the Genocide against the Tutsi were founded. Rwandans dressing, eating, talking, drinking, dancing and building Rwandan make nonsense of all these artificial differences.

Issues that bedevil us like customer service would also be non-issues. Let’s face it, Rwandan are polite, warm, hospitable and generous people. But sometimes we attempt to serve our customers like the Americans, British and the French rather than just receive them as we would receive our guests. We end up suffering a sort of multiple personality disorders and we know how that works out.

There is talk of developing Southern Province as the cultural tourism circuit of the country. This has been going on for some time. In August, we celebrated the Umuganura (harvest) festival. These are good initiatives especially if we consider them in the context of the ‘Ndi Umunyarwanda’ initiative that is a good rallying point to unity. They have a limited reach, however, in terms of perspective (the cultural tourism has not done enough to focus on and raise local tourism) or time and scope-do we have to wait untill August to be very Rwandan again or only at a gusaba ceremony (where we actually find that only women wear traditional garb whereas men wear Western suits)?

 Come to think of it, ‘Ndi Umunyarwanda’ literally translates to ‘I am Rwandan’. Shouldn’t this be an everyday thing? Shouldn’t this be a lifestyle, not a project?

We should not box our Rwandanness…let our cultural juices flow!

Sam Kebongo is a Project Management and Entrepreneurship Development Consultant based in Kigali. sam.kebongo@gmail.com