The emergence of youth movements and activities in Rwanda today is testimony to the progress the country has made in the last few years, for the benefit of the next generation.

It is telling also that government set up the Rwanda National Youth Council to undertake the task of organising and coordinating activities of the many youth organisations in the country today. "There’s hope today,” says Gustave Mukurarinda, who works with a research institution in Rwanda.

The role of the youth in society affairs in today’s Rwanda is in sharp contrast to their colleagues in the country prior to 1994. Several youths and their leaders were interviewed about their inspiration and why youth movements in Rwanda are a relatively new phenomenon.

"Before 1994, I had a good life. I was happy and lived on a farm with my family; I had four brothers and two sisters. I had goals and dreams like any other youth. But all of this changed in 1994 when Rwanda became the stage for a horrifying genocide,” says Claude Bizimana, 28, from Kigali.

There was no mechanism through which young people in Rwanda before 1994 were socialised or given peer guidance, he continues. "Our world began and stopped with the experiences of our family members.”

Gustave Mukurarinda from Nyanza says with the intensity of a philosopher: "We worked or studied, but at the back of our minds we knew there were rights we were not allowed to exercise, especially if we had issues at school. Our parents would not want to discourage us by telling us the limitations we had.”

Callixte Nzabonimana, the Minister of Youth and Sports in Juvenal Habyarimana’s regime before 1994, was among the inner circle of leaders that organised the youth to enroll in militias long before the critical stage of the Genocide began.

The minister used leading musicians of the day to compose songs that incited young people to get ready for the ultimate extermination of the Tutsi.

Callixte was able to achieve a large army of murderous youths by using the extremist Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) and the government-owned Radio Rwanda, to incite and encourage the youth into joining militias who caused a reign of terror especially in urban centres before the period beginning April-July 1994.

Such murderous youth groups were the first youth movements in Rwanda according to Mukurarinda. "The only other movements were organised by religious institutions especially the Catholic Church, like Boy Scouts,” he says.

Zero social life

Outside the political life, there was nothing much else happening in social or economical life; there was just a couple of night clubs in Kigali - Kigali Night and Eden Garden which were the most popular discotheques in the 1990s.

Foreign music came in the form of MC Hammer, MC Solaar, Ben B and Congolese music, which had a huge following in Rwanda. Highly popular among the Congolese stars were Wenge Musica and Pepe Kale.

On the local musical scene, there were a couple of folk groups that are now referred to as "Igisope”. Such music was performed by troupes such as Impala. According to Bizimana, however, there was no music of huge repute in Rwanda before 1994. "It was not a happy society,” he says with a reflective twinge.

Simon Bikindi, one of the most popular music stars in Rwanda before 1994 is particularly accused of using his music to incite hatred of Tutsis in the run-up to the Genocide. Binkindi was a close confidant of Minister Callixte Nzabonimana.

It was revealed by lawyers who prosecuted his case at ICTR that the minister and President Juvenal Habyarimana were always consulted about Binkindi’s music releases.

According to ICTR archives, "Simon Binkindi’s musical compositions and live performances and recruitment, training and command of Interahamwe, were elements of the plan to mobilise civilian militias to destroy, in whole or in part, the Tutsi”.

Televison began operating in Rwanda only in 1992, so there was no visual interaction and cultural exchanges with communities outside Rwanda.

However, sports was highly popular in the country. Mukurarinda says volleyball and soccer were very popular among the youth in Rwanda before 1994, and Rwanda was a regional powerhouse in volleyball.

"Even if there were not many big influences on regional soccer tournaments, clubs like Rayon Sport, Kiyovu, Mukura and Etincelle were much supported and the league was more competitive than it is today.”

He adds that today the league competition is only between APR, Rayon Sport and occasionally Atraco.

Limited horizons

For Mukurarinda, "to most youth, the real world ended with the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village or at the most at the border of their valley.”

"Today,” Mukurarinda says, "often the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens.”

Ryszard Kapucinsciki in the chapter about Rwanda in his book, The Shadow of the Sun, describes this situation: "The newcomer has a wide angle lens, which gives him a distant diminished view…..while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail.”

The Rwanda society, its youth inclusive were kept in a state of permanent ignorance by the extremist governments before 1994; they were not mobilised or sensitized about patriotism or anything, says Bizimana. The country was deeply divided along provincial, social and ethnic division.

Before the mass mobilisation of the youth from 1992 into Interahamwe militias, there was no example of popular youth movements in Rwanda before 1994. The next generation of an entire nation were turned into murderers.

For Bizimana, a pre-Genocide trip around Rwanda was a journey from backwater to backwater, each considering itself in its isolation a shining star.

Ruhengeri and Gisenyi were highly considered as the leaders’ backyard; Butare an intellectual outpost, while Byumba prided itself in providing the country with the hardest working peasants.

Musicians of the day were encouraged and sponsored to compose songs that praised one group over the other; these songs at times encouraged other youths to participate in the extermination of the imagined enemy - the Tutsi!

According to Dr Claude Shema Rutagengwa’s review paper on child rights and youth movements in Rwanda, "The fact that before 1994 the youth were not organised in any forum, there’s considerable shortage of data about the youth in Rwanda. And as far as public institutions are concerned, no document or publication related to youth rights and youth movements have been found.”

As a result there’s considerable shortage of written information about the youth in Rwanda. But the experience of some youths born and bred in Rwanda provides useful insights about the state of the youth before 1994.

Change of the times

To avoid more misuse of the youth, President Paul Kagame’s administration has initiated programmes to ensure the youth are patriotic and have hope in the country by participating in its rebuilding.

This has taken several steps through the educational sector by providing incentives for young people to join and remain in schools - and of course the community service course popularly known as Ingando.

Today, according to the Rwanda National Youth Council, there is non-formal training in youth training centres, some public and others private registered, and they are on the increase in several parts of the country.

These offer 4 or 5 professional trainings: masonry, carpentry, soldering for young men, cooking and tailoring for women. To be admitted into these one has to have completed primary school. Set within this context, the next generation in Rwanda face a wide-ranging and interconnected set of challenges.

Youth who were survivors, perpetrators and witnesses of the 1994 violence still need to heal. Tens of thousands of them lost their families and still suffer from wounds both physical and psychological. They want to go to secondary school, but school fees must be paid.

Those lucky enough to complete school want to apply their knowledge, but find the competition for limited jobs daunting. In what was, after the Genocide, the poorest country in the world, incredible progress is visible in many areas, but there is still much to be done.

Today, Mukurarinda ponders, "Rwanda is an open society - everyone has freedom and there’s respect of law and order. We are not limited by government because of which part of the country we come from or the shape of our nose like before. If you study, work hard, you can achieve anything. There’s hope.”

Ends