Editor,

RE: "No, things were not good before 1990" (The New Times, July 4).

Thank the Catholic Church for inspiring that most genocidal of ideology and its accompanying document, the Bahutu Manifesto, and then subsequently that Belgian so-called professor, Filip Reyntjens, for translating the Hutu supremacist ideology into a constitutional framework for systematic everyday dehumanizing practice that went all the way down to the surreal bayoneting of a family ugali.

It truly seems that, for decades until liberation in 1994, the entire territory of Rwanda had become a site for an experiment to determine whether the ‘ideas’ in George Orwell’s Animal Farm couldn’t act as the guiding ‘principles’ for managing society.

I can almost hear, dinning in my ears, that frequent harsh threat from those who presided over the experiment at all levels: Kandi nagisubiza kw’isuka!

How far an ancient state had fallen: Happy Liberation Day fellow Rwandans!

Mwene Kalinda