As a master’s degree student in Beijing back in 2013, the culture shock hit me fast and hard. The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of the airport I landed in. Mind you, I hadn’t stepped on a plane in years, so you can imagine how intimidated I felt landing in Beijing Capital International Airport, the world's second busiest airport by passenger numbers, and encountering the immense volume of people walking through it. And it was on the bus to the university campus that realized how 'dark' Kigali was in comparison to the Chinese capital. Between the garishly lit roadside buildings and the millions of car headlights, Beijing at night felt blindingly bright. While the first two things I encountered were slightly disconcerting, they weren’t entirely surprising. I mean, I knew that I was going to live for a year in the capital city of the most populous country in the world. It was only when the bus arrived at our campus accommodations that I felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz—definitely not in Kansas anymore. Firstly, I HAD anticipated some kind of language barrier, but what I didn’t realize was just how difficult it would be to navigate. Naively, I thought that with a university hosting hundreds of students from around the world, it would ensure that any signage would at least be in both Hanzi (Chinese characters) and English, or at least in Hanzi and ‘normal’ ABC’s. That wasn’t the case. Everything was in Hanzi. So, I couldn’t even use Google Translate because I didn’t know what I was looking at. Secondly, the food. I quickly discovered that the Chinese food I’d gotten used to in Kigali bore no similarity whatsoever to the authentic Chinese cuisine I now encountered. Even stranger was a drink, popular with all the Asian students, that consisted on bright-colored liquid with small, balls that look like papaya seeds on the bottom). When I asked what it was, I was told it was ‘boba’. If, like me at the time, you have no idea what boba is, it is a tea-based drink that originated in Taiwan in the early 1980’s. What makes it special is that the tea drink is accompanied by black-colored, chewy tapioca balls called ‘boba’. Taiwanese immigrants took it to the US and from there it spread around the world, and by 2012 the market for the drink was valued at an astounding $2.17 billion. The sweet drink, loved by trendy Gen Zs, seemed to be found everywhere in the world, except Rwanda. But that won’t be for much longer. A young local couple will officially open the first boba tea outlet in Rwanda on Saturday and I can bet my last franc that the place will do booming business. Why? Because, for the first time in our history, we have a critical mass of young people able and willing to spend money on what psychologist Abraham Maslow believes is the last human need. In his theory of the 'Hierarchy of Needs', Maslow notes five human needs, with the most basic being physiological (breathing, food, water, shelter, sleep). The next three needs are ‘safety and security’, ‘love and belonging’, and ‘self-esteem’. The last human need, once all the others are taken care of, is ‘self-actualization’. Self-actualization is about, among other things, ‘experience’, ‘creativity’, and ‘spontaneity’. When we talk about economic growth and markers of development, we often concentrate on our roads, hospitals, power plants, skyscrapers, schools, hotels, golf courses, and stadiums. What I don’t think we spend enough time factoring in when we discuss Rwanda’s growth projections is the variety of experiences that people can now spend their incomes on right here in the country. It is my strong belief that those experiences, whether it's boba tea at KABC or Gakondo nights at Mille Collines Hotel, are the true markers of just how far along we have come on our development journey. A few days ago, an ornery Belgian academic, renowned for his nostalgic view on pre-Genocide Rwanda and its government, posted on X (formerly Twitter) two photos with the caption ‘Two sides of Rwanda’. The first photo showed a small village in the Eastern Province while the next one showed the Kigali Central Business District. What the old man (I cannot be bothered to mention his name) probably wanted to highlight was a contradiction between what we professed we were and what we actually were, i.e., poor but pretending to be rich. What he, and a lot of observers who pontificate about Rwanda, fail to understand is the drastic changes that close to 30 years of peace and security have brought about. We are seeing enough wealth being generated by enough people to change investment patterns, especially when it comes to the youth segment. It’s not just about real estate and light-manufacturing. The opening of the boba tea location is, to me, the biggest proof that something rather interesting is afoot. I can’t wait to see what else these Gen Zs, and their disposable incomes, force the market to avail. The writer is a socio-political commentator
