Rwandans are liars and it is part of their culture. From childhood, they are taught not to tell the truth, especially if it can hurt them. This is MIchela Wrong’s central thesis in her latest book - Do Not Disturb. Using this rampart, Wrong attacks the story of Rwanda’s obvious recovery from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in 1994, and weaves an alternative story of death, destruction, violence, and intrigue as the daily lot of the average Rwandan today. Her claim of Rwandan’s predilection to lying is the exact opposite of my childrens experience growing up, as well as the experience of millions of other children that it cannot pass unexamined and unchallenged. It defies imagination that of the more than 13 million Rwandans, only two, to wit, Kayumba Nyamwasa, and the late Patrick Karegeya, whose story Ms. Wrong believes and tells were the only ones raised in the truth, and the rest of us are steeped in and were raised to dissimulate and tell lies. So what are Rwandan’s relationship with the truth? Is it as tangential as Ms Wrong would have us believe? As it happens, the notions of Ukuri (truth), and its opposite Ikinyoma (lie) uburyarya (dissimulation), were important in Rwanda’s rich culture, and they remain so today. Our proverbs and legends are useful guides to the important role played by the truth or lack of it in the socio-economic interactions among Rwandans. Experts have collected more than 5,000 Rwandan proverbs and over 50 of these deal with the important subject of the truth. The story they tell is the exact opposite of what Michela Wrong presents in her book. They describe a society in which the truth was a key building block and in which lies and dissimulation were frowned upon, actively discouraged, and many times sanctioned. Aho kubeshya watona buke - It is better to lose your superior’s favor than to lie. Aho kuryamira ukuriwaryamira ubugi bw’intorezo - It is better to lay your body on the sharp end of an axe than to use it to cover the truth. Ikinyoma cyica nyiracyo - A lie kills its author. Ukuri guca mu ziko ntigushye - Truth passes through fire and does not get burnt. These are the values that are inculcated into Rwandas children, to my knowledge. They extol the importance of truth-telling and are so important that one of them is a leitmotif of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. But Rwandans were also aware that ukuri guca mu ziko ntigushye despite the evident value of the truth as a critical glue to socio-economic cohesion, lies may be attractive and liars may hold sway at least for a time. Many proverbs are warnings against the temporary value of the disseminated lie. Ikinyoma cyicaza umugabo ku ntebe rimwe - A lie provides a seat to a man only once. Ikinyoma gihaka umugabo imyaka ibiri - A lie profits a man for only two years. Ikinyoma kimara iminsi ntikimara umwaka - A Lie lasts for days only, not for a full year. Finally, in the cosmic struggle of the truth vs lies and dissimulation, Rwandans were always confident of the victory of the truth. Ukuri kwimura ikinyoma ku ntebe; The truth unseats the lie. Ubucya bukira buheza ikinyoma; Daybreak and the setting sun puts an end to a lie. These are the values Rwandan children are imbued with. Whatever shortcomings they may exhibit as adults, it is not true that Rwandan culture glorifies lying and dissimulation as Ms.Wrong claims. Quite the opposite. And the belief in the final triumph of the truth, idealistic as it may sound, has been borne out by recent history. Colonialism and its genocidal post-colonial elites installed some lies that culminated in the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994: - That a popular (Hutu) revolution abolished the Tutsi monarchy through the so-called Gitarama Coup d’état. This is nonsense because the Gitarama coup dietetic-placebo of January 28, 1961, and yet Rwanda became independent on July 1, 1962. Surely a Coup in a country under Belgian tutelage if not naked colonialism against a local authority devoid of power is ridiculous at best, and an exercise in political dissembling and dissimulation. - Mgs Parraudin in 1959, claimed that all the riches and the power are in the hands of people of the same race (Tutsi). But leaving aside the characterization of Rwandans into different races (an enduring colonial lie), the deliberate exclusion of sections of Rwandan communities from the exercise of any authority was a Belgian creation. These political lies, propagated by Rwanda’s Colonial masters and their local collaborators eventually turned the Tutsi into an alien race and a legitimate object of extermination. Thatching macabre project was foiled by Rwandan PatrioticForces led by the RPF, whose leitmotif is Ukuri guca mu ziko ntigushye, is not only poetic justice, but it is also a testimony if any were needed, that Michela Wrong’s central thesis that all Rwandans are liars is, not to put too fine a point on it, simply wrong. After all, as Rwandan wisdom has it, ukuri kuvugaukuzi ntikuvuga ukuze - the truth is told by he who knows it, not he who is the elder. Ms. Wrong would do well to ponder this, her expressed deference to the person she calls ‘the general’ notwithstanding.
