The power within

ONE British playwright in medieval theater times, Hannah More, called forgiveness an economy of the heart... for it saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred and the waste of spirits. Today those words reckon our understanding with greater passion as we commemorate the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.The culture of polite but fast learning and the value of the power to forgive give us one of humanity’s virtues – tranquility. Tranquility of any component of nature – spirit, sea, neighbour, name it – tells much about activity and define how man can tame nature to defeat necessity –physical and emotional.Just like it is with nature, turbulence of the mind can cloud perception, injure interpretation and create a whole blackness of yawning void of knowledge.Some of the arresting facets that prevent us from registering tranquility in spirit and body are to do with failure to forgive – others and ourselves, becoming hostages of history in the process. And more evil!In these 100 days, beginning 7th April, Rwanda and the world commemorate and reflect on what befell the country when evil took over good with lightening but shocking efficiency, justice suffocated with impunity, humility and human dignity destroyed with a zeal as radical as religious commitment, truth burnt with rage and civilisation fled in screaming torrents of terror. And more evil!This juncture of history (commemoration) in Rwanda has continued to be used by all; the rich, the poor, the leaders, the elite – all, to ponder on transforming the past moments of recrimination and red-hot hatred into buttressing exceptional pillars of unity, reconciliation and, in the process, writing the last epitaph to the ideology of genocide. And more hope!The RPF-led government has succeeded in taking good where it had never stepped before –geographically and in the minds of the people – eliminating collective guilt, talking to all people with one mellifluous educated voice of looking to the future with steadfast focus, empowering and actually giving them (all) the torch to light in the darkest of corners so that they do not stumble, nay, fall again, leading from the front, telling and showing the followers how possible it is – to live, school, work, play and develop together. And more hope!The creative destruction – of the ideology of genocide, terror and hopelessness has opened the eyes and minds of Rwandans. Of peasants. Of elites. Of politicians. That creative destruction has dissected and exposed the deceptions that were given great esteem heretofore. The creative destruction of evil has taken the course of using such practices as Girinka. Passing the calf to a neighbour, a former enemy, with a contagious passion of love is something to love and live. It is of course a direct agent against poverty, but an indelible and underlying symbol of reconciliation.I am talking of opening very gigantic, sophisticated barriers – of time-honoured hatred, poverty, revisionism and denial – that made Rwanda a miserable gulag prior to the 1994 liberation, using such simple but master keys as Girinka, Gacaca, Bye-Bye Nyakatsi, name them, that open a multiplicity of doors. It requires and takes great ingenuity.The RPF-led government is now telling all to open their eyes towards the good that unite all and shun the bad, past and present, that divides a people and the entire nation.So, the significant amount of reverberations in the media about Rwanda that grace the world pages and airwaves during this period of mourning (but, most importantly, of pondering and reflecting), should bear in mind the new mindset of Rwandans’ new focus of shaping their destiny and the paths (some curved and many under construction) they will walk to get there.The Genocide regime enjoyed, with glee, to put a fox in a henhouse. The people who stopped the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi are saying a good shepherd fights for his sheep – life and feeding. And the world of difference is an open book. Just imagine a Rwanda with a genocide in the past, and failure to forgive today. Good annihilates evil. That is the power!