Rwanda’s liberation holds global lessons

Rwanda’s Liberation Day may be enjoined to the world, as the tragic yet triumphant reason for its being observed today will forever be etched on the global psyche in the memory of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi it ended. The enjoinment includes US President Barrack Obama who has just wound up his Africa tour in time to be home for his country’s Fourth of July celebrations. We may include South Africa’s former president, Nelson Mandela, the ailing global hero – to whom we must wish godspeed to get better, despite the odds writ in his frailty and advanced age. Rwanda’s struggle as much as South Africa’s was based on ending abominable segregation. And so is the coincidence that Rwanda should be marking its Fourth of July on the same day as the US, itself born of a struggle to liberate itself from Great Britain nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago. That struggle perhaps reminds us that history has a habit of bringing together disparate coincidences that sometimes ring true across time and cultures. One other coincidence rings true to this day, to which humanity under the aegis of the United Nations might see some semblance in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The coincidence is in President Abraham Lincoln’s celebrated Gettysburg Address, when he recalled the words “liberty” and “the proposition that all men are created equal”. One hundred and fifty years ago, almost to day – actually between July 1 - 3 1863 – during the Battle of Gettysburg that saw the Union soldiers rout the Confederates, and in which many soldiers lost their lives, it would mark the beginning of the end of slavery in the United States of America. Obama is testimony to that legacy one-and-a-half centuries later in the second term of his presidency. There is also the legacy of Lincoln’s address that would be delivered four and a half months after the battle at Gettysburg, during the consecration of the ground on which the soldiers fell. Someone once said that an old soldier never dies, he just fades away. Mandela is an old soldier, and only history will tell how long it will take for the global statesman to fade away. But it may also seem that Lincoln in his address for the fallen soldiers – I would imagine even those of Umkonto we Sizwe as much as those of Inkotanyi and other liberation struggles – are yet to fade away. Lincoln spoke in what has remained a universal tone for humanity’s liberators, to which it bears to recall some of the words of his address for all our fallen liberators on whichever ground they fell, not forgetting my own, the Mau Mau: “In a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. […] It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” May it be so. Twitter: @gituram