The people of Rwanda were covered in a sombre mood a few days ago as they marked 20 years since their country witnessed genocide.
Stories were told of how hundreds of bodies of people especially of the Tutsi ethnicity group, which I visited last week, the story is re-told through moving pictures, films and text especially picked from newspaper and magazine reports of the time. As you may have been told in several media reports, Kigali and Rwanda have re-organized themselves and are taking every growth opportunity that comes their way seriously.
Uganda has its terrible episodes including the Luwero Bush War and the northern Uganda armed conflict that lasted two decades as government forces battled Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). I was born and raised in Luwero. What I saw as a child, and the testimonies I grew up hearing, were horrible. In 2010, as part of an international crew, I filmed in Gulu for a month and some of the stories I recorded there were unimaginable.
Today, if the Ugandan government decided to set up centralized memorial centres to re-collect the events of Luwero and Northen Uganda, it would be overwhelmed by moving submissions. These are events we probably will prefer to keep under there, hoping that time will erase them.
Next time you are in Kigali, please visit the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre and get a feel of it. If you are a people’s leader, you will know why it is important to be sensitive to others, and therefore act responsibly.
As God blesses Rwanda during this period, He should bless Uganda to avoid another ditch. We are one and the same. Amen!
