As a part of the 14th Annual African American, Native American, Caribbean and the Americas Heritage Conference, NEIU hosted the bestselling author and award-winning foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer, who gave the keynote address titled “Up From Genocide: Can Rwanda Become the Star of Africa?”.
Kinzer has written several eye opening, non-fiction books about American foreign policy, U.S. involvement in foreign affairs, and its often ineffective overthrow of foreign governments.
Drawing on many of the issues discussed in his latest book, A Thousand Hills,» Kinzer spoke about Rwanda’s history as a Belgian colony, racial tensions fostered by Belgians, a civil war involving Hutus and Tutsis, the horrific genocide of 1994 (in which 800,000 were killed in just 100 days), and Rwanda’s recovery from genocide.
Considering the extensive difficulties it had to deal with in the aftermath of the war, Rwanda’s road to recovery has been relatively successful. This recovery and the current prospect of Rwanda as the first middle-income country in Africa are largely attributed to the leadership of Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame.
Kinzer spoke in much detail about the different policies that have made Kagame’s government successful and about Kagame’s own account of what’s necessary to make Rwanda a fully recovered and more developed country.
Kinzer described the Kugame formula of success to be principled on security, gender equality, the eradication of government corruption, low dependence on foreign aid, excellent relationships with the West’s private sector, and a strong sense of unity.
Although Rwanda’s racial tension and hatred saw its peak in the 1990’s, Kugame has been able to alleviate the wounds and unite his people through a development for progress plan known as Vision 2020. This ambitious plan aims to achieve an annual growth rate of at least 7 percent, access to quality healthcare and basic infrastructure, and access to education for all children by the year 2020.
In achieving these goals, Kugame’s hope is to transform Rwanda into a trade and commercial hub of East Africa. These ambitions for a better Rwanda for all citizens is what has brought people together and allowed them to reconcile and forgive one another, in hopes of creating a better country in which it will be impossible for genocide to ever happen again.
“[Rwanda] is an example of what a difference leadership can make, it is on a track to do something that no African country has ever done before, it is a place that might be full of lessons for the world and in the way it dealt with its own trauma, there’s a lesson for each of us as individuals as well,” said Kinzer in his closing remarks on how Rwanda is still a very poor country that faces many challenges.