Remembering Rwanda

We need to do more than hope, we need to make it a reality. That means that we need to enlist those that are working for good to work together, we need to network and to utilise our collective resources for targeted and significant action.

Everyday in South Africa, where we also celebrate 10 years of democracy after a complicated oppression, I am in awe of how much work needs to be done. Everyday I am witness to both tragedy and triumph - but I know this - we must go on, we must go forward, and we must do it now.

While so many countries immerse themselves in strife - our world is being lost to us, the breath of our mornings forever lost - our lives, our futures tainted and the futures of our children snatched from their cradles.

Just a few years back, I lived some time in Jerusalem and travelled much around Israel. It was a girl called Simone in the northern town of Akko who convinced me to attend the holocaust museum there. At first I was reticent. But she persisted - she said: "You need to know, so that THIS may never happen again." I went. Indeed, 50 years + after the holocaust, I fail to understand things so painful that the mind cannot comprehend them, but I have learnt that people need to know. People need to learn to feel for each other again - and cease from reducing themselves to redundant elements of the systems that proliferate oppression.

We need to build awareness - so that people can act.

There is no "Africa", or "Europe" - there is you and me, each one of us in Africa, or Europe. People make a country, not countries, their people.

These things were NOT MEANT TO BE - it is time for us to wake up and realise that they are not INEVITABLE - they are the collective result of individual choices - made in error and blindness and greed. None of these characteristics are essential to the human character, they are forged by circumstance, social disintegration, lack of self esteem, domination....

But within us all we have the capacity to love, to nurture and to heal. We all must work towards the realisation of these qualities within ourselves and our communities and those of us who are willing and able, have a moral obligation to strive for our brothers freedoms, not only our own.

We write history each day as we each make a passage through our lives, every little action and every grand gesture. We are not puppets - and the time has come for us to break free of the kind of thinking that accepts inevitability, that instils in us inertia.

It is not escapist to say that the "International Community" fails Africa. In many ways, it does, in many ways, the global family fails itself, Africa fails herself and she fails the international community. It is so terribly easy to fail, but in so many ways, we must recognise we have triumphed.

We must strive to respond to any "accusations" of failure with open hearts - to say "If I have failed you brother - let me redress - if I can help you sister - let me take a stand, and if I fail because you are beyond my reach and means, may God help me to keep trying again."

Let us never forget.
(A response to Valentine Ngwa published in Pambazuka News last week, from the AFRO-NETS mailing list)