Rwanda Reborn
From the horrors of genocide, this tiny nation is emerging as a surprise success story in Africa. But can it truly overcome its past?
MUTOBO, RWANDA—Ezekiel Nzamwita fidgets awkwardly in a ratty T-shirt and baggy jacket. The onetime primary-school teacher is still getting used to civilian garb after spending a decade in prison-issue pink jumpsuits. "Ten years is a long time," he says, "but things have become better." A confessed killer, Nzamwita is one of about 8,000 genocide suspects released in February from Rwanda's overcrowded prisons as part of a national reconciliation effort after the 1994 bloodletting that claimed a million lives. The 51-year-old Hutu admitted being part of a group that killed a Tutsi man and stole his cows. Nzamwita won his freedom after asking the victim's brother for forgiveness.
He has spent the past few weeks at a "solidarity camp" run by the government. The camp is part of a massive effort to help reintegrate former prisoners, returning rebel soldiers, and longtime refugees into the new Rwanda. Before being released, Nzamwita must sit through a month of lectures on subjects ranging from Rwandan history and the government's political philosophy to the current banking system and new national health insurance scheme. "I think Rwanda will be a correct society now," Nzamwita says, only days away from his full release. "Even in prison, people regret that they were involved in the genocide."
Walking around the capital of Kigali, it is possible, at least for a moment, to forget that only 13 years ago, this tidy city was littered with corpses from one of the most brutal genocides the world has seen. Now, the same streets are scrubbed clean and the gutters are painstakingly weeded. "What's surprising here," says U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda Michael Arietti, "is that this place works at all." Indeed, it is, by some measures, thriving. Modern office buildings and gleaming shopping malls now dominate the center of town. New prosperous suburban developments look distinctly European, with their red-tile roofs and bountiful gardens. (Not everything works-the city's 10 traffic lights have been dark for months.) In fact, Kigali has now become one of the safest, most functional cities in Africa-particularly in comparison with its troubled neighbors, whether it's lawless Congo to the west or the crime-infested Kenyan capital of Nairobi to the east.
While Rwanda might not yet be the Switzerland of East Africa, its government has charted a surprisingly ambitious course for this tiny and startlingly green country known as the Land of a Thousand Hills. The goal is to become a regional stronghold for communications and computing, a place where ethnic divisions like Hutu and Tutsi are a thing of the past. Fiber-optic cable is being laid throughout the country, and Rwanda soon will have perhaps the most advanced broadband wireless Internet network on the continent. "We will be the nervous system for the region," says Romain Murenzi, the country's minister for science and technology. While it still has a very long way to go, Rwanda's broad-based government is winning praise from foreign governments and aid groups alike for its good intentions and surprising lack of corruption. It has doubled primary-school enrollment in the past decade and has established a national health insurance system. "They are," says Arietti, "doing all the right things."
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