The Devil Abolished in My Mind (Original)

Since 1959, all the people in my country have experienced the impact of the genocide ideology which affected different minds of the people, and this led to the severe and a deadly slaughtering of more than 1,000,000 innocent Tutsi in 1994 genocide, leaving the country politically, socially and economically unstable and disorderly. In 1962, when my mother was only one year old, she fled with her mother who was wounded everywhere on her body by the genocide perpetrators, to the north of my country in Uganda and they settled there for a long period of time. My mother met my father in a hard life as a refugee. They both decided to make a new life and at least to have a new family since they had both lost a very big number of family members on either side, and thus I was born in 1989 in this country. As a young man, I grew up knowing that the country I’m living in wasn’t mine. I started to learn true stories about what happened and why I wasn’t born in my country, and if that was the case, why I could not go back to my country. The answer from my parents was that we can’t go back because so many people in our country hate us and they don’t wish to see anyone from the so called Tutsi tribe, that we were called snakes and sometimes cockroaches, and also that the country was like a glass full of water where you can’t add on any more. All this made me grow up knowing that there is a group of people searching for me, not to give me prizes but to kill me. This made me develop a bad intention of waiting for a favorable climate for me to make a good revenge. But between 1994 and 2000, when we went back to our country after Rwanda Patriotic Front had overthrown the Hutu government, more than 120,000 genocide perpetrators were imprisoned and were not yet tried in court. It was costly to the government and there was a need to build more prisons instead of rebuilding commercial houses. In 2001, the government developed gacaca courts, where well-respected elders known as Inyangamugayo were elected based on their honesty by the people of the community. Gacaca originates from our national language Kinyarwanda meaning short, clean cut grass or umucaca. It symbolizes a gathering place for elders to sit on and judge the trial, a system of community justice inspired by tradition and culture, focusing on criminal prosecutions, putting justice partially into the hands of the victims with a mission of achieving truth, justice and reconciliation. Even though gacaca was mainly focusing on unity and reconciliation of Rwandans, it was still very hard for me to change my mind to forgive, not until 2004, in one of the gacaca courts, where a best friend of mine forgave a man who slaughtered both of his parents, two brothers and three sisters while he was watching them die. I changed my mind to develop myself and my country instead of focusing on revenging in 2005 when I was 16. I also forgave all those that killed my family. Since then, my life became more successful. Focused on being an entrepreneur, I now grow watermelons and I offer jobs to five young men on a daily basis to earn a living. Through people like me who changed because of gacaca, now more than 98% want their children to think of themselves as Rwandans rather than Hutu, Tutsi or Twa, based on Rwanda Reconciliation Barometer. Rwanda’s development is second in Africa and first in East Africa. Even though it is a country that lost the biggest number of people in the shortest period of time, united we stand to develop our country and the world. If it wasn’t for the culture of gacaca courts, the devil of genocide ideology wouldn’t have been abolished from my mind. I now call upon all the young men and women in the whole world not to look at their culture as a burden, but as an initiator of their development economic wise. Rogers Kimuli (Age 24, Rwanda) Higher Institute of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry  Youth Category – 1st Prize 2013 International Essay Contest for Young People  So pathetic and creative! What do you think? Tell us in the Comment box below.