[afro-nets] Remembering Rwanda (5)

[" Nicole Venter <<shae@worldonline.co.za>>]

Remembering Rwanda (5)
----------------------

Dear Valentine,

Thank-you for your comments - I answer within your mail.

-- 
 > Nicole,
 > I really hope that the African Renaissance is a reality.


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 the good
to work together, we need to network and to utilise our collec-
tive 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 trag-
edy 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.

--
Easter says to us that despite everything to the contrary, his
will for us will prevail, love will prevail over hate, justice
over injustice and oppression, peace over exploitation and bit-
terness.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu
--

 > Ten years is too short a time for us to understand how our so
 > called brothers and sisters can sit down, plan, import ma-
 > chetes and slaughter almost a million of their neighbors, rape
 > many and plunder their property. I wonder how long it takes
 > for the memories of such barbaric acts to go away; especially
 > so when there are many things to remind the victims including
 > HIV.


Just a few years back, I lived some time in Jerusalem and trav-
eled 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 under-
stand - holocausts and genocides and violence and war continue -
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 oppres-
sion.

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


 > Rather than Africa taking a leaf from Rwanda, we see neighbor-
 > ing DR Congo in anarchy, Sudan on the verge of their own geno-
 > cide and my native Cameroon under a very uneasy calm; which
 > lessons have we learnt? These issues get difficult to compre-
 > hend and at times one is tempted to wonder whether such things
 > were meant to be.


There is no "Africa", or "Europe" - there is you and me, each
one of us in Africa, or Europe. People make a country, not coun-
tries, 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 col-
lective result of individual choices - made in error and blind-
ness 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.


 > After all, history teaches us that men and nations behave
 > wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.


Indeed - but we write history each day as we each make 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 in-
stills in us inertia.


 > In all these, you will always hear our people in their usually
 > escapist tendency say 'The International Community failed us!'
 >
 > They should rather say how they have failed themselves. I weep
 > for Mother Africa! --- Valentine.


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 In-
ternational 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 re-
dress - 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.

In Solidarity,

Nicole Venter
Project Development - Restoration Africa Magazine
The Southern Health & Ecology Institute
South Africa - Botswana
mailto:shae@worldonline.co.za