Earlier today I stood on the grounds of the Kigali Genocide Memorial.
It is a place of profound, heavy silence. The kind of silence that has weight, that presses against you, that asks something of you before you have decided to give it. The memorial is the final resting place of more than 250,000 victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. But 250,000 is only the number buried here. Across Rwanda, the Rwandan government’s official count records more than one million people killed in one hundred days. More than 6 men, women, and children murdered every minute, of every hour, of every day, for three months. What the memorial insists on, with every grave and every name it carries, is that the 250,000 buried here will not be erased a second time. They are counted. They are held.
Walking through the exhibits, I saw the evidence of children maimed with machetes and families burned alive. What it laid bare was not just the event itself but the conditions that produced it. Hatred, when it is systematically nurtured. Ethnic profiling, when it is given official language. Discrimination, when it is not merely tolerated by the state but actively constructed by it. Rwanda in 1994 was not a spontaneous eruption of violence. It was the destination of a road that had been deliberately built, over years, one policy at a time, one broadcast at a time, one identity card at a time. What the memorial forces you to reckon with is how much planning goes into a collapse.
I stayed in the silence for a long time.
Then I walked out into Kigali.
I have been here for several days now. The city is clean, organised, and quietly purposeful in a way that very few cities on this continent are. The streets function. The institutions are, by the standards of the region, surprisingly accountable. Women now constitute 63.8% of the Rwandan parliament, the highest share of any parliament in the world. Rwanda is building a technology hub that draws genuine comparison to Singapore. It hosts continental summits with a competence that much larger countries struggle to match. From the outside, you would not guess that thirty years ago, neighbours were killing neighbours with farm tools.
This juxtaposition, the memorial and the city it sits in, is the most powerful argument I have encountered for a specific idea. Not the idea that suffering produces strength, which is a cliché that serves the powerful more than it serves the suffering. But the idea that what a society chooses to do with its history determines what it can build on top of it.
Rwanda made four deliberate choices that I keep returning to.
The first was to dismantle the official categories of division. The government abolished ethnic classifications on identity documents. There are no longer Hutus or Tutsis in official Rwanda. There are Rwandans. This was not a denial of history. It was a refusal to let the instruments of genocide continue to operate in peacetime.
The second was to choose truth over punishment as the primary mechanism of justice. The traditional Gacaca court system brought communities together, face to face, perpetrator and survivor, to speak what happened and to hear it spoken. It was not perfect. Nothing about rebuilding a society after a genocide can be perfect. But it chose the acknowledgment of reality over the endless deferral of institutional trials, and it chose the possibility of living together over the impossibility of fully satisfying justice.
The third was to build, with relentless discipline, institutions that work. Anti-corruption enforcement. Accountability for public officials. Investment in infrastructure and technology. These are not romantic choices. They are grinding, unglamorous, daily choices, made consistently over three decades by a society that had every reason to collapse and decided not to.
The fourth, and for me the most significant, was to remember. Not to perform grief once a year and bury it the other eleven months. To build permanent spaces of honest witness, where the nation comes collectively to look at what happened, to grieve it, to refuse to let it become comfortable history. The memorial I stood in this morning is not a museum in the way most museums are museums. It is an ongoing act of public reckoning.
I understood all of this abstractly until I stood there this morning and understood it in my body.
I stood on those grounds as an Igbo man, born and raised in Obosi, a small town in eastern Nigeria that saw the blunt force of the Nigerian Civil War. I grew up in the shadow of an unhealed past. My mother wept over the siblings she lost to a war that ended decades before I was born. The trauma was passed down in whispers, in things not said at the dinner table, in the way certain subjects closed the room.
What I find astonishing, what I still find astonishing, is that in all my years of school in Nigeria, we were never taught that war in history class. Not once. The Nigerian Civil War killed over three million people. The majority of them were not soldiers. They were children, who starved to death because the Nigerian federal government imposed a naval blockade that deliberately cut off food supply to Biafra. Hunger was not a side effect of that war. It was a weapon. Three-quarters of those who died were children. And yet the war was simply absent from our curriculum. As if forgetting was the same thing as healing.
Rwanda answered that assumption this morning.
You cannot heal a wound by pretending it is not there. You heal it by cleaning it out, by exposing it, by letting it close slowly and leave a scar that is visible. The scar is the point. The scar is what tells you and everyone who comes after you: this happened here, and we survived it, and we chose not to let it remain unacknowledged. The scar is not a sign of weakness. It is the proof that something lived.
Nigeria, and many other nations across the continent, have chosen the other path. The path of official forgetting. The path that leaves deep resentments in the soil, available to any future demagogue who knows where to dig.
True reconciliation does not begin with amnesia. It begins with the willingness to look directly at what happened, to name it without euphemism, to grieve it publicly and collectively, and then to make the specific, institutional choices that prevent its repetition. This is harder than forgetting. It is also the only path that actually works. A foundation built on buried pain is not a foundation. It is a time bomb.
What Rwanda has shown is that even the deepest wound in a society’s history can become, if tended to honestly, the very source of its regeneration. The memorial and the city are not in contradiction. The memorial is why the city is possible. The grief was not suppressed into silence. It was transformed, through deliberate reckoning, into something the country could build on.
I left the memorial and walked back through the streets of Kigali. The quiet purposefulness was the same. But I was carrying something different. The specific weight of 250,000 names I will never know. A mother’s grief I grew up inside without fully understanding. And a question I could not put down.
What becomes possible for a people who choose to remember.
Not as a question. As the shape of the answer.
