It is 14 years since I first set foot in Rwanda. It wasn’t my plan, but that of someone who was looking for someone to accompany him there, for reasons you don’t want to know.

Until then, Rwanda wasn’t among countries I wanted to visit or even expected to visit. I was in Uganda next door, yet Rwanda could as well have been as far away as Mongolia or Tajikistan, two countries that I have no reason to think I will ever visit.

The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, as it is now officially called, had found me in Europe. Perhaps because I had been hanging around mostly with African National Congress activists from South Africa and perhaps because the country was inching towards majority rule and attracted much attention, events in Rwanda had passed me by.

And so that accidental 2000 visit opened up a whole new world. First, it revealed, in sharp relief, the horrors of what had happened and how, at the time it happened, I had been blissfully unaware that perhaps the 20th century’s most heinous crime was being committed next door to where I called home.

Second, after a few interactions with some of Rwanda’s officials, it began to dawn on me that here was a country with very little in terms of resources, but where such was the determination to succeed, that things seemed to be happening by sheer will power.

For years before the visit, I had experienced, observed, and learnt about the dysfunction, weakness, shadowiness and corruption of the African state and of the fecklessness of leaders and public officials. Here, though, it seemed, was a country that told a different story.

And so began my journey of inquiry and learning about Rwanda to which as of now, there is no end in sight. Yet the more I come and go and sometimes get to feel I know it, the more Rwanda throws up things that make me wonder if I know it at all. Aspects of the recent genocide commemoration yet again made me wonder what I know and what I don’t.

Consider the issue of forgiveness and reconciliation, where those who have wronged others apologise, and those who have been wronged forgive in order to allow life to continue without rancour but with hope that the future will be better than the past and present.

I have known for years about and even witnessed the extraordinary courage perpetrators and survivors of the genocide have shown in asking for forgiveness and forgiving.

And last week I watched a courageous young man face hundreds of people at a commemorative event and tell them about his participation in the killings, his struggle and failure to kill himself after he was freed from prison, the forgiveness he sought and received from his victims who are now his neighbours back in the village, his decision to go to school eventually, where he sits in the same Primary Four classroom as his young daughter, and his hope for the future in a country that, unlike the one he was born in, has turned its back on the sectarianism that drove him to kill.

Why, I wondered, have people who endured so much suffering, some at the hands of neighbours, relatives, and friends, been so willing to forgive?

If one has read the books on the genocide, spoken to survivors, been to the genocide memorials and seen and heard bits of what happened, it is difficult not to wonder. Two survivors’ testimonies I came across suggest the decision is very personal and in some cases may not be as difficult as an outsider may imagine:

Survivor A: “I used to hate him. When he came to my house and knelt down before me and asked for forgiveness, I was moved by his sincerity. Now, if I cry for help, he comes to rescue me. When I face any issue, I call him.”

Survivor B: “After I was chased from my village and Dominique and others looted it, I became homeless and insane. Later, when he asked my pardon, I said: ‘I have nothing to feed my children. Are you going to help raise my children? Are you going to build a house for them?’ Dominique came with some survivors and former prisoners. They built my family a house. Since then I feel peaceful in my heart, and I share this peace with my neighbours.”

As for the perpetrators, atonement and forgiveness allow for a new beginning, as one pointed out: “I burnt her house. I attacked her in order to kill her and her children, but they escaped. When I was released from jail, if I saw her, I would run and hide. I decided to ask her for forgiveness. To have good relationships with the person to whom you did evil deeds — we thank God.”

Occasionally one reads about the failure of and resistance to reconciliation in Rwanda. True, in some instances, but clearly only facets of a very complex and evolving reality.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]