Kigali

Rwanda. I know what you are thinking. Genocide. Play the word-association game against Rwanda and your list probably includes just this one word. And, unless you are a devoted reader of Nicolas Kristof's columns, you would be forgiven--the western media has been awful about reporting anything about Africa other than war and disease. Other media have been equally one-sided--Hotel Rwanda is a tale within the genocide, Jared Diamond's chapter on the country in Collapse speculates about some of the reasons for the genocide, and pretty much all books published about the country recently focus on some aspect of that awful story.

Yet there seems to be something more profound going on in this country. Where other countries with recent conflicts, like Cambodia or Guatemala, can feel tired and broken, there is a vibrancy to contemporary Rwanda that would be remarkable even if the 1994 conflict had not occurred. That 800,000 people (around 10% of the population!) died here just 16 years ago makes what is happening now even more unusual.

Start with Kigali. As a traveler, the rule in Africa is generally to avoid capitals. They are dirty, crowded, chaotic, and dangerous in a hundred ways. The first thing we noticed on arrival in Kigali was the absence of garbage--not only did Rwanda ban the plastic shopping bags that litter the streets of other cities, but the country has had national public holidays where everyone goes out and picks up the
trash. Next thing we noticed were the moto-taxi drivers, all wearing helmets and holding helmets for their passengers (I don't think I've ever seen a motorcycle helmet in Africa before, and in this country EVERY driver is wearing one).

So we hopped on motos to head off to my friend Serena's house, and discovered something else. Paved and line-painted roads. With no potholes. And with streetlights. With groomed medians and roundabouts. More than once we saw work groups planting flowers along the shoulders of the roads. And in pretty much every direction there were cranes or construction crews, building office buildings, building new houses, transforming the city.

This is not to say that there is no poverty. Indeed, in the hinterlands there is still a lot of obvious poverty. Many people live in the most basic of mud huts. The population pressures that Jared Diamond wrote about are manifest in the agriculture that is present on every square inch of arable land, even on the most improbably sloped mountains. And there seems to be much less public investment in areas outside of the main roads and tourist attractions.

All this order and frenzied development seems to have come at a price. The president has an iron grip on power, and earned 94% of the vote in the last election. Moto drivers would only buy and wear helmets if there were some awful punishment in store for non-compliance. There is, apparently, no opposition media and no real opposition. And the success of quieting Rwanda has significantly destabilized the eastern Congo, as the losers in the 1994 conflict (who generally perpetrated the genocide) fled across the border into that lawless region.

But with those caveats, the results of all this effort are undeniable. This president is not unlike other African presidents who have consolidated power, but here that power has been used, at least in part, to build infrastructure, to protect moto-taxi skulls, and to otherwise invest in the country. At some point I will look up the numbers, as I have a hunch that all this development is being driven
by low corruption (!!) and very large post-genocide aid flows. But something is definitely going right in this place.