Dr Richard Sezibera took the words right out of my mouth. I remember back in Burundi, when I was barely a teenager, just shortly before the Genocide against the Tutsi, when all of us used to actively engage in activities that promoted a sense of oneness through various community endeavours such as fundraising, itorero, summer jobs and other cultural events to promote and uphold that which the RPF-Inkotanyi stood for.
Editor,
RE: "Why RPF-Inkotanyi is not a political party but a family” (The New Times, July 20).
Dr Richard Sezibera took the words right out of my mouth. I remember back in Burundi, when I was barely a teenager, just shortly before the Genocide against the Tutsi, when all of us used to actively engage in activities that promoted a sense of oneness through various community endeavours such as fundraising, itorero, summer jobs and other cultural events to promote and uphold that which the RPF-Inkotanyi stood for.
This was and forever will be a sense of community, oneness, family (umuryango).
I remember grandmothers selling their baked goodies across town just to raise money in support of the then fighting sons and daughters of Rwanda, the RPF-Inkotanyi, in hope that one day we’ll all be able to live together in peace just like our ancestors before us.
It’s an overwhelming joy to witness that the RPF-Inkotanyi never lost sight of that vision and I just wish all Rwandans would wake up from their self-inflicted trance, a legacy of colonialism, and see themselves as one and simply drop this incessant and pointless need to form political factions which serve no other purpose but an illusory "opposition” against one another, simply because western neo-colonialism demands it.
But I have hope.
Ali Rukariza