At Kigali Genocide Memorial, I sat among filmmakers, authors, musicians, and civil servants as the Minister of National Unity and Civic Engagement, Dr. Jean-Damascène Bizimana, addressed a gathering marking 32 years since the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
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Commemoration is never joyful. It is a painful encounter with memory, yet I left carrying something unexpected – a deepened sense of responsibility as a writer.
Because one question would not leave me: What did writers do?
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History is clear. The genocide did not begin with weapons; it began with words. Before there were roadblocks, there were manifestos. Before mass violence, there were newspapers and radio broadcasts carefully designed to make killing feel not only justified but necessary. Hassan Ngeze, the editor of the extremist Kangura newspaper, used his publication to print lists of Tutsi names, dehumanise an entire community, and prepare the public imagination for what followed. Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza co-founded Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) whose broadcasters directed killers in real time, calling the Tutsi "inyenzi" [cockroaches] and instructing listeners to cut down the "tall trees." The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted both men not for carrying weapons, but for the words they produced and broadcast.
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Someone wrote those scripts, someone read them on air, someone listened – and then acted.
Propaganda rarely announces itself as hatred. It disguises itself as political commentary or righteous self-defense — until, slowly, it changes how people see one another.
A document cannot be judged by its words alone, it must be judged by its consequences, its context, and the ideology it helped sustain.
The responsibility writers cannot escape
The danger did not end in 1994. It evolved – and today it wears the respectable clothing of international publishing.
Beyond Rwanda's borders, a troubling pattern persists. Authors, journalists, and commentators some with prestigious platforms and international audiences — continue to produce works that misrepresent the genocide, rehabilitate discredited narratives, and provide intellectual respectability to denial. These are not isolated opinions, they form part of a coordinated effort to reframe what happened, shifting focus away from survivors and toward revisionist accounts that the ICTR and decades of testimony have already addressed.
When such narratives are published by prestigious houses and celebrated in Western literary circles, they do not merely misinform — they weaponize prestige against truth, making it harder for survivors to be believed and easier for the world to forget its obligations. Words that once prepared the ground for genocide now work quietly to erase it. This is why narrative is not merely a cultural concern; it is a matter of justice.
We who call ourselves writers love to celebrate storytelling but Rwanda demands an honest reckoning: influence is morally neutral. The same pen that records testimony can distort it. The same platform that amplifies healing can legitimize harm. To be a writer is not automatically to stand on the right side of history – it is to hold power, and to choose, with full awareness, how to use it.
President Paul Kagame has reminded us that historical clarity is a duty we cannot escape. Legal frameworks can restrict harmful speech, but they cannot build the architecture of truth that makes revisionism implausible. That architecture is built story by story, over generations.
Rwanda is 32 years on. An entire generation has been born into a country that chose reconstruction and truth over silence. Rwandan writers and African scholars must now reshape the narrative with the same intentionality once used to destroy it – centering survivor voices, challenging revisionism, and investing in African-authored accounts of African history.
Those who planted hatred understood the power of narrative, those who distort history today understand it still.
The pen that wounded must now heal but healing requires courage. And it begins with the truth.
The writer is an author and publisher.