John Muyenzi never thought he would be a published author. However, his experience as a refugee, his previous work in the field of development, as well as past and present events happening around the world, got him asking questions about humanity and its relations, which led to his book, We Are All The Same Species. He takes us through his insights on the need for us to learn from history, ponder on the causes of xenophobia, hatred, genocide and wars. Why this particular topic? I was trying to explore why people grow hatred towards each other, but I think my interest in human relationships started a while back when I was working with development on issues of poverty, which is a result of some activities that are against people’s wellbeing. Although it’s not a result of xenophobia, they are somehow related. We visited areas where people were miserable and we had different ways of approaching this subject, but my main problem became the fact that whatever good ideas, whatever theories we had about development, it never seemed to make much of an impact. I realised that you cannot do something for people and expect them to get better, they have to be involved somehow. They have to participate in the process and understand their own situation. That is when I started asking questions about human relations in general. How do you associate human relations with outcomes related to hatred? When you read the book you understand some of the manifestations, for instance, the relationships between men and women and how they are related to gender-based violence and discrimination. We are all born innocent human beings, somewhere along the way, people become different, and I wonder how it happens. Some communities in Kenya where I worked, you wonder what men do, everything is done by the women. Also as a refugee, I wondered why I couldn’t go back home. I was born in Rwanda, became a refugee in my early teens and had seen the country the way it was and I couldn’t explain the reasons behind it until I started reading politics, and it didn’t make sense. It’s not Rwanda alone, there have been many wars around the world and they all round up to human relations, so I thought of writing about it someday. As a first time published author, take us through your writing process? When I started, I actually wasn’t thinking about writing a book. Initially, I wanted to write articles and blogs. I sent some articles to local newspaper companies but they were never published, maybe because they were too long. I thought of blogs based on my experiences so as to generate more opinions from people. Every idea I got I put it down on my computer and it grew to 50 pages. My daughter-in-law encouraged me to develop it into a book and that is how it came about. Who is your target audience? The book is in English because I want my readers to be diverse since it covers several topics on human relations. Some of the things I write about have taken place elsewhere. My concern is that the human race, if it isn’t careful, might just destroy itself. Also, not caring about what happened made me write this because after what happened in Rwanda, over a million people died, and although people write about it, some people don’t learn any lessons. And I wonder why people are like this yet we are supposed to be the most intelligent species. That’s why it was written for a larger audience than Rwanda. I shared a copy with Rwanda Education Board and they plan to recommend it as a reference book for secondary schools. Are you going to write other books? For now, my son and I started a blog, antixenophobia.com, it has the book and a couple of articles about what is happening because we are in a period of Covid, and we are writing articles on how people are reacting towards it, and I hope to write other articles around the same theme. I’m challenging Rwandans to go beyond Ndi Umuyarwanda and start discussing topics about Rwandans and the need to stop being defined by foreigners.
