Following the signing of the peace and prosperity deal by the presidents of Rwanda and DR Congo in Washington this week, we can expect the cacophony of international “expert” voices who will speak with moral certainty and local ignorance. They will recite the tropes about Africa, but they don’t know the streets, skylines, or political rhythms - let alone the beliefs, goals, and values of the people whose future seek to arbitrate. A simple test for “expertise” Imagine a simple test for anyone offering sweeping judgments about Rwanda: name the tallest buildings in Kigali, the main streets that define the city’s daily flow, the country’s third largest town, and two cabinet ministers. Do you know the words for peace or hope in the local language, Kinyarwanda? Most self-styled experts in New York, Geneva, or London would fail this test in seconds. They could lecture at length about “authoritarianism,” “extractive elites,” or “plundered minerals,” in poor nations, yet have no mental picture of a Friday traffic jam on KN 3 Road, a dawn bus pulling out of Huye, or a mayor working hard to get a new school roof or improve the health clinic. This is what might be called “principlism”: the habit or established approach of judging a place almost entirely by other nations and western abstractions, with little obligation to know Rwanda in its own textures and contradictions. It is politics without insight, morality without deliberation, assertions without a conscience. A certain class of international officials moves from report to report, applying the same template across continents: tick the box for competitive elections, scold about term limits, recycle paragraphs about “shrinking civic space.” Most of the time these experts have never been to the country they seek to influence. In quiet gatherings, some call them “robots” – programmable machines that execute the software of global governance, regardless of sovereignty, context, values, attitudes, or assumptions about life. African experts and “the distant gaze” Many of Africa’s most incisive writers have warned against this kind of “distant gaze”. Wole Soyinka has long satirized the imported certainties of those who descend on African societies armed with theories but no patience for their “lived particulars”. In his plays and essays, the real villains are often “the mimics” – local and foreign – who treat universal principles as short cuts and substitutes for knowledge, rather than a framework that must evolve, be tested, and linked to present reality. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has described how colonial and post-colonial elites were trained to look outward first, using other people’s categories to judge their own societies. He calls for a “decolonization of the mind” precisely because external narratives flatten experience; they make it easier to denounce than to understand. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argues, “reducing any people to a single story is a form of power: it freezes them in someone else’s script.” Rwanda has been caught in such a single story, “written in conference rooms far from its streets.” Teju Cole, writing about the ethics of looking at Africa from afar, has dissected the “well meaning” observer who feels entitled to a moral verdict after a single visit, a single dossier, a grisly statistic. What unites these voices is a simple insistence: you do not have the right to pronounce on a society whose everyday life you have not cared to learn. Nadine Gordimer, in her examinations of South Africa’s fraught transition, showed how people emerging from catastrophe often find themselves living in arrangements that are morally untidy yet historically necessary. Demands for purity from the outside can be a way of refusing to grapple with the mess of real change. Chinua Achebe – whose novels took apart the easy stories that colonizers told themselves – understood that whoever controls the narrative about a country’s “failures” and “successes” quietly shapes the options for that country’s people. Rwanda’s starting point: a shattered state Any judgment on Rwanda that ignores its starting conditions is, at best, naïve. In 1994 the country was not just poor; it was physically and morally wrecked. Nearly a million people were killed in a hundred days. Institutions collapsed, infrastructure lay in ruins, and social trust had been massacred along with bodies. The basic functions of a state – to keep people alive, to protect them from their neighbors, to reopen schools and clinics – had to be rebuilt from nothing, less than nothing. The new leadership faced tasks that few Western democracies have confronted: demobilizing armed groups, handling hundreds of thousands (millions?) of perpetrators, resettling refugees, and keeping a traumatized society from sliding back into revenge. Under such conditions, the priority was not to perfect a liberal constitution, but to prevent a second cataclysm. Order was the most important human right. A governance system for an early-stage nation Out of that wreckage emerged a governance model that confounds principlist expectations. Rwanda built a highly disciplined state with a strong presidency and a young technocratic bureaucracy. Officials are evaluated on performance contracts (Umuhigo); line ministries are expected to deliver results that can be measured in kilometers of road, school completion rates, health insurance coverage. This is not a comfortable arrangement for opposition politicians or combative journalists. It is also not an accident. From the perspective of those who rebuilt Rwanda, a fragile, early-stage nation could not afford a permanently contested, weak state. The memory of a government that incited its own citizens to murder sits just behind the current preference for order. The leadership’s wager has been that a generation of results-oriented rule is the price of moving from survival to prosperity. Critics in international NGOs (snug in the leafy suburbs of America or a café in Europe) see only the constraints; pragmatic Rwandans who remember the 1990s know how bad it could have been. African thinkers help illuminate this tension. Soyinka warns that power must never be given a free pass; there is always a need for “irreverent scrutiny”. Yet he also understands that post catastrophe politics is morally compromised by definition; no path forward is perfect. Ngũgĩ would likely ask whether Rwandans themselves are setting the terms of their political evolution, rather than having them imposed through aid conditionality or diplomatic pressure. Gordimer’s work reminds us that a society clawing its way out of mass violence may look illiberal to contented democracies – and yet may be answering to a deeper imperative: “never again,” rendered not as slogan but as institutional design. Achievements the robots don’t see Principlism tends to minimize what does not fit its script. A more grounded view must hold Rwanda’s achievements and its shortcomings in the same frame. Over roughly three decades, the country has done much that was once thought impossible. It has delivered some of the fastest sustained economic growth in the world, lifting large numbers of people out of absolute poverty. Public health indicators have radically improved; deaths from common infectious diseases have fallen, and life expectancy has risen by more than a decade. Primary and lower secondary school enrollment have expanded nationwide, with girls’ participation catching up to and sometimes surpassing that of boys. Corruption is lower and more tightly policed than in neighboring states, helping to create an environment where investors follow through on their promises instead of fleeing at the first shakedown. Kigali has built a reputation for order: streets cleaned regularly, streetlights functioning, public spaces taken seriously (Umuganda). Environmental measures such as a long-standing ban on plastic bags, wildlife protection, and nationwide community clean up days are not mere optics; they shape daily life. Women occupy a majority of seats in parliament and have pushed through legal changes on property, inheritance, and gender-based violence that have rebalanced the scales of social power. To acknowledge Rwanda’s achievements is not to grant its rulers moral immunity. But to ignore those achievements is to tell an incomplete and profoundly unfair story about a society that has fought its way back from hell. Peace and hope What Rwanda does not need, in the end, is to be cast as either a miracle or a menace, a CEO state to be feted at conferences or a rogue regime to be lectured by remote committee. It needs to be argued on terms that begin with an honest accounting of its history, its tradeoffs, and its own internal debates. That means listening to Rwandans who know the country beyond Kigali’s conference halls, and to Africa’s greatest thinkers who have spent their lives scrubbing the residue of Western power. Soyinka once remarked that “the least interesting thing you can do with a principle is simply apply it”. The real work is to test it, bend it, and sometimes break it. Those who wish to speak with authority about Rwanda should first submit themselves to that work: learn the streets, the towns, the local jokes; listen to the way a cab driver and a schoolgirl talk about peace and hope. Only then will their judgments be something other than recitations of a script drafted in the chilly metropoles of Europe and America – and only then will Rwanda be treated, not as a case study, but as a living country writing its own story. Let us begin with a lesson that everyday Rwandans (and Africa’s great writers) could teach in Washington this week: Amahoro na Icyizere. Michael Fairbanks is a Bioethics Fellow at Harvard Medical School and the co-founder of AKAGERA Medicines, which is owned by the people of Rwanda through the RSSB.
