An invitation to reflect before Kwibuka 32. As Rwanda approaches the 32nd commemoration of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, I find myself returning to the same truth that visits us every year, often before the calendar formally turns to April 7: memory arrives before the date does. ALSO READ: From fragments to a shared future: Rethinking Rwanda’s national story There is something about this season that shifts the air around us. Conversations become quieter, pauses grow heavier, and even the ordinary feels touched by a solemn awareness. Before the ceremonies begin, before the flame is lit, before the nation gathers in collective remembrance, there is an inward moment that belongs to each of us. A moment of reckoning. A moment of asking what remembrance really means? ALSO READ: Kwibuka: Our role to preserve the memory remains Thirty-two years later, April still speaks. It speaks not only through official commemorations, but through the private spaces we carry within us, in the stories passed down at home, in the silences we have learned to recognize, in the names spoken with care, and in the memories that remain too sacred for easy language. For some, these memories are lived and deeply personal. For others, especially those of us who came after 1994, they are inherited through testimony, history, and the moral responsibility of never allowing distance to become detachment. ALSO READ: No Genocide happens without a plan, preparation, state involvement – Rwandan envoy That responsibility matters now more than ever. To remember the lives stolen in 1994 is not only to mourn them; it is to interrogate the kind of society we are building in their memory. ALSO READ: The enduring legacy of Rwanda's genocide survivors Commemoration that ends in ceremony but does not shape our civic choices risks becoming performance. Kwibuka must remain a moral checkpoint, a moment that forces us to ask difficult questions about truth, justice, and the fragility of our shared humanity. Are we choosing truth over convenient narratives? Are we raising a generation that truly understands the cost of division, or are we assuming history alone will teach them? Because history does not teach itself. It must be spoken, protected, and passed on with intention. In an age where misinformation travels faster than memory, remembrance must also confront the digital spaces where hate mutates and survives. Today, dehumanization does not always arrive in the language we recognize from the past. Sometimes it slips through a tweet, hides in a YouTube video dressed up as “analysis,” or spreads through carefully edited clips that distort truth and reward outrage. Sometimes it lives in comment sections where prejudice is normalized one sentence at a time. This is how dangerous ideas endure: not always through open declarations, but through repetition, innuendo, and the slow erosion of empathy. That is why Kwibuka 32 must also be a call to vigilance. We cannot speak of remembrance without speaking of genocide denial, revisionism, and the quiet rehabilitation of hate in online spaces. The digital world has made it easier than ever for lies to find audiences, for history to be manipulated, and for younger generations to inherit confusion instead of truth. If we fail to challenge this, we risk allowing memory itself to be contested. And memory should never be left at the mercy of algorithms. But vigilance alone is not enough. Reflection must also lead us inward. What kind of language do we tolerate in our daily lives? What jokes do we let pass unchallenged? What assumptions about “others” do we leave unexamined? Division rarely begins with catastrophe; it often begins in the small permissions we give prejudice, the casual indifference we show to harmful narratives, and the comfort of assuming that “it could never happen again.” History warns us otherwise. That is why this moment, even before April 7, is so important. This is the time to reflect not only on what happened, but on what we are becoming. A society that remembers well is not one that lives trapped in grief, but one that allows memory to shape its ethics, its institutions, and its future. To remember is not passive. It is an active refusal, a refusal to let lies replace testimony, to let convenience replace truth, and to let silence make room for dangerous narratives. Thirty-two years later, the question is no longer whether April still speaks. It does. The real question is whether we are still listening closely enough to hear what it demands of us. And perhaps before the official days of commemoration begin, this is the invitation April offers us: to listen, to reflect, and to recommit ourselves to truth, humanity, and the work of safeguarding both. Because remembrance is not only about looking back. It is about deciding, together, what kind of future memory deserves. Raissa Giramata is a social commentator.
