For five years living in Rwanda, I have seen, I have heard, and I have read about the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. What I have encountered does not fit into language. It breaks it. My lips, though trained to speak, feel incapacitated before it. ALSO READ: Genocide against the Tutsi: A moral test everyone failed My hands, though given to writing, feel too small to carry its weight. For how do you gather one million deaths into sentences without betraying them? Where do you even begin when the beginning itself is already unbearable? ALSO READ: A preventable genocide, a denied responsibility: What ‘Corridors of Power’ reveals about Rwanda I have stood at memorials where silence is louder than any cry. I have walked among bones that were once people, lives not taken by illness, not claimed by nature, but hunted down because of an identity they did not choose, marked for death by names they did not give themselves, and abandoned not only by systems of governance that should have protected them, but by a watching world that failed to build even the most basic shield against their destruction. ALSO READ: Rwanda’s commemorations in the shadow of indifference I have read the trembling words of those who survived, words soaked in memory that refuses to loosen its grip. I have stood in Kwibuka ceremonies, where grief does not visit, it lives. I have entered churches that became killing grounds, and something in my faith broke quietly within me. I listened until listening itself became a wound. I have tried to learn, to understand, to hold it all, but the more I reach, the more it escapes me. The missing voice And yet, in all of this, something is missing. A question that refuses to loosen its grip. What would the one million who were killed in those three months say? Not the survivors. Not the historians. Not the speakers who have found words. Them. The ones whose lives were cut off mid-sentence. The ones whose final breaths were taken by a machete, whose tomorrows were never promised but violently stolen, whose ordinary dreams of waking, of eating, of embracing loved ones were interrupted without mercy. The ones who ran with nowhere to arrive, who hid and were still found, who called for help into a silence that never answered. The ones who reached for life and found death instead. The ones who never got to explain themselves. Never got to defend their humanity. Never got to say goodbye. Never got to finish being human. What would they say if breath had not been torn from them so violently? Silence that speaks Would they ask us why we speak of them so easily, as if their deaths have settled into something manageable? Would they ask why our voices do not shake when we remember them? Would they ask why we stand where they were slaughtered and still find the strength to argue, to debate, to analyze? Would they ask why we have learned to live with what should have broken us completely? Or would they say nothing at all, because perhaps silence now carries what our words have failed to hold? Because perhaps silence is closer to their truth than anything we have ever said? Erased in naming and classification Here lie people who were killed for how they were seen. Not for what they did. Not for what they chose. But for what they were called. And in that naming, they were erased. They were denied even the dignity of finishing their own stories. The survivor speaks, and we must listen. But even the survivor cannot cross fully into that dark place where the dead remain. There is a depth of horror that no returned voice can reach. The end of easy words And so, this question does not comfort. It wounds. It humbles. It strips us of the arrogance to think we understand. It ends our careless debates. It silences our easy explanations. Because perhaps remembrance is not in what we say, but in what we can no longer say. Perhaps it is in standing before those graves, undone, knowing that beneath them are voices that will never be heard again, and realizing, with unbearable clarity, that the most honest response left to us is not speech, but a broken, trembling silence that finally learns how to mourn. The burden of the living But even in that silence, something presses upon the conscience of the living. For if their voices are gone, then the weight of their unspoken words falls upon us. Not to replace them, for that is impossible, but to carry the burden of remembering rightly. To refuse the violence of forgetting. To resist the temptation of turning their deaths into mere history, something concluded, something archived, something safe. Because there is nothing safe about a million graves. There is nothing distant about a hatred that once walked openly, spoke loudly, and convinced ordinary people to become instruments of destruction. The second death The danger is not only what happened. The danger is how easily the world moves on from what happened. How quickly language returns to normal. How swiftly statistics replace names, and numbers replace faces. One million becomes a figure to be cited, not a people to be mourned. And in that shift, something sacred is lost again. They die a second death, this time in our memory. A question that refuses closure To ask what they would say is to resist that second death. It is to insist that their silence is not emptiness, but interruption. A disruption of our comfort. A refusal to allow us to speak too quickly, too easily, too confidently. It forces us to sit in the unbearable tension between knowing and not knowing, between remembering and never being able to fully remember. It confronts us with the limits of empathy, the inadequacy of words, the fragility of our humanity. Where it began And perhaps this is where remembrance must deepen. Not as a performance. Not as a ritual alone. But as an ethical demand. To become people who are incapable of indifference. To become people who recognize the early signs of dehumanization, who refuse the language that reduces others to categories, labels, and threats. Because that is where it began. Not with machetes. Not with mass graves. But with words. With naming. With the slow, deliberate stripping away of dignity until killing no longer felt like killing. A mirror to the present What would the one million say about how we speak today? About how we divide, how we label? Would they recognize the patterns? Would they warn us? Or would they simply grieve again, this time for a world that still has not learned? This question does not allow distance. It draws a line from then to now. It exposes the uncomfortable truth that the conditions which made such horror possible are not entirely gone. They linger wherever humanity is denied. Wherever power is used to exclude. Wherever difference is turned into danger. And so remembrance becomes responsibility. Honoring without using And yet, even here, we must tread carefully. For there is a temptation to turn their suffering into a lesson for others, to make their deaths serve our arguments, our warnings, our narratives. But even that can become another form of violence if we are not careful. They are not examples. They are not illustrations. They are people. And perhaps the most faithful way to honor them is not to use them, but to let their absence reshape us. A silence that changes us To become quieter. Kinder. More attentive to the dignity of others. More resistant to hatred in all its forms. To carry a grief that does not fade into convenience. To remember that beneath the soil of Rwanda lies not just history, but humanity interrupted. The unfinished sentence What would the one million say? We do not know. And we never will. That is the wound that does not heal. That is the silence that does not close. But perhaps in refusing to answer too quickly, in allowing the question to remain, we come closer to honoring them. Not by speaking for them, but by being changed because they can no longer speak. And so we stand. Not as those who understand. Not as those who can explain. But as those who have been confronted by a silence that demands more from us than words. A silence that calls us to remember differently. To live differently. To see one another differently. Because somewhere beneath that silence are one million voices that never finished their sentences. And the least we can do is refuse to finish them carelessly. The writer is a political economist and educator.
