If we were to remember each victim of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi one person per day, it would take more than 2,700 years. That is the scale we are asked to hold. ALSO READ: Rising genocide ideology in Great Lakes demands urgent action – experts It is a number that resists comprehension, so we reach for ways to make it tangible. If you read each name aloud—just the name, 10 seconds each—you would be speaking for more than 115 days without pause, without sleep, without night ever falling on your silence. ALSO READ: How youth can lead fight against genocide ideology on social media If you lit a candle for every life lost, one minute at a time, the flame would burn continuously for nearly two years. Even then, you would only be approximating what “over one million” means. And across the country, over 50 million handwritten pages of the gacaca proceedings document the killings. One page at a time, one name at a time, one life at a time, as President Paul Kagame reminded us, “in every single village and neighbourhood in Rwanda.” ALSO READ: ‘Killed twice’: A Bigogwe survivor’s story of loss and resilience This is what over one million means. Not a statistic but a human being who had plans, who had love, who believed there would be a tomorrow. We who grew up after 1994 learned the number early. We said it in school. We read it in memorials. But there is a difference between knowing a number and being old enough to carry it. You are old enough now. So let it land. ALSO READ: A preventable genocide, a denied responsibility: What ‘Corridors of Power’ reveals about Rwanda President Kagame stated plainly, the genocide against the Tutsi “was carefully prepared, and carried out in plain sight.” Each act of violence was meant to erase not just a life, but the fact that the life had ever existed. People did not wait to be saved. They hid. They ran. They protected others at the cost of themselves. Survival, in those weeks, was its own form of resistance. No weapons. No medicine. No shelter. No map. No refuge. Just breath after breath—until the Inkotanyi came and poured their lives not only into survivors, but into the entire nation. ALSO READ: Rwanda’s commemorations in the shadow of indifference “Our deepest source of grief was always that we could not arrive earlier,” President Kagame said. Let’s sit with what that grief means. Inkotanyi did not arrive into victory. They arrived into evidence. Every kilometer they gained, they found more of what they had not been able to stop. More churches. More schools. More bodies. They advanced as fast as they could and still found silence where there should have been people. That grief has no resolution. It was carried into the rebuilding of this country, and it is in the foundation of everything standing today. We are the generation that inherited what that grief built. Which means our goal is not to arrive, we are already here. Our duty is to make sure the question of arriving too late is never asked again. In memory. In truth-telling. In refusing to let hate and genocide ideology spread unchallenged in our region. In showing up, not only in remembrance, but in action. By doing, not just by being. That duty is the honour of our lives. Our parents’ generation learned a lesson that was brutal and permanent. As President Kagame put it, “if our lives do not happen to align with someone else’s interests, they are not worth saving.” That lesson was learned in real time. The warning was sent and returned to those preparing the killing (UN commander Roméo Dallaire’s January 1994 fax). When protection was needed, it was withdrawn. When evacuation was possible, it was selective (foreign nationals airlifted out). And where the Tutsi gathered in trust, they were left behind (ETO Kicukiro). “The technology existed to disrupt the radio broadcasts that directed the killings. The planes capable of jamming those signals were available... In the end, the operation was deemed to be too expensive.” President Kagame added. That is the world we were born into. A world that knows. A world that failed Rwanda because it chose convenience. A world that calculates, and chooses what is politically convenient. Which is why the question of what you want to become matters so much. As President Kagame affirmed, “we will not ask anyone for permission to live” and “this country will not die twice.” Not because the world has changed, but because we have. Not because protection will come, but because we understand what it means when it does not. Becoming Inkotanyi today is not only a military inheritance. It is a philosophy. It means you do not wait to be believed. It means you do not ask for permission to remember. It means you understand, in your bones, why collective memory is not sentiment. it is security. As President Kagame affirmed, “you can never silence us in whatever form.” This is the logical conclusion of everything our people survived. We struggle to hold one million in our minds. Survivors carry it in their bodies every day. That is the distance between commemorating and surviving, and no ceremony fully crosses it. But we close the distance every time we refuse to let the weight become comfortable. Over one million victims to remember, and we have barely begun. The writer is a social commentator.
