There are decisions that feel reasoned, and then there are those that arrive fully formed; quiet, insistent, and strangely certain. In 2015, when I left Rwanda after a brief return home, I told myself that my move back to the United States was about personal recalibration and professional refinement. There were opportunities in different regions, including the American South, each offering its own version of reinvention. But when a close friend, my former neighbour and college mate from Chicago, a native of Detroit, suggested I consider Michigan, I did not hesitate. ALSO READ: US city honours genocide victims with official proclamation Looking back, that lack of hesitation feels less like spontaneity and more like recognition. Something in me understood, before I could articulate it, that I was returning not just to a country, but to a continuity I had already begun to build. The Midwest had held me for several years prior. Its rhythms, its restraint, its unspoken codes of endurance, they were not foreign to me. And Detroit, when I arrived, felt at once unfamiliar and somehow known. ALSO READ: A letter to negationists: During these 100 days, let memory be sacred It reminded me, in ways I could not immediately explain, of Kigali. Not in form, nor in scale, but in spirit. Here was a city confronting itself, negotiating the distance between what it had been told it was and what it was becoming. Beneath the long shadow of industrial decline, something deliberate was taking shape. Art was no longer peripheral but central. Culture was not decorative; it declared. Murals stretched across once-forgotten walls. Music carried both memory and defiance. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I began to understand that this was not merely aesthetic revival. It was a reassertion of identity after rupture, a refusal of erasure, one I recognized from Kigali. ALSO READ: A preventable genocide, a denied responsibility: What ‘Corridors of Power’ reveals about Rwanda It is perhaps why what happened next unsettled me as deeply as it did. Sometime in 2016, I walked into the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. In its main hall, suspended from the ceiling, hung a collection of African flags, a visual assertion of connection, of lineage, of continental presence. And among them was a flag I recognized immediately, a symbol of a regime built on hate. Not the Rwanda I knew. ALSO READ: 32 years later, Rwanda remembers It was the flag of a regime that had orchestrated the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. A flag under which hatred had been formalized, systematized, and executed. By 2016, it had long been replaced, officially, symbolically, morally. And yet there it was, suspended in a respected institution, unchallenged and uncontextualized. What unsettled me was not only its presence, but its quiet acceptance. ALSO READ: I remember April 1994 as if it were yesterday History, when left unattended, does not fade; it distorts. It lingers in fragments, in outdated symbols, in incomplete narratives that risk becoming permanent through neglect. In that moment, I understood that distance does not dilute responsibility. Even now, my life moves between East Africa and the United States, back and forth, deliberately, ever entirely one or the other, but always accountable to both. ALSO READ: Naming the genocide: Why terminology still shapes justice So, I did what I could. I raised the issue. I followed up. I insisted. And when it became clear that correction would require more than conversation, I reached out to the Rwandan embassy in Washington, D.C., requesting that the current flag be sent to replace what should no longer have been there. It was, in the grand scheme of things, a small act. But it was necessary. Years passed. My connection to Michigan deepened; not as a relocation, but as a return I continue to make. What began as a decision became a relationship. The friendships I formed across Detroit and the broader state were not transient. They took root. The city, in all its complexity, became more than a place I spent time. It became a place that, in its own way, received me. Which is why, in April 2026, when the Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, signed a proclamation formally recognizing April 7 as a day of remembrance for the Genocide against the Tutsi, the moment did not feel distant. It felt earned. Not because it was expected, but because it was precise. To name the Genocide against the Tutsi correctly is not a matter of semantics. It is a matter of historical integrity. It resists dilution. It refuses vague language. It honours the specificity of what occurred and restores dignity to those whose lives were targeted with equal specificity. For a place I have come to consider a second home to make that choice - to be deliberate, to be exact - carries weight. It affirms something I had sensed years earlier in Detroit’s resurgence: that places, like people, are capable of confronting their histories, of correcting their narratives, and of choosing to remember with clarity rather than convenience. I think back now to that moment in the museum; the suspended flags, the quiet dissonance, the act of intervention. I see it not as an isolated memory, but as part of a longer continuum. A reminder that memory is not passive. It does not preserve itself. It requires participation. It demands insistence. And sometimes, far from where a history began, you find a place willing to insist on getting it right. The writer is a communications specialist.
