A number of young Rwandan writers have participated in international writing competitions and emerged winners. This indicates that there is a lot of talent in the country, but it needs to be discovered and supported. Tom Patrick Nzabonimpa, 22, is disappointed that in the creative industry, music is valued more than writing. For this reason, he started a writers club in 2020 to hone skills of budding young writers. The group called ‘Writers Space Africa (WSA) - Rwanda Chapter’, started with only 8 members and in just one year, it has grown to 110 members and is open to as many writers as possible. Nzabonimpa’s zeal to start the platform was due to research he carried out and discovered that there were no writing clubs he knew about. He aimed at bringing together Rwandan writers to enhance their skills, network, and collaborate. He started looking for writers right away, and got only eight of them. All writers were to share their work on a WhatsApp group that he would constructively assess, and this was in form of poetry, books, quotes, and short stories. Nzabonimpa started by teaching the writers punctuation, grammar, the flow of the story, and how to keep the stories interesting to the reader. “I have seen the writers improve, now they can help others write appealing stories. Some writers have had their work published in local and international magazines. The progress is promising,” he says. According to Nzabonimpa, unfortunately, physical writing lectures were paused as Covid-19 hit, but online lessons are still taking place where writers are taught styles and creativity, for example, how to tell captivating stories, be open to change, play with rhyme, simplify choice of words and research. The club has groomed many to become published authors and poets. WSA-Rwanda Chapter is in the process of writing a collaborative book that contains writers’ short stories, poems, essays, and quotes. Most of their work is featured on social media, and each member pays a monthly subscription fee of Rwf 500 to assist in organising learning materials. Nzabonimpa, however, still needs financial support to accomplish his purpose, he has hopes of turning the group to an NGO so as to acquire funding and see young writers excel. He recalls starting the group because he noticed many writers had no confidence for fear of criticism. Now, all that is behind them and they are proud to share their work. “The writers gained confidence from making mistakes and accepting that they still need to learn. They are proud of the writers they are,” he says. He believes that Rwandan writers can compete on the international scene if given a platform and maybe through organising more writing competitions to encourage them to participate. They also need financial support to be able to publish their work as it is expensive. Nzabonimpa is intrigued by topics such as love, African identity and mental health and was compelled to start writing poems by a friend in 2018. While going through his Facebook newsfeed to check what was trending, he came across a poem written and posted by a friend. He read it and was fascinated by the arrangement of the words, rhyme and the flow. He could feel the tone of the writer and her feeling with each line. And it was something he wanted to try. In 2019, he joined Writers Space Africa, although he had basic poetry skills and no idea of the purpose for which he wrote. While in the competition, he was enlightened on the purpose of writing, and the necessary skills for various writing types. He participated in PenPen Africa, an African writers’ residency project that featured twelve selected writers from across Africa, in 2020 where he submitted a creative non-fiction story that depicted his family, mainly basing on his parents’ separation that left the family shattered. His story was among the top six selected internationally. He has also participated in a number of workshops that helped him learn to edit. It is then that he yearned to start a poetry group in Rwanda. His poems include “The Morning Talk”, “When She Leaves”, “The Dark Cage”, “I won’t Write You Another Poem”, to mention a few, and he is in the process of completing his first book. Through poetry, he believes that he is understood. He writes to heal, educate and make his audience relate. He is a graduate of electrical and electronic engineering at Rwanda Polytechnic-IPRC Kigali and practices this profession.
