Skulls of victims of the Ntarama massacre during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Twenty one years after the Rwanda genocide, it is still all too often the case that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
As Rwandans continue to commemorate the 100 darkest days in their nation’s history, it is well worth remembering that the problems that brought those events have to do with relations between disparate groups of peoples.
In times past, it was a case of perceived superiority, or more precisely racial and ethnic arrogance.
This was the doctrine of the Hutu nation in the years preceding the genocide. That regime followed the example of many others in history: There was Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, colonial Europe and the many imperialist wars fought around the world, America and its dehumanization of African slaves, all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire.
Each of these groups, and many others, thought they were the best thing God ever created. Sadly, that thinking is still with us today.
How else does one explain the 2007-8 postelection violence in Kenya, the war between the Dinka and the Nuer in South Sudan that manifests itself as a power struggle between President Salva Kiir and his former vice president Riek Machar, and the supremacist thinking of assorted Islamic fundamentalist groups such as Al Shabaab and Boko Haram?
But given the changing dynamics of today’s economy, sometimes these sentiments are clothed in economic garb. In South Africa, for instance, hard times have forced the longoppressed masses to see other African nationals as enemies, thinking they are taking away their jobs and pushing them into poverty.
This same trend is discernible in East Africa. The slow movement in implementation of various protocols and petty agreements that come to the public limelight are the tip of the iceberg: Lying beneath the surface are deeply-ingrained nationalistic feelings, suspicions about the intentions of other member states, and intricate machinations about how to get something from others while giving away as little as possible.
As a result, the integration ship has time and again found itself wading through the murky waters of tit-for-tat sanctions, frosty relations and suspect nontariff barriers.
It is not a situation that augurs well for our stated aim of creating one people with one destiny. All these factors point to the fact that integration must be based on sound political decisions.
It is the politics that determines everything else: Who is in the fold and who is out; who we shall trade with and how; and who shall be welcomed into our countries and in what manner.
While the integration process should rightfully proceed with caution, that does not include political bickering and grandstanding.
Neither should it, and indeed the events around us should make us proactive in pulling down the walls that separate us. Following the 1994 genocide and his ascendancy to power, President Paul Kagame did a sterling job of demolishing the invisible wall that had for decades separated Hutu from Tutsi.
The question is: Can this effort be extended beyond Rwanda to the whole of East Africa? How shall we demolish the wall that separates the Ugandan from the Rwandan, or the Tanzanian from the Kenyan?
An integration process that brings together disparate peoples for economic purposes but does not break down the mental barriers between them can never achieve full unity.
If anything, that would be a recipe for a future crisis, because many of our thinkers simply hope to bury Kikuyu-Luo or Dinka-Nuer rivalry within a larger regional fabric.
While that may appear to be helpful, such a solution can only offer temporary relief. If East Africa is to have a strong foundation devoid of any possibility of implosion between its peoples or xenophobia against those without, it is necessary to initiate an educational process that replaces narrow parochialisms with broader principles.
Many of those principles are well enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international instruments, including the East African Community Treaty.
Using them, we can take advantage of the strengths of everyone in our midst. It is the best tribute we can give the victims of past prejudices, from the Rwandan genocide to the killings at Garissa University College.
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