Rwanda - 2011

I have just returned from a fortnight in a teacher training college in Butare in Rwanda, the heart of equatorial Africa. Although Rwanda was first a German and then -after the first world war- a Belgian colony, it has recently joined the Commonwealth and is determined to move into the English speaking world. The reasons are twofold: first, they see it as economically beneficial given that information technology is dominated by English and they have also joined the English speaking East African Economic Community which includes Kenya and Uganda. Second, they are deeply discontented with their colonial past. Unlike Britain, the Belgians did empire ‘on the cheap’ and the legacy is not a good one. Rwandans believe that policies pursued by the Belgian regime fomented the ethnic tensions which led to the genocide of 1994 when 1 million people were brutally slaughtered in less than 100 days.

My teaching effort was part of a much larger development project that my political party has been organising for the last 4 years. This year we took 100 self-funding volunteers with us to work on a number of programmes: doctors, nurses and dentists to treat patients and spread best practice in remote rural areas; business people to give their expertise to enterprises in  Kigali; politicians and researchers to work with the Rwandan Senate to help them better hold their own government to account; a social action project to help charities raise funds and deploy their resources more effectively; 3 coaches from the Football Association to help focus the Rwandan passion for the game; and –the main effort, accounting for about half of the volunteers -the English teaching. This year the legacy will be even more lasting because we opened a state of the art school that sprang from the initiative of our earlier visits and financed by one of my parliamentary colleagues.

It may seem a bit odd for us -with only 0.2% economic growth in the last quarter- to be helping a country with staggering annual economic growth of 8%. The reality is, however, that the country remains in  need of development with most of the population reliant on subsistence farming.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty have been very critical of Rwanda’s human rights record, so this criticism might be extended to my project along the lines of ‘why are you helping what is just another authoritarian African regime?’

My answer is twofold: first, our effort is to help the Rwandan people and not the regime. Second, the critics are too harsh. The regime is a genuine democracy enjoying wide popular support. Only a few years ago Rwanda was a political and economic basket case with over 10% of the population lying hacked to death in the streets including the overwhelming majority of its professional, business and managerial class. Yet within the last 15 years the situation has been transformed. There is no corruption and hardly any crime. You are equally safe in the towns or the countryside by day or night. Right next door however, are unstable states plagued by strife, civil war, disease and even cannibalism. Of course the Rwandan Government is determined not to slip back into the abyss and so, any politician who strays into anything approaching the ethnic tensions of the past is going to find the remainder his career confined to prison.

As before, I found the experience exhausting but rewarding. Teaching very large classes of young adults without the assistance of books and so many other materials we just take for granted here presents many challenges. I managed it for a fortnight, but it is what most teachers in the developing world do all the time.