Africa

With the announcement that it plans to lay 2,300 kilometers of fiber-optic cable in the next year, Rwanda has taken the lead in communications technology in Central Africa. Nearly any discussion about Rwanda, whether positive or critical, takes place against the backdrop of the 1994 genocide and the context that created it. This decision marks a huge step forward for that country and will help transform the country’s economy while allowing it to become a regional telecommunications hub.

This news takes place against the backdrop of the seemingly perpetual chaos just across Rwanda’s border in eastern Congo.  Any positive developments in Rwanda occur against the backdrop of that vortex, into which Rwanda could be (and has been in past conflicts) easily subsumed. Thus Rwandans, though not Rwandans alone or even primarily, have to hope that a possible commitment of 3,000 more UN troops will stabilize the region long enough for negotiations and a political solution to emerge. Rwandans, Congolese, Ugandans, Burundians and others simply cannot afford a perpetual cycle of one-step-forward, two-steps-back. People with the least ground to lose cannot afford to lose more.

In September voters in Angola, Rwanda and Swaziland will go to the polls for a national election. In November Zambia and Côte d’Ivoire will follow suit, (though the situation in the Ivory Coast is up in the air), and Ghanaians will do the same in December. While the spate of elections might seem as cause for celebration, allAfrica reminds us that elections are a necessary but not sufficient condition for a democracy to succeed.

David Ignatius has a column in The Washington Post revealing the ways in which Rwanda has, against all odds, managed in many ways to come to grips with the horrible events of 1994. The Rwanda story is unspeakably incomprehensible for most of us, and yet the last fourteen years have shown the ways in which people are able to reconcile, however imperfectly, in the face of the worst humankind can do to itself.