Dark days and a shared future (Reflections on Black History Month)

By Omar Ndizeye

When asked by the Ishami Foundation to discuss my recent book Life and Death in Nyamata, Memoir of a Young Boy in Rwanda’s Darkest Church as part of the celebration of Black History Month, I first of all asked myself whether I have enough knowledge about the month itself and what its purpose is. And, whether reminiscing about our past is an effective way to overcome the vanity and ‘othering’ of human beings, whose history of various ages, different innovations and many other good things that happened many centuries ago, was overshadowed by the effects of slavery, colonization and other violent periods that followed the Holocaust and the two World Wars. 

Whether I knew something about black history or not, I asked myself  how I was to use the month as a platform to talk about my painful past, to heal and be healed, and to tell the world what happened to me and my people in Rwanda. I kept wondering whether I was supposed to repeat pages of my book, which talks about my father’s family’s deportation in 1959 from the north of Rwanda to the southeast region of Bugesera at the time when Rwanda was still under Belgian rule. 

As I kept wondering what to share with those touched by the great actions of the Ishami Foundation – raising awareness of the history of the genocide against the Tutsi as well preventing genocide through the arts – I asked myself whether you and others who will read this will ask me the same question I am often asked. Why in the title of my book did I include the words Darkest Church?

I was about to worry that you might not understand that the title is linked to the dark days I spent inside Nyamata Church, when my own were slaughtered without pity by Interahamwe and soldiers of the former Government. 

But I was comforted to also think that our focus during this month should be to reflect on why human beings whose faces are angels when they are still babies become demons. As the Latin proverb says: Homo Homini lupus est, which means, ’A Man is a wolf to another Man.’ Unfortunately, this same proverb has been best proven at those historical moments when the idea arises that ‘We are good, others are bad’and this leads to attempts to exterminate entire people groups.

Whether your reflections during this month are on achievements, success stories, or on a painful past, this month is about building a memory – acollective memory that reflects why we have arrived where we are. By consciously finding an answer to this question, our minds will inform us that our future depends on who we believe we are.

We must understand that completing our mourning is important for us to avoid living with immense depression and to overcome grief. This allows us to build our shared future without any complex; to deconstruct the myths of our past by rethinking about the best way to build a shared future.