"The composition of this panel, bringing together a former member of the ex-FAR, General (Rtd) Ibingira from the RPA/RPF, and a former member of the FDLR, and what they have shared, reflects just how complex, diverse, and layered our history is. It is from that history that we should draw the lessons to move our country forward, in the way we want and through our own efforts.
Let me say this: a great deal of what has been said on this panel has been valuable, and the discussions around it have only reinforced those lessons. One thing I wanted to pick up on is what Ibingira mentioned about those ungrateful people who insult and disparage others.
My advice is simple: do not waste your energy fighting those who insult you. Put your energy into building, building yourselves, and building your country, so that insults and the people who make them become insignificant and have no impact on you. Ignore them, and keep doing what you are supposed to do. That is what matters.
Your response should be your actions. Eventually, those who thrive on insults grow tired and stay hostages of history." President Kagame | Unity Club Meeting.
“Do we really accept that, as black people, we are somehow less human and inferior?
Accepting it is not simply a matter of saying “yes.” No one will ask you that question directly. You can even say “no,” but if you behave in the very ways that brought us to the kind of history we have lived through, then, in reality, you have accepted it. You have diminished yourself. And your actions become the evidence. The evidence is in doing the very things that others did, or in trying to justify them with explanations that should never be accepted.
There are no two ways about it. Good politics and a good ideology produce positive outcomes. Bad outcomes come from bad ideas. You do not need any other evidence.
Many of you are still young. You go abroad to study. Under normal circumstances, there is nothing they know that you cannot also learn. But you can come back having absorbed ideas without questions, ideas that take you away from who you are and try to turn you into something else, something that is not yours.
Whether those ideas are good or bad, there is one illness I do not think we will cure anytime soon: when, in your own mind, you stop being yourself and begin wishing you were somebody else. Why would you want to become someone else? To achieve what? In our own history, with everything we have been through, that is exactly how we lost our way.
And then you wait for someone from outside to tell you, “This is wrong,” and you immediately agree, without realizing that what is being condemned is you. It is about stripping you of your identity, and you willingly accepting it.” President Kagame | Unity Club Meeting.
“We went through a very dark chapter. But is that who we were meant to be? Is that what Rwandans wanted for themselves? Even if some people at the time wanted it that way, our responsibility today is to say: no. It is our history, but it is not who we should have been, and it is not who we should become.
That is what liberation means. It means that, as Rwandans, we freed ourselves.
You live for what you truly believe in, to the point where, if necessary, you are ready to die for it. That is where Rwanda stands today, whether some people like it or not.” President Kagame | Unity Club Meeting.
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