Text by Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi
I think, it was on the Lorimer Station platform last Monday or Tuesday around 1:30pm on my way back home from a rehearsal when I saw a young musician setting up his note stand and warming up on his alto saxophone. Playing a kind of a blues. I liked his tone, so I greeted him and started a short conversation with him. Read more: https://doobeedoobeedoo.info/?p=16402
…When I play music on the streets for Rwanda this summer, my theme will be reconciliation…” – Text and photos by Jeremy Danneman (Parade Of One)
Note by editor: this article was posted in Parade of One on
Despite the great cultural and economic differences that exist from one region of the world to the next, there is still this unifying principle: Every nation on earth might benefit from a drastic change in perspective, from time to time. There is no region or people that has achieved perfection. Here in the USA, it is more and more popular to acknowledge that our high degree of consumption has 
placed an unsustainable burden on the earth’s natural resources, and so we need to adjust our minds and lifestyles to consume less, waste less, and recycle more. Over in Rwanda, there is not much problem with consumption. On the contrary, dire poverty has left many Rwandans unable to afford their basic needs. They too, though, are in the midst of a huge shift in their collective mindset. Rwanda is overcoming deep ethnic divisions between the Hutu and the Tutsi. The disease of bigotry must be flushed from the minds of the people, and they must embrace those they used to hate, not just for the sake of inter-ethnic harmony, but to be unified in the national quest for economic development and the rise from poverty.
So just how are new perspectives formed? First, the old point of view of must be examined and adjusted or abolished. We must view ourselves as if we are passive observers and play the role of critic. In a sense, we must escape ourselves, creating a certain distance from which we can more objectively see our own minds. Music is often acknowledged as a great form of escape. When we listen to music, we might achieve a greater distance from our own perspectives and habits, and after the performance, as we return from our imaginations back to real life, maybe we won’t fit so neatly into the mold we left of ourselves. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.” This summer I will go to Rwanda and play music on the street to help the people there escape old hatreds and bring the spirit of forgiveness and solidarity closer to the surface. I too, though, will be undergoing a transformation in which my perspective will shift greatly, as it already has since I first started the Parade of One project about a year ago. I will be relying on improvisation to guide myself and others to a new experience of one another. In this essay, I’ll be returning to themes of how music can help flush out old mindsets and build community, and the way that improvisation, in particular, can help forge new identities. But along the way, I will also be acquainting my American readers with recent Rwandan history and the current presidential race there.
Rwanda is a small, landlocked African nation that is still recovering from the worst trauma in its history: the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, a severe blood stain on the history of mankind very similar to the Holocaust in Europe. Nearly one million innocent lives were taken in one hundred days. The perpetrators of the genocide aimed to eliminate all members of the Tutsi ethnic group, and they made serious progress in that mission. The genocide was caused by manipulative leaders in the Hutu Power movement who preached the dangerous and unfounded belief that the two main ethnic groups in Rwanda are not equal, that the minority Tutsi are inferior to the Hutu. The Hutu Power philosophy would eventually be summed up in the Kangura, a popular propaganda newspaper which published the Hutu Ten Commandments in 1990. Intermarriage was condemned; it was considered treason to conduct business with a Tutsi; the Tutsi were to be barred from holding office, and only Hutu were permitted to be school teachers, to name just a few of the guidelines for the believer in Hutu Power.
Neither Hutu nor Tutsi are indigenous to Rwanda. The cattle herding Tutsi migrated from the north, and the farming Hutu came from the south. Both ethnic groups speak the same Kinyarwanda language though, and there is no religious division between them. It was not until colonial rule that tensions between Hutu and Tutsi started to simmer. First the Germans, then the Belgians imposed a system based on the bogus European racial thought of that time (eventually embodied by Nazi Germany.) The colonial powers saw physical features of the Tutsi minority that they felt made them superior to the Hutu, so they imposed a labor division that favored Tutsi, and even relied on the Tutsi to help enact policy. At the same time, the Belgians were very quick to support the Hutu massacres against the Tutsi that emerged in the final days of colonial rule, probably in a desperate attempt to hang onto whatever power they still wielded in the region.
After independence from Belgium, backlash against the colonial rule resulted in the sudden dominance of the Hutu Power movement. Rwanda only had two presidents between independence from Belgium in 1962 and the genocide of 1994. First, Gregoire Kayibanda, who is often called the founder of Hutu Power, ruled until 1973, when his defense minister Juvenal Habyarimana ousted him. Habyarimana continued to enact bigoted policies, so the Tutsi minority was forced to endure discrimination and even massacres. Many Tutsi refugees fled to neighboring countries such as Uganda and Tanzania.
On April 6, 1994 a plane carrying President Habyarimana was hit by a missile as it approached the runway in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. It is still unknown who was behind the attack. The president was coming back home from Arusha, Tanzania where he had been forging a power sharing agreement with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and other opposition parties. The RPF was formed abroad by Tutsi refugees and Hutu political dissidents. Their aim was to be repatriated in Rwanda and gain full citizenship and equal rights. Tensions between the RPF and Habyarimana’s government had inflamed into a civil war in 1990, so the agreement that Habyarimana was finalizing in Tanzania aimed to end the violence through the sharing of power, an idea much detested by Hutu Power hardliners in his government.
The still mysterious assassination of Habyarimana led to an extremist Hutu Power government ruled by military leaders, igniting the Genocide against the Tutsi which would take nearly one million innocent lives. Civilian Hutu militias aimed to eliminate the Tutsi, and killed men, women, and children with no regard for who was a civilian or combatant. The most prevalent method of execution was by machete or nail-studded club. Eventually, the RPF defeated the genocidal government by way of military force, ending the genocide. Finally, the process of democratization and the slow rise from civil war, dictatorship, and poverty could begin.
Now Rwandans have been living in relative peace and calm for sixteen years, even enjoying reductions in poverty. It is impossible to deal justly with every last perpetrator of the genocide, because they are such a large portion of the population. So in many cases, the killers and the families of the dead live side by side. They cope with one another, either through mutual avoidance or apologies and forgiveness. The killing has stopped, but the pain from the genocide is still immense. It is felt by both Tutsi and Hutu, and by both victims and perpetrators. There are those who were raped and the children of rape, who unwanted by their mothers, have become orphans. For others, there is the hard weight of guilt for having thought with the masses and committed murder; and even worse than the guilt, is the fear of retribution, that those they’ve harmed will seek justice. And still for those who mourn their friends and family, there is not only the immense loss, but this thirst for revenge that they must dismiss from their minds. Killers and victims are living among one another, and even if there is peace, the social difficulties are unspeakably immense.
Now, Rwanda is preparing for its second presidential election since this madness of genocide and civil war was extinguished. On August 9 2010, Rwandans plan to choose who will be their leader for the next seven years. It is within this collective mental atmosphere, a stew containing leftover bigotry from the Hutu Power era and intense feelings of guilt, betrayal, loss, fear, and the thirst for revenge, that Rwandans will decide what direction their nation will take.
When I play music on the streets of Rwanda this summer, my theme will be reconciliation. I think that when people enjoy a performance together, they can think together, believe together, and work together even if it is only to have a friendly debate about the quality of the performance. It is not just that music provides a form of escape, but that it can create a shared experience. A performance, like a film, or a sports event, can create bonding moments between people. As we witness a performance, not only will we escape our old perspectives on life, but by sharing this experience with others, we will come closer to those around us, be they Hutu, Tutsi, Muzungo, victims, or perpetrators. Henry David Thoreau says this of music’s ability to ease pain and reduce hostility, “When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe.” My hope is that through my music, I can build community and help people grow beyond their reservations about one another. Since the venue is the street, a public space, the performance is open to all segments of the population. It is not restrictive to different religions, economic classes, or ethnic groups, and so community can be built in a way that crosses social lines… (will be continued)
