Here is an appeal by Michael on behalf of the American Friends for the Kigali Public Library (the AFKPL) for help creating Rwanda’s first public library. Michael is a regular contributor to the Globetrotters e-newsletter.
My wife and I recently returned to the United States from a one-year journey through Africa. During the last three months of the trip, we enjoyed the privilege of working in the Prosecutor’s Office of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. As part of the job, I poured through reams of scholarly texts, investigators’ reports and trial transcripts and interviewed witnesses during two trips to Rwanda. The more I learned, the more shocked and disgusted I became. The more I thought about the events that occurred, the more I questioned humankind’s decency, its purpose, and its future. In Rwanda, I met with a man who watched his mother bludgeoned to death, with a woman repeatedly raped and with a man who snuck his family across the Congolese border in oil drums. Even now, I sometimes lie awake wondering what is wrong with all of us. How can we allow these things to occur? Who among us is willing to participate in such acts? Who among us seeks to profit?
My understanding of the Rwandan genocide developed in stages. After reading about the country’s cultural history and the events that occurred leading up to and during the genocide, I finally started to comprehend what these murderers sought to accomplish. It may sound naïve and even a bit stupid, but until that point I never could comprehend one person’s desire to destroy another. Suddenly, the events of the Holocaust, which I had read about, spoken about and felt sorrow over for years, took on a cold reality. For the first time, my brain clicked into focus and I understood the mindset of a people that sought to destroy systematically the entire population of its self-defined enemy.
With this realization in mind, I visited Rwanda and saw a country devastated by its own havoc. Years after the tragedy, a palpable sense of ruin hangs in the air. Commerce functions at a virtual standstill. Street hawkers carry a threatening gleam in their eyes. Were they once machete-wielding murderers? You can’t help but wonder. Bullet-ridden, pock-marked homes and sidewalks with bullet casings protruding from the ground are common sightings. One senses that so many of Rwanda’s people fell so far below the edge of decency that they no longer know how to live without abuse. One wonders what will be the next phase in the struggle between the Rwandan people. Then one realizes that the simmering depravity that plagues Rwanda is not localized to that country. So much of Africa has endured horrific violence. Rwanda’s western neighbour, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is the inspiration for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Having returned to the United States armed with little but a sense of helplessness and the desire to cause positive change, I teamed up with some dedicated people and joined the American Friends for the Kigali Public Library (the “AFKPL”). In connection with a Rwandan chapter of the Rotary Club, we are working to build Rwanda’s first public library. It is our hope that the library will serve as a place of solace for the wounded, a haven of intellectual growth for the curious and bedrock of enlightenment for all. We have already begun construction on the library, obtained commitments for book donations from publishers and we have raised approximately $750,000 of our $1,200,000 budget.
If anyone would like to donate his or her time, money or books to the cause, please do not hesitate to contact me at mrakower@hotmail.com.
We have more information about the AFKPL, which includes its contact information. If you would like to see this, please e-mail me. Also, for those of you living in England, an organization at the University of Oxford called the Marshall Scholars for the Kigali Public Library is contributing to the new library. Zachary Kaufman (zachary.kaufman@magdalen.oxford.ac.uk) is the contact there.
As a fellow Globie, I appreciate your support. Together we can cause positive change.
Sincerely, Michael Rakower