An Eventful Life

The East African (Nairobi)

7 January 2008
Posted to the web 7 January 2008
Shyaka Kanuma


RWANDAN PRESIDENT, Paul Kagame, turned 50 last month. The event was celebrated at Jali club in the country's capital, Kigali.

Various personalities in Rwandan politics, business and industry, journalism and other professions attended the ceremony after being invited by the president's family.


Even though the nature of the audience gave the impression that it was a public event, the Kagames - the president, First Lady Jeannette and their four children - did not allow it to turn into that. TV Rwanda and Radio Rwanda did not air the event.

President Kagame has a notable aversion to using public resources to turn personal affairs into grandiose public events. Everything at the birthday party - all the food, drinks, entertainment and hiring of the marquee - were paid for from personal resources, according to sources close to the First Family.

Not many people whose life has taken twists and turns like the Rwandan president's live to mark 50. When Kagame was a toddler in 1959, marauding Hutu militants almost killed him, his parents and siblings.

That year was when modern Rwanda's violent history began. It was the time of the "Hutu Revolution," a spate of bloody upheavals that were much less a political revolution than a violent transfer of political power from Tutsis to Hutus instigated by the Belgian colonialists.

What saved the young Kagame and the other members of his family is that one of his aunts was Queen Gicanda, wife of King Mutara Rudahigwa. She sent a car that evacuated her beleaguered relatives in the nick of time, the pursuing Hutus just a few metres behind.

Long after the late Deogratius Rutagambwa, President Kagame's father, had taken his family to exile in neighbouring Uganda (a situation that befell hundreds of thousands of other Tutsis), the young Kagame, who was always restless, kept asking about Rwanda, wondering when they would return home.

As a teenager in the early to mid 1970s, Kagame the future revolutionary would, according to his own account, cross over into Rwanda dressed in a shirt, shorts and rubber shoes and go all the way to Kigali without arousing suspicion. This was a daring move since in those days being a Tutsi was enough reason for one to be hauled into a police station for questioning.

The people Kagame visited in Kigali were relatives who had remained in Rwanda. Once in Kigali, the young Kagame, still clad in his schoolboy outfit, would hang around public places such as bars, drink a soda, and listen in to conversations around him while making mental notes and learning.

During the day, the boy would walk along the street across former president Juvenal Habyarimana's State House.

After he did this a couple of times, one of the presidential guards noticed him and called out to him to come over.

"I ran away very fast!" Kagame says.

Was what he learnt during those forays in Kigali useful in his future role as leader of the Rwandese Patriotic Front guerrilla movement? No doubt it was.

It takes an unusually courageous, resourceful and intelligent man to lead movements to dislodge entrenched oppressive systems. President Kagame proved from an early age to be that kind of person. But these personality traits were understated because he was not a charismatic public figure like his close friend Fred Rwigema, the RPF's first leader, with whom he shared many adverse moments in life and who was to lose his life in 1990 on the first day of the war to dislodge the Habyarimana regime.

The abilities of Kagame, who began his military career in Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army, were to come fully to the fore when he took over the RPF, reorganised it and led it to a bloody victory against Habyarimana's army and stopped the 1994 genocide.

In the aftermath of the war and the genocide, Rwanda was a corpse-filled shell of a country and few doubted it would be anything more than a Somalia-style basket case. But President Kagame has proved his leadership abilities extend well beyond the war front. His government has transformed Rwanda into a place of optimism.

The president's birthday party therefore was something more than that: it was a celebration of a life dedicated to serving one's people.