On leaving the DRC for Rwanda and Kenya
March 12th 2011
To cross the border from DRC into Rwanda at Gisenyi is to pass through the door to another world. Leaving behind Goma and everything that is shambolic about it the traveler approaches clean orderly well functioning Rwanda. It is a nostalgic, even sad, moment—Goma has been my home and is very familiar to me. I even exchange greetings with the corrupt border official who shook me down for a bribe on entering the country 10 weeks earlier. He is actually my neighbour now as he occupies the same compound where my demobilised soldiers project has established its computer lab. We see each other all the time and here at the border he greets me like an old friend.
At the Rwandan side the window where you pay for an entry visa—which you apply for online and receive (promptly) by email—has a proud sticker testifying that service standards are approved by an ISO 9000 designation. A cheerful, competent and uncorrupt official stamps your passport, hands it back to you and wishes you to enjoy your stay.
And then you are through to Gisenyi and its neat boulevards, gardens and well maintained homes and hotels on the corniche of what is the Lake Kivu Riviera. As you leave Gisenyi and climb up through the green green hills of Rwanda it is as though you are entering an African Switzerland. But then, after a few miles, you come upon a prison, a new and modern looking compound with a high brick wall, the first reminder that in fact all is not well in Rwanda.
Despite outward appearances of order and prosperity this remains a troubled country with its own secret sadness. The ongoing lack of ethnic harmony or any real national consensus over its politics and other troubles points to Rwanda’s historic fault line, something which has produced exclusion, coded ethnic politics and genocide, being unresolved. This and other problems are something which its disciplined, authoritarian government keeps a tight lid on—trouble being stored up for the future. Looking back over my shoulder at the DRC in the distance, to where Rwanda has exported its own problems, including a spectacular view of the Nyiragongo Volcano, there is sadness in knowing that Rwanda’s troubles is not over, will, sooner or later, come to the fore again.