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Africa's new class of power players
Who knows division like Rwandans?
For every African who goes abroad and returns with professional expertise and grand visions, there are many more who don't come back. According to the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, brain drain has been steadily increasing. Between 1960 and 1975 an estimated 27,000 highly qualified African professionals left their home countries. Between 1985 and 1990, the number was up to 60,000 - and Africa has been losing an average of 20,000 annually ever since. These figures do not include the sizable number of students who leave to study overseas - and haven't yet decided whether they will ever return.
If they do, many can be quickly defeated. Corruption bankrupts some. Others are knocked down by poverty, entrenched traditions, AIDS, or tribal warfare.
In 1994, Chris Kayomba was a refugee in Uganda, halfheartedly studying journalism, watching dead bodies flow into Lake Victoria, and dreaming of the day he would go home to Rwanda and make a fresh start.
More than 50 of Mr. Kayomba's relatives - brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins - were killed during the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda. In all, 800,000 people died in the ethnic cleansing.
When the genocide finally ended, Kayomba took a taxi back home to Kigali and, just shy of age 30, got together with some friends to try to do something about repairing the country. They started Umuseso, Rwanda's first daily opposition paper. Umuseso, derived from the Kinyarwanda word for "daybreak," was going to be something fresh, they told themselves. In a land scarred by Tutsi and Hutu tribal hatred, their paper was going to offer straight talk about ethnicity and government - "and Manchester United," adds McDowell Kalisa, a senior editor who also moonlights as the British soccer team's Rwanda fan-club director.
The paper would heal, challenge, bring up new ideas. That's what they thought. But in Africa, good intentions sometimes can take one only so far.
The team became discouraged. As government harassment grew, one fled to the Netherlands, two were jailed, and others left the country. Kayomba clung to his ideals, getting a scholarship for a master's degree in peace and conflict studies at the University of Londonderry in Northern Ireland. Ireland was something else, he recalls. At first he was not sure they were even speaking English - and he's sure many of them had never ever seen a Rwandan. But soon he began to love it, and made friends with everyone - Catholics and Protestants alike. He even became a go-between for them.
"Think about it," he says with a grin. "Who has better experience in evils of division than Rwandans? I know what that's like." In class they studied Israel and the disputed Asian territory of Kashmir, and in the evenings they held debates on different ways of resolving ethnic and religious strife.
When Kayomba came back from Ireland, he had big plans: He would write powerful commentaries in Umuseso about postwar reconciliation between tribes; he would advocate for overcoming the lingering animosities in the country without limiting freedoms; he would organize lectures on how other postconflict societies have dealt with their pasts; and maybe he would even run for office.
So far, he has done none of this. He needed to make money first, he admits. He grew tired of the infighting at the paper, the bureaucracy in and around the government, the prohibition of any real talk about ethnicity, and the mild but persistent harassment of anyone saying anything controversial at all. So he went to teach journalism at the University of Butare and do research on democracy for a Dutch nongovernmental organization (NGO).
He's married now, and makes four times as much money working for the NGO than he would working at his old newspaper. Sometimes he even writes a column for the government paper.
"There is no real independent media here," he says, defending his choice. "No one really addresses the issues anyway."
Umuseso is still around, though these days its just Mr. Kalisa and his friend Robert Sebufirira, writing the stories, doing the editing, delivering the newspaper in a van. The focus has changed, too. There are more sports pages and far less talk about ethnicity. It's prohibited by the government - an extreme measure taken, they say, to prevent a repeat of the horrors that were born out of the combination of free speech and simmering ethnic tension that led, in part, to the genocide. In private, critics argue that the newly reelected President Kagame is using these laws to stifle freedoms and actually stirring ethnic divisions by shoving them under the carpet.
Kayomba's colleagues at Umuseso can understand his choices. "Rwanda is a poor country," says Mr. Sebufirira, "and it's hard to remain courageous when you need to make ends meet.... Don't be surprised if you meet someone with good ideas and you come back five years later and they are speaking the opposite."
"If you study or move out, you get new ideas - you are not confined in a certain cycle and as a result, you look at things so differently," explains Kalisa. "The problem is that you find you can't implement those good ideas back home.... Kayomba got so many good ideas [in Ireland]. But when he wanted to exercise them, he found this was not good ground to work on."
To serve the nation, not just the tribe
Kenyans haven't faced genocide like their neighbors, but tribalism is no less of a divisive force. Kenyatta's speech last Christmas - and the way he campaigned - was noteworthy for its relative lack of tribalism.
In Africa, the man with the tribe behind him is expected to take care of his people at the expense of everyone else. National pride or unity is not a concept that comes easily to a continent where colonialists unceremoniously split up rivers, mountains, tribes, and families as they divvied up the land among themselves. Tribalism has been the order of the day ever since. Everything, it seems, takes a backseat to ethnicity. Take Kenya's exalted long-distance runners. When a Kenyan wins the New York marathon, the media in Nairobi hail it as a Kalenjin or a Luhya victory - not a win for Kenya.
Kenyatta's father, as president, gave members of the Kikyuyu tribe - Kenya's largest and most influential - a disproportionate share of political and economic power. Afterward, President Daniel arap Moi exploited distrust of the Kikyuyus for his own ends and handed out favors to his tribesmen, the Kalenjin, as well as to other supportive ethnic groups.
But in last year's elections, both Kenyatta and current President Kibaki - also a Kikyuyu - campaigned on platforms to stop this cycle. The peaceful elections, with voting patterns less ethnically based than before, may be an example of an emerging national spirit that weaken old ethnic cleavages.
"We are not fighting for liberation anymore," says Kenyatta. "Now it's time to rediscover what sort of leadership we want. We need to design and build systems and create institutions that will serve - not just individuals or this generation - but posterity. America has done this, and this is why it is still standing firm after 200 years."
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Fighting 'brain drain'
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COMING HOME: Africa's emerging power players
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KENYATTA
Possibly Kenya's next president
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MAKATIANI
Launched Africa's biggest Internet company
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KAYOMBA
Founded an independant newspaper in Rwanda
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DARKOH
Leads Botswana's free AIDS-drug program
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BRUKTAWAIT
Started Ethiopia's largest private bank
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TSELE
General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches
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Q&A: The higher education equation in Africa's development
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