[RonPrice]

In 1994, as I was heading into my last five years of employment as a teacher, the ruling Hutu government in the then small African nation of Rwanda, set out to eradicate its Tutsi minority. The Rwandan Genocide, as this eradication program came to be called, consisted of the mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people. The Hutu people alleged that the Tutsi minority held an unfair monopoly of power in Rwanda.

The majority Hutu people had come to power in the rebellion, the revolt, of 1959–62 which overthrew the Tutsi monarchy, and established a republic. I was just 15 years old in 1959, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and played hockey, baseball and football as a grade 10 student. By 1962 I was working on my matriculation studies and had begun to travel and pioneer for the Canadian Baha’i community.

In the colonialist period, under Belgian rule before 1959, the Tutsis and Hutus, the two ethnic groups concerned, had come to hate each other through systematized inequality and a struggle for power. It is a somewhat complex story that can be easily read by those interested. I shall say no more here. I certainly knew none of this back around 1960, occupied as I was with my local agenda, with growing-up, in the small town of Burlington Ontario.

In August 1998 the largest war in modern African history began. Called the Second Congo War, it began on the eve of my retirement after 50 years in classrooms. It directly involved eight African nations as well as about 25 armed groups. It took place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By 2008 the war and its aftermath had killed 5.4 million people mostly from disease and starvation. This war was the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II. Millions more were displaced from their homes or sought asylum in neighbouring countries. By then, by 2008, I was fully ensconced in retirement, had taken a sea-change, was on a pension, and was still as far removed from all this slaughter in Africa as I had been 14 years before.-Ron Price with thanks to All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, SBSONE, 8:30-9:30 p.m. Parts 1-3, 18/10/’11 to 1/11/’11.

So much of the world’s slaughter
goes on in some parallel universe
as one eats one’s evening meal and
tries to get through one’s own life
unscathed by the slings-and-arrows
of outrageous fortune. Ill-equipped
to interpret the social commotion at
play throughout the planet, we listen
to the pundits of error & sink deeper
into the slough of despond, troubled
by forecasts of doom and doing battle
with wrongly informed imaginations as
our days pass swiftly as twinkling stars.1

1 Ridvan message 1999, The Universal House of Justice

Ron Price
2 November 2011