Victoire ngabire, leader of FDU-Inkingi political party returned to Rwanda on January 16th, 2010 from exile. The Rwandan president Paul imprisoned her since October 14th, 2010 for requesting democracy in her country and justice for the hundreds of thousands of Hutus that RPF killed since 1990, during the genocide and after.
Understandably there can only be one Mandela and one only, particularly if one considers the 27 years he spent in prison. No cloning of his experience appears possible. The closer the Rwandan political prisoner, Victoire Ingabire, can get to the real Mandela is only in terms of similarities of segregation system she is up against.
The Rwandan apartheid led by extremist Tutsi elites around its president Paul Kagame seems to be worse than the South African one. The difference between them is mainly that the former does not say what it is on the tin. It is subtly covered up under oiled tuned schemes that its millions of hutu victims experience harshly every day since 1994. It is more real than the South African one in the sense that it kills in millions, it imprisons in tens of thousands. It rapes in hundreds of thousands of Congolese women and girls to occupy and plunder Eastern Congo mineral resources. It excludes every hutu it despises. It persistently kidnaps every young male and adult hutu and forces them into military training to defend its political and economic interests nationally and regionally.
However, like the South African one of the recent past, it has its neo-liberal sponsors in US, Britain, Israel and other western countries. They are all interested in material wealth. Lives of Africans are the least of their preoccupations, as long as they are able to access the mineral resources especially of the Democratic Republic of Congo they envy and pursue now for more than a century. No matter how many millions of Africans they want killed, nothing seems to ever stop them in their obsessive pursuit.
This Friday 13/12/13, many South Africans and other people around the world are still mourning the passing of Nelson Mandela. Victoire Ingabire, another African hero for millions of Rwandans is faced with an apartheid like system, which oppresses the hutu majority [85% of the population] in an unprecedented way hard to understand if you are not one of them. Whatever the verdict that the High Court in Kigali will give today on her case [she has been imprisoned since October 14th, 2010] might only be a minor event in that Rwandan apartheid of tutsi rulers against oppressed, exploited and excluded hutu.
As people continue keeping alive the memory of Mandela, they should not forget also that Rwandan and African woman prisoner who left everything, her family and her professional comfort and devoted her life to fight the Rwandan apartheid institutionalized by Paul Kagame as a system of government against the majority hutu population.