TWO years after the genocide, Rwanda has 500,000 widows, the same number of orphans and 73,000 people in custody accused of killing the husbands and fathers of their fellow Rwandese.
Land lies idle in many parts. Those who used to farm it are either dead or in refugee camps, afraid to return home. Representatives of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees visit the camps in Zaire regularly to encourage people to go home. Small groups are escorted on visits to their former homes to encourage them to return permanently.
But fear remains strong. According to Rwanda's Minister for Family and Women in Development, Ms Aloyisia Inyumba, roughly a million Rwandans have not returned to the country. "Their husbands and fathers were murdered by Rwandese. The problem is how to organise these traumatised people. We have to solve the justice issues to give people the confidence to come back."
The "justice issues" concern the fact that two years on, nobody has been convicted of murder, let alone genocide, arising from the killings of up to a million people in 100 days in 1994. "Those who organised and carried out genocide are still moving freely around the region," she says.
Those accused who are not moving around freely are packed into overcrowded camps throughout the country. The sheer numbers mean that most are unlikely ever to go on trial. The international community is pressing the Rwandan government to categorise the accused and to put those charged with the most serious crimes on trial soon.
The international community, however, is in little position to preach. Trials of the ringleaders at an international tribunal were supposed to be well under way by now. So far, justch would compete with those of ethnic competitors in a society where ethnicity and success are linked inextricably.
Finally, might one appeal to members of the post colonial school to drop the term "cultural schizophrenia": schizophrenia is a debilitating, lifelong illness and hardly appropriate to jokey metaphors.