A few days ago I was running late for a meeting so I hastily parked my vehicle in a faculty reserved parking spot. I returned an hour later in time to find a parking enforcement officer writing me violation ticket. I approached the straight faced man with a beaming smile, hoping he could let me off the hook. As I started to explain myself, he noticed my foreign accent and asked where I was from. ‘Rwanda’, I answered.

‘You mean like in the movie Hotel Rwanda?’ he asked, a typical question Rwandan diasporas get on an almost daily basis.

‘Yes, that is my country,’ I shot back. At this point he quickly crossed out the ticket he was writing and apologized for wasting my time.

‘You have been through enough already. I will not cause you any more problems,’ he said as he drove off leaving me stunned but nevertheless elated.

In the west, Hotel Rwanda has become the first and in some cases the only point of interaction between Rwanda’s ten million people and the vast majority of the hundreds of millions around the world. Sadly, the very inspiration that foments the creation of this film is based on fallacies, inaccuracies and outright fabrications.

In 1993, Steven Spielberg directed probably the most critically acclaimed film on the subject of genocide based on the story of a German businessman, Oskar Schindler, who saved the lives of more than a thousand refugees during the Holocaust.

The similarities between Hotel Rwanda and Schindler’s List are obvious as Paul Rusesabagina, the hero of Hotel Rwanda is portrayed as a Schindler like businessman who saves lives in a nearly identical chapter of history. This, among many other erroneous insinuations, epitomizes a barren filmmaking that rushes to loosely base the ideal story line of one successful film to inspire the creation of another. This would be otherwise perfectly acceptable if the film did not lay claim to being a true story.

Not only does Hotel Rwanda fall short in terms fact checking, it also lags far behind in terms of quality when compared to its ‘original’. And yet, despite all this, I can’t help but be thankful that this film saved me from paying a hefty parking fine – this being a cheerful barometer of the more significant consequences of this film.

Looked at in the bigger picture, the world did not pay enough attention to trigger any action when scenes of the actual Rwandan genocide were broadcast on live television and yet audiences worldwide have so far paid over thirty million dollars to watch this film.

Hotel Rwanda is to date the most publicized piece of Rwanda’s documented history worldwide. If it wasn’t for this film, hundreds of millions Americans, Asians and Europeans would never know who or what Rwanda is.

The most important lesson from this therefore lies is in understanding how we as individuals and collectively as Rwandans are perceived wherever we go around the world. We live in a global village that has cowered to the cult of celebrity and succumbed to the influence of media supremacy. Sadly this arsenal is powerful enough to compromise and alter Rwanda’s globally accepted history by sheer volume. Hate it or love it, the world sees Rwanda through the myopic lens of Hotel Rwanda.

It is nearly impossible to argue out or challenge individual facts of this film because regardless of the platform one uses, changing the global impact of a medium that was viewed by hundreds of million people is a mammoth task. Especially given the emotional strength of the film and it’s good jumble of fact and fiction—touching enough to be believable, yet phony enough to be laughable.

In the short term the best Rwandans can do is to try to harmonize their identity with this film by identifying and accepting its points of accuracy. In the long-term Rwanda should increase its interaction with Hollywood with an aim to instigate a historically accurate blockbuster film that will overshadow the current impact of Hotel Rwanda.

I drive off the scene with mixed emotions — relieved that I will not be paying a hefty parking fine and guilty that I am a beneficiary of a filmmaker’s profit motivated scheme to milk the sympathy of whoever cares to watch this film.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Foreign media coverage on Africa is defined by crisis. For two decades, Rwanda has made the pages of global newsprint for both positive and negative reasons, yet on the onset the country’s weaknesses always seem outshine its achievements. Positive and negative stories alike are given the same treatment that capitalizes on a predetermined dramatic editorial [...]

A few days ago I was presented with an interesting question by one of my mentors. She asked me, “What would you write if you knew you had only a few days, maybe even hours of life left, just long enough to sum up what is most important to you about life? If I had a few more hours to live, my final words would be summed up in a message about the importance of an immortal human legacy: mankind’s ability to leave behind that which is greater than him.

Trade and charity run parallel. The west will not donate trade to Africa in the same way that it donates aid and therefore the Aid vs. Trade debate does not hold. With trade, Africa simply needs to take action instead of calling out for help.

There is a significant increase in violence against the Zimbabwe’s remaining white commercial farmers as the country fast-tracks enforcement of farm takeovers. Farm invasions have been taking place since 2000, but the latest round is more vicious than ever before. At 94% unemployment cannot possibly get worse, as for hyperinflation, there can be no report more damning than the indefinite suspension of the national currency. It seems like Zimbabwe has no more surprises in store – for its people and for the global news audience. But then again it never runs out of surprises. At the dawn of independence in 1980, when the world was wobbling with optimism for Zimbabwe, Professor Abdul Rahman Babu authored an open letter that predicted this series of events that have come to unravel almost thirty years down the road.

When Januna Ali Jama, a spokesman for one of the groups demanded an $8m ransom for the return of a Ukranian ship his group had captured, in “reaction to the toxic waste that has been continually dumped on the shores of our country for nearly 20 years”– one couldn’t help but view the requisition as modest and justifiable.

I am starting to think you only have to be Rwandan, to fully understand what it feels like to repeatedly receive insults on your human conscience and intelligence. Only time will tell if Barack’s new policy on Darfur will bear fruit but one thing is for sure — General Gration will be surprised to find that Darfurians prefer the cookies to the goldstars.

Among the realities that this year’s Nobel prizes brought to light is the fact that the United States is a nation made up of immigrants who drive its innovation economy. Statistics indicate that foreign-born science and engineering students earn one-third of all Ph.D.s awarded in the United States. However, It is important for the prize to evolve in a way that enhances the contribution of scientists that are struggling to meet the most important challenges of the 21st century like climate change.

In order to successfully fight HIV, it is important to dispel the common myths and negative portrayal of the ‘developing world’ because gives the impression that Africa is world’s away from the west.

Africa is least responsible for causing the current changes in global climatic conditions since it emits the lowest greenhouse gases yet it is at the highest risk of facing the most dire effects of the changing climate conditions due this over dependence on natural resources. There is a need for the continent’s representatives to take a united and proactive stance at the December 7 Copenhagen summit that will lay down the global framework for climate change control beyond 2012.