When you watch Hotel Rwanda, one of your first thoughts is: this story is incomplete. How did they get there, that early scene? How do a people get to a point where it is ok to order machetes for killing other human beings they had lived with, worked beside, bought from, and sold to? In years to come, you will read of other countries – or courtesy of Half of a Yellow Sun- of countries that were. You will listen to other people, through documentaries and interviews. Like the weathered father on that Al-Jazeera documentary narrating how he now searches for his son, fearing the young man has returned to Somalia to join the Al Shabaab. You wonder how that man could stand by and allow his child be radicalized. Your own parents would have slapped sense into you. With each story, you read or listen to, you questioned how whole groups of people reach that point. You know your people have never known true peace but you still wonder how it becomes normal for people to carry such a heavy load of hate such that they consider and commit murder, such that one can blow up themselves for questionable beliefs? How? Unfortunately, fate decides to help you answer these questions through experience, and gives you the recipe for war you didn’t ask for. *** Mix ¾ silent majority propagating stereotypes and fending only for self 2/3 biased media, journalists reporting for sensationalism, the next brown envelope, or to encourage their own faction ½ inadequate education, teach young people dependency but not proactivity, teach youth the parts of a grasshopper but neither the hard truths of their history nor the laws of their country. Leave them grossly uninformed and depending on which region their school is based, leave them to be further socialized with stereotypes.  Add a full measure of fear and distrust of the armed forces, be they police, army or everything in between. Let that fear seep so deep into their hearts and do nothing to erase it. Add tribalism, corruption, religious dogma, and let these mature under an oppressive government with power-drunk, short-sighted stooges of neo-colonialists who would rather repress than dialogue Sprinkle a dash of social media power to inflate everything, and spread incomplete news faster… And there you have it, the perfect conditions for war. *** You were not wrong when you thought Hotel Rwanda was incomplete. No film could capture it all. Wars are like wine; they mature over time but pop out as spontaneously as harmattan rain. The screenwriters had to leave the rest to the imagination or to experience. You are discovering now that it begins slowly, with years of grumbling and anger accumulating, hoarded like an abscess left to fester till it bursts open with an accidental scratch. War began when your aunty was mocked for marrying “Les Bamenda la”. It began when going to French areas became synonymous with going to the metropolis and returning to Anglophone areas was synonymous with rural living. War grew in our hearts when we would go on long holidays to French areas and count how often the power went off, noting that it was less frequent than the times it went off back ‘home’. The seeds of war were sown unwittingly when you soaked in your grandparent’s disdain for all things French such that boycotting French lessons didn’t faze you. You were allowed to fail that subject. No one would question it. War spread as we grew, grew older, and grew tired, as our government didn’t even bother to pretend any longer. As our president would patronize with statements like “apprenti sorcier” referring to protesters, or “better late than never” as an excuse for and tardy celebration of independence and presumed unity. And this is how war began; like a belch after you’ve eaten too much. Taken too much nonsense. Nonsense like regional balance which somehow is always unbalanced. Nonsense like regular news broadcasts which omit the hard truths, twist the soft ones and butcher the language of the minority- news that is ironically old no matter the presenter. Nonsense like government appointments comparable to a game of musical chairs. We all have a chance to sit and eat, then shuffle dance to get another chance. Nonsense like tens of millions disappearing, stolen, they say, from ministers’ homes as though they were national bank vaults. Too much nonsense like fifty thousand people registering to write entrance exams where only two hundred and fifty are needed. A veritable lottery. The battleground was slowly built but the war has been quickly called. As swiftly as the arbitrary arrests of January 17th, 2017. When all of a sudden those who would answer bullets with sit-in protests were replaced with those who could actually wield machetes if given. Now you can tell that war is not a fire, but a bar of soap, able to hold still when dry, but ready to slip out of grasp when lathered. And governments like yours would lather, throw water saying “It is nothing. They will return to court when they are hungry”, “There is no Anglophone problem”…“Those people protesting are terrorists”… and so the foam will build and you will see war tumbling towards you like the unwieldy soapsuds. Yet not everyone will see it. It is funny like that. Soap lathers silently, so it is that war encroached silently, with people accepting the bubbles as the norm. War grows unto people. They begin to take cases of vengeful arson in stride, they make excuses for journalist calling for massacres, they defend all the wrong means using the desired end, even it the desire is hazy. War foams slowly with adaptation to over-militarisation, with alternatives found to ‘inconveniences” like opening up shops on Sundays and sending your kids to other towns for schools. Like securing visas to travel; let those who are poor and unable to leave remain to die. You see now that this is how it starts, the wars you read about, watched