TheDeepTake #Appartenance #Identité #Rwanda #Migration #HistoiresAfricaines

BELONGING IS A STORY WE BUILD

There is a question that runs through many lives … Not necessarily the question of where we were born, but of where we choose to be. You can spend an entire lifetime in the country where you were born and never quite feel at home. You can carry a sense that something is missing. And sometimes, it takes crossing a border to discover a place that somehow feels more like you.

This is one of the questions at the heart of my conversation with writer, publisher, storyteller, trade unionist and former French politician Daniel Le Scornet Rugamba, now known in Kigali as Rugamba. Together with his wife, he left his native France and settled in Rwanda. Not to spend a few years here, but to build a life: to create a publishing house, accompany writers, preserve and circulate stories, and contribute, in his own way and from another perspective, to the cultural and intellectual life of this country.

So, this conversation is not really just about books … It is about a word that sounds simple, until you begin to ask what it really means: Belonging.

What makes a country become ‘yours’? Is it a passport? A language? Memories? Friendships? The landscape around you? Or is it, perhaps, the decision to love a place deeply enough to build something there?

We often talk about ‘integration’ as if it were an administrative process – as if belonging could be measured by documents, residence permits or citizenship. But integration can also be something deeply intimate. Countries are made of roads, hills and cities. But the Rwanda of Le Scornet Rugamba is, above all, made of stories. And stories happen to be his real job.

Which raises another question: what story do we choose to tell … and whose story gets to be told? Perhaps, when a human being leaves one country and chooses another, they are looking for more than a different place. Perhaps they are looking for another possibility of being themselves. And this is where we should resist the temptation to intellectualise everything.
There are things no university can teach us. Some things can only be learned by living.

We spend so much time talking about borders, and far less about bridges. Yet bridges often change the world more than borders do.
The journey of Daniel Le Scornet Rugamba reminds us that we can be born in one country, come to love another, contribute to a third – and, somewhere along the way, discover that identity is not simply a place we come from. It is a story we continue to build.

Thank you, Le Scornet Rugamba, for sharing yours with us.