Louise Mushikiwabo

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Louise Mushikiwabo (born 22 May 1961) is the fourth and current Secretary General of Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.

She served as Rwanda's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation from 2009 to 2018.

She has also served as the Government Spokesperson.

She had previously been Minister of Information. At the Summit of Francophonie in Yerevan, Armenia, she was elected for a four-year term as the Secretary General of Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF).

Early life

Louise Mushikiwabo was born in Kigali, Rwanda's capital, on May 22nd. Bitsindinkumi, a Batsobe family, was her father; Bitsindinkumi was a farmer, and she spent time as a bookkeeper for a colonial coffee plantation. Nyiratulira's mother was a first cousin of Abiru scholar and historian Alexis Kagame. She spent her childhood in Kigali. Lando Ndasingwa, a notable businessman and politician in Rwanda before being killed in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide, and Anne-Marie Kantengwa, who took over Lando's hotel Chez Lando after his death and served in the Rwandan parliament from 2003 to 2008.

Mushikiwabo started studying at the National University of Rwanda (currently University of Rwanda), in Kigali's southern city of Butare, in 1981. She graduated from university in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in English, and then worked briefly as a secondary school coach for a short time. She moved from Rwanda to the United States in 1986, where she began studying for a master's degree in Languages and Interpretation at the University of Delaware, with French as her special language. She remained in the United States after finishing her studies in 1988, settling in the Washington, D.C. area. She began her career with lobbying firms before taking up a position with the African Development Bank (ADB); as part of her role with the ADB, she lived in Tunisia for a short time and then became the bank's Communications Director.

In 2006, Mushikiwabo co-authored Rwanda Means the Universe, an American journalist and ex-marine. Mushikiwabo's family, her early life in Rwanda, and her emigration to the United States are chronicled in this book. It also discusses the Rwandan genocide in depth, both from a historical perspective and a Washington view, as she learned that several of her relatives had been killed.

Personal life and family

Lando Ndasingwa, her brother, was the only Tutsi minister in the last Habyarimana government, but she was killed in 1994, despite the 1994 genocide. After her brother's murder, Anne-Marie Kantengwa took over the operation of their brother's hotel and restaurant, Chez Lando. Mushikiwabo is also the niece of the distinguished Rwandan scholar and priest Alexis Kagame.

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Political career

Mushikiwabo was invited by Rwandan President Paul Kagame to return to her homeland Rwanda and take up a post in his government in March 2008. Laurent Nkusi was named Minister of Information, replacing her predecessor. Mushikiwabo was responsible for determining whether or not to take action against several local media organisations that had run defamatory news about Kagame early in her tenure. The president had compared Adolf Hitler to Adolf Hitler in an article, but the High Council of the Press (HCP) had ordered that the government suspend the newspaper's license. Nkusi had declined this offer, and although Mushikiwabo did not officially suspend the paper, it nevertheless stopped printing in October 2008. Mushikiwabo mainly urged her employees to embrace freedom of the press, but she was also committed to making sure that the media adhered to Rwanda's toughest guidelines surrounding genocide denial. She issued a provisional ban on the Kinyarwanda radio station broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 2009 because she said it had broadcasted programs "giving free reign to genocidaires and denunciators of the genocide"; the BBC denied this assertion, arguing that both the government and the government had contradictory interpretations of the genocide.

Mushikiwabo served as Minister of Information while also being responsible for the ministry's decision making. For example, as Rwanda faced a diplomatic crisis with Germany after the detention of President Kagame's chief of protocol, Rose Kabuye, Mushikiwabo, spoke to the international media to clarify the Rwandan government's position. She made use of her linguistic skills, being able to give speeches in all of Rwanda's official languages, Kinyarwanda, French, and English.

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