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In a landlocked and resource-poor country, you can appreciate why the laptop represents one of the most potent symbols of Rwanda's ambition to turn itself into a knowledge-based economy. The government hopes to train 50,000 computer programmers within the next decade, a scheme that is being developed in parallel with other large technology projects whose aim is not to catch up with neighbours such as Kenya, but to leapfrog them within a generation. A wireless broadband system is planned for Kigali – a city-wide umbrella that would convert the capital into a huge "hot spot". The rest of the mountainous country is being crisscrossed by a fibre-optic cable network for broadband access, which will first establish connection to regional hubs and then spread out to the smaller towns and villages.
Kigali these days is a place of fresh-minted neighbourhoods and tidy streets, polished ministries and regulated traffic. Municipal workers clean gullies and hack away at intrusive vegetation. Plastic bags are banned. The wearing of seatbelts is strictly and expensively enforced. But the optimistic billboards placed by the government, the glowing write-ups delivered by visiting reporters and politicians keen to polish the country's success, still struggle to disguise its problems. Genocide survivors continue to be murdered in dozens every year – one Rwandan explains to me that the killers seek to eradicate the human reminder of what happened and the their own guilt by killing again.
The authoritarian president, Paul Kagame – once embraced by President Clinton as an exemplar of Africa's new leadership – stands accused by human rights organisations of suppressing opposition politics and parties, most commonly by accusing them of harbouring ideological sympathies with the genocidaires. In recent weeks, too, a series of unexplained grenade attacks have rocked the capital .
Most Rwandans, when they do talk of the past and what it means today, say that while they can live and work together for the sake of peace, they cannot forget.
I take a drive out of Kigali one day with Samuel Dusengiyumva, a 28-year-old consultant with One Laptop Per Child. He has offered to drive me to the genocide memorial in Nyamata, a church where 10,000 Rwandans were blasted with grenades then hacked to death in April 1994. He talks about what schooling was like before the genocide and after; how lack of education contributed to mass murder.