Diane Mukamurenzi, GPJ Rwanda
KIGALI, RWANDA – When James Ndahiro arrived at The Catholic University of Eastern Africa in Kenya in 1993, he was its first blind student, he says.
“When I arrived at the university, they all were surprised to see me,” he says. “They told me: ‘We didn’t know you were like this when we called you, but we are really surprised. Will you be able to do it?’ I told them, ‘I can do it.’”
With few resources available for blind people at the university, Ndahiro had to improvise. First, he enlisted a roommate to read his lecture notes aloud after class and tape-recorded the reading to review later.
Then, in order to access the school’s library, Ndahiro purchased a Braille typewriter and hired a person to read books out loud to him. He painstakingly transcribed them into Braille so he could read them later.
“I was the only blind person to join university at that time,” he says. “But because I was willing to do it and I had a vision to attain, I made it as I wished.”
His disability has never hindered his ability to achieve, he says. After he graduated university, a scholarship took him to Europe to attain advanced degrees in accounting and finance.
Today, he has a busy life in East African business and politics. He is a member of the East African Legislative Assembly, an organ of the East African Community, a regional intergovernmental organization of five republics, including Rwanda. After contributing to the founding of the Rwanda Stock Exchange, today he serves as the chairman of its board of directors. He also sits on the boards of several financial services companies.
He has a confident, happy manner, chats easily with all kinds of people and is often smiling. He has become an inspiration to colleagues, family members and fellow blind citizens.
Blindness is a large and poorly treated problem in Rwanda, according to data published in 2012 by the Fred Hollows Foundation, an international organization that works to prevent blindness and to promote eye health. There are 30,000 blind people in Rwanda, suffering mostly treatable types of blindness, but only 11 ophthalmologists to serve them.
Rwanda’s Ministry of Education has recognized the need to support students with disabilities, including blindness, and adopted a Special Needs Education Policy in 2007.
But disabled students still face many problems in school, including discrimination and a lack of resources and facilities, according to a 2010 study by the Kigali Institute of Education and the University of Manchester.
To respond to these ongoing problems, the Ministry of Education is preparing to update and revise the 2007 policy to better serve disabled students. But it has not announced its new policy yet.
Ndahiro, 46, was not born blind. In 1992, after growing up in Uganda, the then-25-year-old was fighting as a soldier with the Rwandese Patriotic Front, the political and military armed group that sought to repatriate Rwandan exiles, reform the Rwandan government, and end the genocide in Rwanda. One day, his vehicle hit a land mine, and the resulting explosion cost him both eyes.
Shortly after the accident, Ndahiro decided to attend university in Kenya. But the school was not prepared to accommodate blind students, he says. The rector asked him to wait for two years for the university to find equipment and to train lecturers who would assist him.
“I didn’t agree with him,” Ndahiro says. “I didn’t have two years to lose, for I was committed to achieving my goals.”
He pressed his case, and the rector eventually agreed, Ndahiro says. The rector offered to waive the university’s fees for Ndahiro, but he refused because he wanted to pay for himself.
“I don’t like when people take pity on me,” he says. “However, I like when I help others. Even though I am blind, when someone wants to help me, we become enemies.”
Despite the obstacles, such as a lack of materials in Braille, Ndahiro was a star student. He got high marks and later won a scholarship to pursue a doctorate in accounting and finance at the University of Manchester in England, which he followed with another business degree from the Maastricht School of Management in the Netherlands.
His accomplishments distinguish him in Rwanda.
In Rwanda, society tends to perceive disabled people in terms of their ability to function in and contribute to their communities, according to the 2010 study by the Kigali Institute of Education and the University of Manchester. This emphasis on function extends even to linguistic prefixes in Kinyarwanda and other languages in the Bantu family, as the same prefixes that describe objects can also refer to disabled people. For example, the Kinyarwanda word “ikimuga” means both “a person with a disability” and “a defunct object,” such as a broken pot.
One of Ndahiro’s former classmates, Bart Gasana, who knew Ndahiro before he lost his sight, says he thought Ndahiro would have had to drop out of school when he became blind and do smaller jobs.
“I later went to study in the Netherlands and was surprised to find him there,” he says. “I really encouraged him to keep on.”
Ndahiro was an exemplary student, Gasana says.
“The way I used to know Dr. James at school, he really performed better than all of us,” he says, “to the point that there are subjects we would fail when he has succeeded [in] them. He is really my role model because he is intelligent.”
Robert Mathu, CEO of Capital Market Authority, an institution that runs the Rwanda Stock Exchange, says that Ndahiro’s professional experience led him to become an appointed member of the task force that designed and advised the government on founding the Rwanda Stock Exchange.
Christophe Bazivamo, a member of the East African Legislative Assembly, says that Ndahiro is an exemplary member of the assembly.
“He performs his tasks better than many of his colleagues who do not have [a] disability,” Bazivamo says.
The assembly is currently developing a policy to empower disabled people to be part of the community’s integration process, in which it engages the populations of the five member countries to participate in developing their nations, Ndahiro says.
Today, Ndahiro lives in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and has a wife and three children. Family member Alex Nzigiye says Ndahiro takes care of his immediate and extended family.
“As a person who lives with Dr. James, let me say that he fulfills the family’s responsibilities,” he says. “I can even say that he is really better than most of us because he helps us as his siblings, he helps his children, and there are many more family members he helps.”
As an example of Ndahiro’s generosity, Nzigiye adds that Ndahiro has paid all of Nzigiye’s school fees from primary school through university.
Ndahiro is also an inspiration to other blind people in Rwanda, such as Jacques Mugisha, who works at Handicap International, an organization that works to promote rights for disabled and vulnerable people, in Rwanda.
“What I know about him is that he is a very confident person,” Mugisha says. “When he plans to do something, he uses all means to achieve it, and he always makes it.”
Ndahiro says his only obstacle is people who do not give him a chance.
“The challenge I have is that people tend not to trust people with any kind of disability, yet they aren’t given any opportunity to expose their capacity,” he says.
GPJ translated this article from Kinyarwanda.
