Rwandan politician
Louise Mushikiwabo (born 22 May 1961) is the fourth and current Secretary General of Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. She previously served as the Minister of Foreign AffaInternationaleirs and Cooperation of Rwanda from 2009 to 2018. She also served as Government Spokesperson. She had previously been Minister of Information. Her father was Bitsindinkumi, from the Batsobe clan; Bitsindinkumi worked as a farmer, managing the family's smallholding as well as working as bookkeeper for a colonial coffee plantation. Her mother was Nyiratulira, a first cousin of the Abiru philosopher and historian Alexis Kagame. She spent her childhood in Kigali. The youngest of nine children, her siblings included Lando Ndasingwa, who became 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 Parliament of Rwanda from 2003 to 2008. After completing primary and secondary school in Kigali, Mushikiwabo went to study at the National University of Rwanda (currently University of Rwanda), in the 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 teacher. In 1986, she emigrated from Rwanda to the United States, where she began studying for a master's degree in Languages and Interpretation at the University of Delaware, with French as her specialist language. Upon finishing her studies in 1988, she remained in the United States, settling in the Washington, D.C. area. She started her career working for lobbying organisations, before taking 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 eventually became the bank's Communications Director. In 2006, Mushikiwabo wrote a book, Rwanda Means the Universe, which was co-authored by Jack Kramer, an American journalist and ex-marine. The book is semi-autobiographical, describing Mushikiwabo's family history, her early life in Rwanda, and her experiences upon emigrating to the United States. It also describes the Rwandan genocide in detail, from a historical perspective as well as from Mushikwabo's own point of view living in Washington, as she received the news that many of her family members had been killed.
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