Those mornings—red earth and sand beneath bare feet, hunger’s ache in my stomach, my mother’s determined whisper that learning was freedom—have never left me. I have dwelled on Rwandan soil for only six of my many years, yet Rwanda has dwelled in me every moment. Exile shaped the very fabric of my identity, forcing the question that haunts every refugee: Where does home go when the road never ends?

Philosophers have long wrestled with this question. Diogenes called himself a kosmopolites, a citizen of the world, not as a boast but as a lament for lost belonging. Hannah Arendt warned that the twentieth-century refugee was “the vanguard of its peoples,” a prophetic sign of states that had forgotten how to protect their own. Theology, too, is steeped in exile: Abraham hears God’s promise only after leaving Ur; Moses meets the Burning Bush while tending sheep on a foreign mountain; Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus flee Herod’s terror into Egypt; the Prophet Muhammad’s hijra turns flight into the founding moment of a new community. Even science reminds us that homo sapiens is a migratory species. Genetics chronicles an ancient restlessness that scattered our ancestors from the Rift Valley to every shore, proving that movement is as natural to our species as speech.

However, willing movement is a pilgrimage; forced movement is torment. Today, torment dominates. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports that by the end of 2024, 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced—of whom 36.8 million are refugees and 73.5 million are internally displaced. That number is still very high in the first half of 2025, to about 122 million, despite some small returns, nearly doubling compared to a decade ago (unhcr.org, apnews.com). Sub-Saharan Africa bears a heavy burden: the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reports 38.8 million Africans displaced within their own borders, almost half of the global total (internal-displacement.org). Sudan’s civil war alone has displaced more than fourteen million people, while Congo, Mozambique, Somalia, Ethiopia, and the Sahel quietly bleed into the statistics.

Behind every number stands a face. Think of Albert Einstein, who scribbled the equation that bent the universe while navigating Swiss, German, and then American exile. Think of Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, and Joseph Brodsky; of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writing Devil on the Cross on Nairobi prison toilet paper; of Freddie Mercury reinventing himself from Zanzibar refugee to rock icon; of Madeleine Albright, who fled first Hitler and then Stalin before advising American presidents. Exile bruises, yet it can also refine vision, distilling what the settled overlook. In deserts, prophets see burning bushes; in wilderness, refugees sometimes glimpse futures that sedentary societies have forgotten how to imagine.

That paradox—tribulation giving birth to revelation—sustains my hope. It is not destiny that condemns the twenty-first century to greater waves of displacement; rather, it is political failure, ecological neglect, and moral laxity. To stop the flood, we must address causes, not just symptoms. Allow me to outline a seven-point agenda—woven as one thread rather than a list—that aims for nothing less than a world where flight is a choice, not a necessity.

First, nations must rebuild the crumbling framework of preventive peace. The expense of mediating grievances early is minimal compared to the costs of supporting camps later. Second, sovereignty should be redefined as stewardship, not control: governments that commit atrocities, starve populations, or strip citizens of their rights must face automatic, legally binding sanctions—economic, diplomatic, and personal—enforced by a revitalized Security Council freed from veto paralysis. Third, there is the urgent need for climate justice. Science already shows us that warming deserts, failed rains, and rising seas displace more families each year than bullets do. A global climate adaptation fund—paid for by a levy on fossil-fuel windfalls—should allocate resources directly to vulnerable communities worldwide, enabling them to stay in place before they are forced to flee.

Fourth, economies must be reformed to incentivize inclusion. Fair-trade systems, debt relief tied to governance reforms, and regional free-movement agreements—such as Africa’s own AfCFTA—must be completed and enforced to turn borders from barriers into bridges. Fifth, citizenship itself needs to evolve. Every child born without a nationality should be granted jus soli where she first breathes; pathways to naturalization should be straightforward, swift, and affordable; and passports should serve as symbols of dignity rather than tools of exclusion. Sixth, knowledge must circulate faster than people are forced to move: invest in broadband, open-access universities, and digital credentialing so that war cannot orphan a student’s future or destroy her transcripts. Seventh—and central to all the others—civil society must be protected as the immune system of democracy. When journalists can report freely, churches can provide shelter, scientists can issue warnings, and artists can remember, societies can detect issues early; when civil society is suppressed, crises grow unseen until refugee flows stretch across continents.

None of these prescriptions are cheap or simple. But neither is the current situation, measured in lost childhoods, drowned hopes, and the billions donors reluctantly spend to prevent camps from becoming graveyards. My own life shows that saving even one child from exile’s cold hand can lead to them serving, healing, and teaching many more. Imagine, then, what humanity might gain if exile itself were made obsolete.

So I dream — not as idle fancy but as a moral obligation — of a dawn when the word “refugee” returns to ancient scripture and dusty archives, no longer a headline or a camp clinging to a desert fringe. I dream of a Rwanda whose sons and daughters roam only by choice, whose hills shelter memory without mourning; of an Africa that exports ideas, music, and innovation, not desperate bodies in leaky boats; of a world where wandering is once again pilgrimage rather than flight. Until that dawn, I will carry the wilderness within me as both wound and wellspring, a reminder that from rag-torn tents can rise visions capable of remaking nations. And I will labor—as refugee, doctor, teacher, and citizen of an unfinished future—toward the day when no child will memorize the map of exile before she learns the anthem of home.

BLOG: I Dream of a World without Refugees | ChimpReports

Contact: ngombwa@gmail.com