Buffalo State University shares a timeline of Rwanda partnership!

In 1993, if you’d asked Drew Kahn, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor and founding director of Buffalo State University’s Anne Frank Project (AFP), to find Rwanda on a map, he admits he “would have needed time.”

But in the 31 years since, Kahn has not only learned exactly where Rwanda is, but he has also cultivated a relationship with the country by bringing more than 150 Buffalo State students there for study-abroad through the Anne Frank Project, a program designed to build community, manage conflict, and explore identity by sharing stories stifled by oppression. In April, his work earned him an invitation to speak at an international United Nations conference commemorating the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Here’s how this unique connection came to be.

1993: Kahn comes to Buffalo State

Kahn was hired as an assistant professor of theater in 1993. He taught acting, voice, and movement and directed productions. He played a key role in developing the university’s robust theater program, but he noticed that even with such active student involvement, something was missing.

“It was always curious to me: How come our campus has so much Black and Brown representation, but we don’t see that level in the theater?” he said. “Because we weren’t telling their stories.”

2006: Buffalo State produces The Diary of Anne Frank—as never seen before

Kahn suggested that the Theater Department present The Diary of Anne Frank, a stage adaptation of the diary Frank wrote while hiding with her family during Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. But Kahn did not want to mount a traditional production; he wanted students to connect to the story’s truth and emotional reality. With no shortage of genocides that had killed Black and Brown people, Kahn felt representing one of these genocides alongside Frank’s story was critical to both student and audience experience.

During his extensive research, Kahn kept coming back to the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, during which extremist members of the Hutu ethnic majority murdered as many as a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu people. He came across Immaculée Ilibagiza’s book Left to Tell, in which the author conveys how—after watching her family’s execution—she hid with four other women in the home of a Hutu pastor.

“They hid in a bathroom and slid a bookcase over the door,” Kahn said. “She was a Rwandan Anne Frank.”