July has, for years, been one of East Africa’s most restless and epic months, and as it nears its close, it’s time to reflect on the end of one of its most consequential events.
On July 17, 1994, what the United Nations later designated the Genocide against the Tutsi officially ended, when the Rwanda Patriotic Army/Front took power and established a government of national unity. It marked the sunset of the most murderous 100 days in the world of the 20th century, with one million Tutsi and opposition Hutu having been slaughtered by the Army and its Hutu extremist militia allies, the Interahamwe.
It’s uncomfortable to admit, but as a single event, the Genocide against the Tutsi will continue to define and shape the region for at least the next 75 years.
One of the reasons for it is that it has produced a remarkable number of other crises, including the war by the array of Tutsi-speaking people of the Democratic Republic of Congo against what they say is a campaign to exterminate them, which is currently led by the M23 rebels. That war is likely to tear apart the DRC as we know it.
The Hutu-Tutsi question also continues to roil Burundi politics, and pessimists think the country is on a dangerous path to another ethnic bloodbath in the not-too-distant future.
In Uganda, “anti-Banyarwanda” politics continues to flare up, sometimes in ugly and emotive ways. Depending on how President Yoweri Museveni’s rule and his NRM end, a purge of Ugandan Banyarwanda is likely if populist nativists take power after him.
Globally and around Africa, the Rwanda genocide revision and denialist industry is booming. It thrives in the popular form, common in Western revisionist scholarship and literature, including high-profile books and documentaries like the 2014 BBC documentary Rwanda: The Untold Story, which pushed the narrative of the “double genocide”.
This view argues that what happened in 1994 wasn’t a targeted, state-sponsored extermination of Tutsis, but rather a mutual, two-sided slaughter where equal or greater numbers of Hutus were killed. Revisionists also often allege that there were war crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in the devastating conflicts in the DRC, and that that balances the genocide sin and blame book.
On the other extreme, that the RPA/F mostly murdered the Tutsi to make the Hutu-dominated government in Kigali then look bad, and that there weren’t even that many Tutsi to kill, to begin with.
None of this, however, will reverse what might follow. Like some other African peoples, such as the Somali, Hausa (outside Nigeria), the Ewe (outside Togo), the Bakongo (outside Angola), because of colonial borders, labour migrations, and late 19th century/early 20th century ethnic cleansings, the majority of Tutsi people live outside Rwanda in parts of Central and East Africa.
The Tutsi will not roll over and play dead. History teaches us that societies that organise themselves to prevent a repeat of genocide almost always concretise either into actual sovereign states, autonomous sub-national entities, or de facto governments specifically engineered to prevent another bout of mass killings. Those that morphed into independent states include Israel, Armenia, and Kosovo; and there’s the Iraqi Kurdistan sub-national region, and Rojava, the de facto autonomous zone in Syria.
We can’t be sure what this form of “survival statehood” will take, but we can be sure it will happen, barring massive waves of enlightened national politics that prevent it. And if one takes an unblinking view of the political crises in several African countries (South Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon, South Sudan, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda, to name a few), by the end of this century, this fracture could leave us with an Africa that has over 70 independent states.
One of the questions is what the driver is of the global Tutsi genocide-denialist machine that keeps this issue such a raw nerve in Central and East Africa.
Part of it has to do with the timing of the RPF’s rise to power. It is easy to forget, but in 1994, when apartheid ended in South Africa and Nelson Mandela was elected the country’s first democratic leader, the world changed. Mandela and the ANC’s adoption of one of the world’s most progressive constitutions and a multiracial society overturned centuries of tropes about vengeful African natives. It was an unfamiliar Africa.
And at almost the same time, the genocide broke out in Rwanda. Ah, that was more like it. The problem is that Rwanda refused to remain dead, and rose (in some areas spectacularly) from the ashes.
The genocide denial, therefore, serves to encase not just Rwanda, but the wider Africa, back in the box of lazy tropes of a continent ruled by “ancient African tribal hatreds”.
Secondly, it functions to protect the legacies. It shields the complicity of, especially, Western countries like France and Belgium (or more accurately their elite Establishments) which maintained significant military and diplomatic support for the Rwanda regime before and during the 1994 slaughter.
This was evident early in 1994, when the US and United Nations avoided using the word “genocide” and downplayed the systemic nature of the killings in Rwanda because it insulated them from the moral and legal failure of standing by.
On the 32nd anniversary of the end of the genocide, the insight should be that “victim zero” should never have happened in the first place.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. X@cobbo3
