Rwanda is no exception and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case when the Belgians were in power. When people say Africa is not for sissies, they really mean Rwanda. This place is hardcore. Don’t be seduced by all the greenery – it harbours a vicious cruelty that is imbedded in the country’s psyche.
At the time of the last genocide most Rwandans poured scorn on political correctness. Muslims were called “penguins” to their face. Hutus knew they were “ugly and stupid”, and only good for looking after cattle because that’s what they had been told for centuries. If you don’t believe me, read the newspapers of that time. You’ll find it there in black and white, and we all know newspapers don’t lie …
Thanks to the Belgians, ethnic division is now part of the country’s genetics. Every coloniser in Africa was guilty of human rights violations and theft of precious resources. The Belgians, however, deserve special mention for cruelty and exploitation. Belgium never even officially colonised the Congo. In 1885 King Leopold simply claimed the country as his private property where he could do as he pleased. The state financed the infrastructure and the king pocketed the profits.
King Leopold’s exploits in the Congo are infamous. His philosophy was to scare people into working harder to increase his own wealth. At that time rubber was an expensive and sought-after product in Europe and in the process of extracting it in the forests of the Congo King Leopold’s henchmen murdered more than 10 million Congolese. People’s head and hands were cut off and the heads displayed on poles as a barbaric warning – all in the name of rubber.
During King Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo, neighbouring Rwanda was under Belgian control. The country had very few natural resources and this was before the days when the wild gorillas attracted international tourists. Even though the Belgian government couldn’t make the same kind of money from Rwanda that King Leopold made out of the Congo, they certainly used his tried and tested methods to increase production. Their technique to motivate workers was to give them eight lashes with a cane before work.
But the Belgian’s special legacy to the Rwandese was ethnic hatred. The area’s original inhabitants were the Twa pygmies who were not and to this day are not regarded as people by many Rwandese. In some remote parts of the country it was quite acceptable to serve them up for dinner. At least that’s what was alleged in a newspaper. Today they form only 1% of the total population.
The first time I mentioned the Twa in Rwandese company the conversation stopped immediately and everybody burst out laughing. Why a mzungu would be interested in these baboons boggled their minds. I once saw a Twa man in a Rwandan village, but children beat him with sticks because he had the audacity to show his face in town. He was trying to get to the local clinic.
The Hutus and the Tutsis are the two largest ethnic groups in Rwanda. The Hutus look like Idi Amin and represent 84% of the population. The Tutsis represent 15% of the population and look like models. They are tall and thin with narrow noses and a light skin. The Belgians decided that the Tutsis were clever and the Hutus stupid. In their infinite wisdom they introduced a dompas system with which to indicate every person’s ethnicity.
And to make absolutely sure that the two groups would never live in peace again, they decided that only the Tutsis could own land, and that the Hutus had to work for them. To top it off, a law was passed that only allowed Tutsis to receive any form of education. Not only were the Hutus stupid and ugly, but were now rendered illiterate. Their laws have a certain resonance with the ideologies of apartheid South Africa.
The Hutus were understandably more than a little peeved with the situation and in 1959 the first genocide took place. There were 100 000 deaths. The Tutsi king and about 200 000 of his followers had to flee the country and most of them ended up in Uganda. Among them was Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda.
When the Belgians decided to leave in 1962 they had to decide who would be granted power. The Tutsis were educated and had started to think independently. The Belgians did not think this was a good idea and so put the Hutus in power. In this way, the elderly white men of Europe argued, they could still control Rwanda from a distance. Suddenly the cow herders were in a position of power and the festering conflict, which was suppressed for centuries, erupted with unprecedented hatred.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s it was legal for a Hutu to murder a Tutsi with no consequences for the murderer. Tutsis were called inyenzi’s (cockroaches).
In 1963 there was another genocide and thousands of Tutsis were murdered. As the victims were black and there was no international media to carry the news to the outside world, no one actually counted the bodies. However, it has since been described as the biggest genocide since the Holocaust.
By 1974 the Hutus were resenting the fact that there were still so many Tutsis in professional positions, especially in medicine, academics and education. They were all forced to resign … and again there was a massacre.
This was the country to which we were heading to stage a pop concert – a country suffering from permanent post traumatic stress syndrome, not fully recovered from its nightmares of four years ago.
Music is cunningly used by many a despot to calm the masses. It wasn’t Lucky’s first invitation to a country with extraordinary problems. His passport also bore the stamps of Sierra Leone and Liberia.
The airport in Kigali, with the imaginative name of Kigali International Airport, must have been designed in the seventies by a depressed architect. We arrived at a drab building with two entrances, one marked Arrivée/Arrival and the other VIP Arrivée/Arrival. There was little or no control over people’s movements. The tarmac was like the local athletics track where eager television teams and radio and newspaper journalists dodged aircraft wings and jockeyed for first place to record the arrival of Africa’s biggest superstar. Kigali International Airport is clearly not frequented by loads of celebs.
Lucky entered the airport via the VIP Arrivée, while the rest of us mere mortals used the Arrivée entrance. In a country where one’s social status is the be all and end all, the news that you’re nobody is not conveyed very subtly. There was only one important person on this occasion and even the men in black wearing black sunglasses to patrol the interior of the airport hardly gave our impressive Rwandan visas with their gorilla holograms a second glance.
The weather was surprisingly mild and the airport almost empty. The dejected immigration and customs officials soon realised this was not a day to cash in. Any false move made by them would mean the end of the concert. This was clearly set out in the contract with the promoter and it was his duty to see to it that everything went smoothly – otherwise his investment would fly back without laying the proverbial golden egg. Lucky had also insisted that the concert fee be deposited into his bank account before he packed his suitcases. It was a question of once bitten, twice shy …
Kigali has 851 024 residents. On the way from the airport to the Windsor Umubano Hotel we saw 851 023 of them. As part of the marketing for the concert the promoter, Mister Vincent de Gaulle (don’t forget the all important “Mister”), decided to take us on a short trip. We drove through the whole of Kigali while thousands of people, sometimes up to a hundred deep in places, lined the sides of the road to cheer Lucky. He rode in splendid isolation in a massive 4x4 – not unlike the pope, minus the bullet-proof glass. The crowds threw branches in front of his vehicle and went seriously ballistic.
The rest of the group, all twelve of us, travelled in a ten-seater bus called a matatu. The 4x4 kicked up a lot of dust and we had to follow shortly behind it as people were stepping onto the road to get a better look at Lucky who was standing up, waving from the open sunroof.
The matatu carrying us was a Japanese import since in Japan all vehicles have to be written off after five years in service. An entire economy has been built throughout Africa around these imports. Once, a long, long time ago, the bus might have been five years old in Japan, but its African vacation had been going on for several years. The bus still carried Japanese lettering on its sides. No effort had been made to Rwandanise it and even the Rwandan number plate was rather scruffily hooked over the original Japanese one.