Killing pregnant women over cows is primitive

LIBERATION DAY is around the corner. Just like the recent genocide commemoration day, this milestone also provides us with a moment for reflection. Indeed, many Rwandans will take time to ponder the meaning of this particular liberation day, relative to our political and economic circumstances. It is a chance to reflect over how far we have come from oppression, exclusion, poverty, and ignorance, for instance. Important as those points of consideration may be, there’s another element from which we continue to be victims in need of liberation: intellectual domination. As Africans, we continue to be consumers of foreign ideas that are intended to explain our reality. The problem, however, is not so much that these ideas are necessarily foreign but rather that they tend to distort the way we understand what is going on around us. Consider the recent massacre that claimed 30 people and leaving another 28 wounded in South Kivu. The story carried and repeated in the international media quoted the provincial governor Marcellin Cishambo explaining that the massacre was a “dispute over cows.” On the surface it was about cows. However, the extreme nature of the methods used to kill these people coupled with the targeted victims reveals that something else altogether. One news agency reported that the “victims had been shot, stabbed or burned in their homes,” before being more precise that those targeted were mostly women, some of whom were pregnant, and children. Such description makes it clear that this was a politically motivated massacre. With such understanding established, one would have to begin deciphering the ideological inspirations of the perpetrators and their intended objectives. All across Africa, particularly in the rural areas, competition among communities over local resources often leads to social tensions. Consider the common tensions between communities whose source of livelihood is predominantly land cultivation or cattle keepers. It is not uncommon that this or that community of land cultivators would be unhappy with another of cattle keepers over disagreements on who has which right over the use of the land, with herders believing that they have grazing rights while the cultivators perceiving this as an encroachment and a disruption whenever the animals destroy their crops, for instance. In the areas of the massacre in question in South Kivu, one can find the Bavira, Bafuliru, Barundi, Babembe and a little bit farther inside the Banyamulenge. Since independence, and possibly before it, local tensions in this area have been over rights to grazing, cultivating, and fishing. More importantly, however, these tensions didn’t always result into massacres. All that changed after 1994. The exodus of Rwandan genocidaires into the Kivus introduced in that area the idea that social problems can have ‘permanent solutions.’ However, it is one thing to think that you can ‘eliminate’ a problem and quite another to have the means and methods to do it. Accordingly, as the Congolese territory became more ungovernable with each community forming ‘self defence’ militias, or Mai Mai, this idea would gain the means for implementation against perceived enemies. Moreover, it was by learning far too well that pregnant women and children became preferred targets in a strategy intended to uproot ‘enemy communities.’ In other words, the story is much more complex than it appears. And it has very little to do with cows, per se. Which begs the question: Why was the media so eager to parrot the governor’s claim of a “dispute over cows” as the motive for the massacres? The short answer is that it fits the pattern. It maintains a certain narrative about Africa and Africans. For the international media, the simpler the story the easier it is for its local audience to grasp. The problem with such reporting is that a complex problem is presented in the most superficial way possible rendering it to similarly superficial solutions. As a result, people begin to wonder what is wrong with the people concerned. Before long, someone will want to “go there and do something about it.” In the case of the killings in South Kivu, such a person is likely to bring the communities involved together to discuss matters to do with cows, when the underlying causes of the problem are elsewhere. Ultimately, grievances remain unresolved till the next cycle of violence. Meanwhile the area becomes declared “conflict prone,” a place for well-intentioned NGO’s to ‘risk their lives.’ This is the standard pattern of story-telling. The problem is that it feeds something more dangerous: The more Africans appear to be killing each other over trivial things, like cows, the more the story sticks of a people unable to govern themselves let alone determine their own future.

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Killing pregnant women over cows is primitive