Barrel of the Pen: Rwanda's armed intellectuals

‘I want to start by thanking the chairperson for her generous introduction. I’m humbled. Today, I want to talk to you about peace, security, and justice using a conceptual framework I have developed on contemporary security threats and how law enforcement authorities can respond in a timely manner,” the panellist said, as he took to the podium to present his paper. If memory has escaped me, then I have added or left out a word or two. If you’ve been to academic conferences you are used to this language from academics. They like to talk about conceptual models or theories which they use to explain reality. But this speaker was not an academic. So I sat upright despite the lethargy from the fact that I had yet to jumpstart my day with the usual cup of coffee, that morning magic that gets most of us going. And so, a senior official from the Rwanda National Police, continued with his presentation during the 3rd annual symposium of the National Police College (NPC), mixing theory with practice. I knew that this was a highly educated man but he was no academic, right? I stayed glued. As if it were a baton-relay, when it was the turn of another, this time from the army, to speak, he turned on the charm offensive. He had been introduced by the renowned Journalist Andrew Mwenda, the proprietor of the Independent news magazine (Uganda). Mwenda told the audience that this was an African hero and that if he were an American or a European, Hollywood would have made a movie about the heroic battle of Kitona which he commanded when the RPA troops fought their way out of the encirclement of the Angolan troops. Mwenda also told the audience that he would think of no other person more qualified to talk about the subject of foreign interference that undermines Africa’s potential to build systems for peace, security, and justice. In short, Mwenda hyped the speaker and, oh boy, did the latter live up to the hype. You would think it was Mohammed Ali in the ring, floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. Here he was, mixing deep intellectual insights with humorous anecdotes from his catalogue of experience whose central thesis was that colonialism might have ended in form but it lives-on in substance, and that while it has different features it has retained the same objectives since the industrial revolution in the late 18th Century: to dominate and control for the exploitation of resources for repatriation to the mother country. Consider this gem of an example. The British, he started, built the East African Railway alongside copper mines in Uganda all the way to the Mombasa port; and the Belgians did the same in the DR Congo, connecting a network of roads and railway from locations with natural resources to the sea. Today, he said, it is not the colonialists who are building the infrastructure whose objective has not changed. Africans are borrowing money, and becoming indebted as a result, in order to construct new, and to refurbish the old, railway networks so that they can ensure that their resources reach the former colonial metropoles. In other words, Africans are willing actors in their own exploitation. Or, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Of course, this was less of an attack, but more of a call for African industrialisation, to create value for the continent’s resources, to stem what he sees as colonialism by other means, and to ultimately stop the bleeding, some of it admittedly self-inflicted, that has gone on uninterrupted for centuries. Equally up to the task was an army Colonel. Even if he had tried he would not have been able to hide the extent of his knowledge on the subject of his presentation, “Issues that compromise the strategic security environment.” Oh, did he own the room! Again, what impressed was not only the mastery of the subject but also the command of its delivery; it was the ease with which he began to delineate traditional from contemporary threats to security. The Colonel, cerebral in disposition, took the audience to a journey of international terrorism, all the while manoeuvring the labyrinth of the different kinds of terror networks around the world, the major participants and their motivations – from the Wahhabist extremist ideologies of the 19th century to the present desires to create caliphate states. Now, the stereotype of the Rwandan military officer is one who abandoned his studies in the early 1990s to answer the call for duty, as a member of the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA). However, over the years the establishment of academic centres of excellence in the police and the army is putting this stereotype to rest. The real story, therefore, is how the armed forces are quietly refashioning themselves as capable of winning the battles on the field as well as those of the mind. It is a shift that recognises that in the 21st Century the battles that are lost in the mind will be very difficult to win on the battlefield, that the practice of the intellect is as essential as field drills, commando training, and parachuting. The officers in the symposium are leading by example. For us, we’ve long considered our armed forces, due to their sense of patriotism, as the heart of our society. I suspect they are its brains, too.

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Barrel of the Pen: Rwanda's armed intellectuals