Part Two: The Banality of Evil The first time I heard that Rwandans, and specifically those believed to be of Tutsi descent, had brought their massacre and attempted extermination upon themselves, I must have been about 13. Sat in the history class of a Nairobian school, I watched as the white woman tasked with instructing us coddled the young (white) girls visibly disturbed by a gang rape scene in the movie Sometimes in April. Mrs Teacher explained calmly that there were no limits to the violence that a human could inflict when provoked, but that to not provoke them in the first place, was to preserve one’s self from harm. The teary-eyed teens sniveled and nodded, visibly reassured. Now that I know some of the troubling deceptions used to vilify the Tutsi-identified Rwandan and to victim-blame, I suspect that Mrs Teacher did not sympathise with the victim, but rather with their butcher. It’s strange; try as Rwanda may to destroy the rift at home (for it is in fact unfounded), onlookers, listeners, self-appointed critics, will systematically choose to identify with either ethnic group’s stereotypes. When Mrs Teacher shrugged off the mass murder of +1,000,000 people over a period of 100 days, a perceived relatability between the “perpetually-wronged working class” she identified with in her native England, and the Hutu genocidaires, lay beneath her serene tolerance of the intolerable. You will find that this supposed (again, unfounded) relatability and resulting hostility towards our current leadership still persists today, in British leftist politics, which are as we speak depicting the Rwanda-UK Asylum deal, as a death sentence for poor migrants being sent to suffer under the terrible, terrible hand of terrible, terrible, “aristocratic” (shoutout to Michela Wrong) FPR. There is so much I would wish to say to these people now – some of which would not be so polite – but in that little room on the second floor of Braeburn Secondary School in Nairobi, where the acacia trees beyond the aged little square windows willowed gracefully as African children were taught to rationalize their own persecution, I said nothing. I silently mulled over the fact that the person entrusted to enrich my mind had just implied that my country people, my brothers and sisters, deserved to be massacred. “Did Tutsi-identified Rwandans Deserve to Die After All?” is a question you will hear almost everywhere outside of Rwanda, when the Tutsi genocide is brought up. Over the years, the versions of this rhetoric I have experienced have varied with the level of objectivity that my interlocutor was attempting to feign. Like Mrs Teacher, I find that Westerners, for fear of the sheer cruelty and invalidity of their rhetoric being exposed to those over which they claim moral superiority, will mask their hatred for communities they’ve perceived as indocile and insolent, behind worry for other communities, making the latter the victims of invented crimes, with a magic wave of the wand of neocolonialism. It’s quite psychologically perverse, but I suppose they enjoy the exercise. These days, our neighbours beyond the Kivu Lake have chosen not to burden themselves with the labour of pretense. Tedious contortions of the truth have been abandoned to make room for the rather familiar, and ever as nauseating, open hatred for the Rwandan, the “Tutsi Rwandan”, and the “Tutsi Congolese”. In a village in Eastern Congo, habitants have taken to cannibalism to dehumanize those they perceive other, even beyond their deaths. It is not enough that Rwandans or Banyamulenge should die due to a perceived difference; they should be violated in the most gruesome manner in the process. They should be burned, or have their flesh torn apart and consumed, as onlookers cheer on in crazed, hateful glee. When discourse purposely overlooks this attempted trigger to a genocide, it is passively advancing, as I believe it did in 1994, as I believe it did in 1957, as I believe it did in the mid-19th century, as I believe Mrs Teacher told us, goggly-eyed children, in 2008, that “some” Rwandans indeed deserve to die. I will never stop questioning such hostility. But hated or not, Rwandans know that we are not to blame. You know, we know, everybody knows: over the past several decades, Congo’s internal conflicts have unfortunately been plenty. A huge, wealthy country once considered a personal piggybank for Belgium (“Tout ca ne nous rendra pas le Congo”, which roughly translates to “All this will not give us back Congo” is still a commonly used expression locally), when Congo bleeds, someone feeds. Who would this feeder be? Well, we have seen plenty of large middles gorging on the sorrow of African people, enriching themselves beyond explicable greed, their opulent “private palaces” across the world nauseatingly filled with suspiciously-obtained gold....and none of these abundant forms are sitting in Rwanda’s high offices. I challenge anyone to tangibly prove me otherwise. In the meantime, I would invite you to note that the Congolese Presidency alone, has spent, over the past year, twice as much as was voted by the Congolese Senate and National Assembly, through the “Loi de Finances de L’exercice 2021 au premier semestre”, and about 4 times as much as it was publicly projected that they would. And where did this excessive expenditure by the Congolese highest office, worth about 156,000 Congolese people’s yearly salaries, go? Banquets, perhaps. A Public Expenditure Review co-written by the Congolese authorities and published by the World Bank, states that: “Expenditure tracking after the funds leave the Treasury is almost never done.” Essentially, Congo is comfortably admitting that its citizens’ money is being excessively signed off in broadday light, with no accountability on where it actually turns up. There is no other way to put it: these are thieving tactics. So why and how is Rwanda blamed? (mpo na kokoba) Click here to read the first part of this four-part series.
