The French love affair with Rwanda was, you might say, also a product of a pervasive national mythology. “France is not France without greatness, ” Charles de Gaulle had said, and the preservation of that status as a global leader defines much of the policy thinking in the offices of France’s Foreign Ministry on the Quai D’Orsay in Paris. Maintaining a strong web of economic and diplomatic interests in their former African colonies is seen as a key part of that strategy. And so in places like the Ivory Coast, the Central African Republic, and Chad, where the French tricolor flew until the 1960s, France has provided monetary support, trade links, and frequent military intervention almost from the day that these countries gained their independence. Its eagerness to play such a father-figure role earned it the nickname “the policeman of Africa.” The French army, in fact, has executed nearly two dozen military campaigns on the continent since the era of independence-a level of microinvolvement far out of proportion to any other great power. France never was much of a player in Rwanda during colonial times, but they now considered us worthy of attention for their own psychologically complicated reasons.
If Rwandans are obsessed with height, then the French are obsessed with tongues. A large part of that mystical greatness in the French mentality is centered on the preservation of the pure French language and the repelling of all attempts to marginalize it in favor of the international tongue of commerce, aviation, and diplomacy that is English. President Habyarimana and the Hutu elite were considered exemplary guardians of the French language and the kind of cultural values that it represented. At the urging of his French friends, our presidential “father” instituted new educational guidelines in schools, and new ways of teaching mathematics and the French language to young people.
The RPF invaders, by contrast, had spent most of their lives exiled in the former British colony of Uganda and were therefore English speakers, part of what amounted to a representation of the old Anglo-Saxon hordes that had been dogging France for the last thousand years. And I believe they were not entirely wrong-I believe the English speakers did have their own ambitions to achieve hegemony in the region and control the entire space between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. So at the Quai D’Orsay the logic went like this: If the RPF rebels should become strong enough to overthrow Habya-rimana it will spell the loss of a small but important Francophone ally in Central Africa, which could soon be speaking English as an official language, reviving unpleasant tribal memories of the Battle of Agincourt and the Hundred Years War. While the French publicly supported peace talks, they were, in reality, working behind the scenes to preserve Habyarimana’s shaky hold on power.
I am not saying this mentality is logical, but if there is anything that being a Rwandan has taught me, it is that most politics is an outgrowth of emotions that may or may not have any relation to the rational.
So when I decided not to wear the president’s portrait on my lapel I was putting my thumb in the eye of a very insecure man. My friends told me later that I had been taking a stupid chance. I should have just worn the stupid thing to make the flunkies happy and not risked my job or my family’s welfare on a symbolic matter. I knew Habyarimana and the akazu didn’t much care for me, anyway. It would have cost me a huge amount of self-respect to have worn that dictator’s face on my jacket. If this was a risk, it was a calculated one.
I never told my father about my run-in with the president. I didn’t want him to worry about my job-or my life. But if I had told him, I like to think it would have made him laugh.
While peace talks with the rebels dragged on the programs on RTLM got worse and worse. I do not know how I managed to keep listening to it. Perhaps it was out of a need to understand exactly where popular opinion was heading. Or perhaps it was just morbid fascination.
Either way, I began to hear the racial slur “cockroach” so frequently that it lost whatever power it had to shock. I heard myself being lumped in with those who were considered less than human. The enormously popular singer Simon Bikindi had recorded a song played over and over on RTLM called “I Hate These Hutus.” He was talking about people like me-those people of the majority group who didn’t have a taste for racial politics and refused to join in the crude political movement that became known as Hutu Power. To Bikindi they were nothing but traitors:
I hate these Hutu, these arrogant Hutus, braggarts who scorn other Hutus, de ar comrades.
I hate these Hutus, these de-Hutuized Hutus, who have disowned their ident ities, dear comrades.
The anger on the airwaves became so common that it didn’t seem particularly out of line when RTLM broadcast the tape of an address made at a political rally in the northwest town of Gisenyi. The speaker was a government official named Leon Mugesera and, I have to say, he knew how to whip up a crowd. Copies of this speech had already been circulating around the country like bootleg treasures, with people commenting favorably that here was a man who really understood the threat to Rwanda. “Do not let yourselves be invaded, ” he kept exhorting the crowd, and it gradually became clear he was making an allusion to the ruling party being “invaded” by moderates who wanted to engage in peace negotiations with the predominately Tutsi rebels. In words that would become widely repeated throughout Rwanda, he also recounts a story of saying to a Tutsi, “I am telling you that your home is in Ethiopia, that we are going to send you back there quickly, by the Nyabarongo.” Nobody in Rwanda could have missed what he was really saying: The Tutsis were going to be slaughtered and their bodies thrown into the north-flowing watercourse.
His final exhortation to the crowd could have served as a summary of the simpleminded philosophy of those who were screaming for Hutu Power the loudest: “Know that the person whose throat you do not cut will be the one who cuts yours.” He was preaching an ideology-and an identity-based on nothing more than a belief in the murderous intentions of the enemy.
I think that was the most seductive part of the movement. There is something living deep within us all that welcomes, even relishes, the role of victimhood for ourselves. There is no cause in the world more righteously embraced than our own when we feel someone has wronged us. Perhaps it is a psychological leftover from early childhood, when we felt the primeval terror of the world around us and yearned for the intervention of a mother/protector to keep us safe. Perhaps it makes it easier to explain away our personal failures when the work of an enemy can be blamed. Perhaps we just get tired of long explanations and like the cleanliness of an easy solution. It is for wiser people than me to say. Whatever its allure, this primitive ideology of Hutu Power swept through Rwanda in 1993 and early 1994 with the speed of flame through dry grass.
The grand purpose, as I have said, was not really to avenge the slights committed by the Tutsi royal court sixty years earlier. That was merely the cover story, the cheap trick that could rouse a mob into supporting the strong men. And that was the true purpose of all the revolutionary rhetoric: It was all about Habyarimana and the rest of the elite trying to keep a grip on the reins of government. It seemed almost irrelevant to point out that Hutus had been in a position of undisturbed power for thirty-five years and that the Tutsi were in a position to affect very little of Rwanda’s current miserable situation-even if they had wanted to. It was a revolution, all right, but there was nobody to overthrow.