6. Why? How? Searching for answers in the Diaspora
April marks the tenth year since the genocide that left a million dead in Rwanda. There will be many acts of remembrance, public and private. Many will be intensely personal. There will be those who wish that we would all forget, that the whole thing would just go away. Many of these will be in prisons in Rwanda, Tanzania or hiding out in capitals around the world. The feelings and reactions about the date will be as varied as the individuals who dared not look away.
Much more complex is the reaction of Africans in the Diaspora. For them as for many others around the world, there was what to make of the scarcely believable horror that forced itself on their lives through television sets. The shock of what was taking place before the world’s eyes froze most people’s analytical faculties. In some sense, the whole world participated in the genocide in Rwanda. Thanks to the miracle of television, we all went along as spectators. Unwilling, reluctant spectators, horrified and yet gripped by the terrifying depths to which human souls could sink. As people watched helplessly, representative governments, chiefly Great Britain, the United States and of course France, worked overtime to ensure that what was happening in Rwanda was not called genocide, because then they would have been obliged to intervene. For them this technicality was all-important.
And so a more convenient, comforting description gained currency in newsrooms. The world was informed that what was taking place in Rwanda was ‘tribal killings’. It was an Old Faithful that never fails to satisfy the questions what and why whenever a conflict in Africa degenerates to such an appalling extent that it forces itself on the attention of a wider world that would rather focus its attentions elsewhere. For most people watching, this line provided some comfort in that it at least provided a context into which they could put the abominable crimes they were being forced to witness.
The line provided a way in which they could distance themselves from what was being done. Such savagery could have nothing to do with them. It could only be done by that ‘other’, the ‘other’ that did not have their sensibilities.
The irony is almost chilling; this is how the organisers of the genocide spoke of their eventual victims. The Batutsi were “snakes” (Rwandans’ horror of snakes should be understood in a biblical sense: an insidious and perfidious killer) that not only could but should be mercilessly destroyed. They were not to be thought of like other people, they were different, they were the other. Upwards of 300,000 children were killed in the genocide, although ‘kill’ is too kind and innocuous a word for how their young lives were ended before they had hardly begun. The leaders of the genocide simply put the rhetorical question to the Bahutu population, “when you hunt for a snake, do you spare its young?” Such reasoning was designed to make even infanticide acceptable.
For Africans in the Diaspora, there could be no such easy comforts. The people committing such unspeakable crimes were no aliens that could be disowned, they were just like them. Diaspora Africans could not distance themselves from the perpetrators of the genocide by seeing them as the other. The other that were not like them, the other that were capable of such inhumanity that they themselves found so abhorrent. They had to endure that terrible unease that must come with witnessing a human being just like you descend into such depths of inhumanity that one would not have even dared to imagine.
The dictionary description of the word empathy, is the power to enter into the feeling and spirit of others. The trouble with empathy is that while it leads one to identify and wish to protect and comfort the victim, it cannot protect itself from the horror of the knowledge that the perpetrator is a human being just like oneself. How could the minds and hearts that could just as easily be theirs, not only perpetrate, or even contemplate such an abomination? How could the eyes that could easily be theirs bear to look upon such evil?
As it should have done, the Rwandan genocide challenged the assumptions for the basis of our own humanity. If a general observation can be made about how Africans in the Diaspora responded to this most profound and personal of challenges, it is that above and beyond the abhorrence that gripped every decent human being, they felt it incumbent upon them to help in some way. And many did. In Britain, a number of organisations both large and small collected money and material for Rwanda, long before the call to respond to the crisis begun to be heard commonly in the mainstream.
A number of individuals organised fund raising events. This was particularly true of those in the media. A number of well known professionals exploited their celebrity status and managed to bring together a number of pop stars and other entertainers for fundraising events. The speed with which this was done was surprisingly impressive and for the few Rwandans then living in the United Kingdom (UK) profoundly touching.
The Diaspora community in the UK is relatively small, powerless and lacks any real organised unity. It was for instance notable that while they were organising events for Rwanda, holding meetings, talks and seminars about Rwanda, neither the individuals nor the organisations involved had any awareness that there existed a Rwandan community in their midst.
While they talked of the need to show support and solidarity with their Rwandan brethren, they had no idea that they could share these feelings and deliver these messages, face to face in the same city. Conversely, the tiny Rwandan community in the UK stoically continued to plough a lonely furrow, doing all it could to support people back home. The community never realised that less than three-quarters of an hour’s drive away, people who thought of them as brothers and sisters were almost desperate for an opportunity to help. With this state of affairs it was therefore most impressive that so many were galvanised into action so quickly and so effectively.
There was however another side to this general picture. In Britain, after the initial shock of the first images from Rwanda, one of the determining factors in black people’s response to the harrowing events in Rwanda, was the extent of their identification with Africans in Africa and Africa itself. This identification or lack of it is in turn influenced by their respective backgrounds. The majority of people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere are descendants of Africans that were forcibly removed from Africa during the slave trade.
From the moment of capture, these Africans were no longer treated as human beings. Once in the Americas or the Caribbean, those that survived the slave ships were soon deprived of everything that any human being takes for granted. They were stripped of their identity, even their names were take away and replaced with those of the slave owners. “Forget you are African, remember you are black” was drummed into their beings, often with whips. To be African was to be a person with a heritage, a family, a name. It was to belong. To be black was to be a subspecies, a beast of burden. For good measure, the idea of Africa was depicted as a dark primitive place from which the slaves should be grateful to have been delivered.
Over centuries, this notion has been burned into the psyche of many people of African descent. It has lain dormant ready to be triggered by any occurrence or happening that might lead to self-awareness or self-analysis. It is an enduring intellectual and psychological war in which many Diaspora African scholars and activists have been engaged for centuries. For many black people whose view of Africa and Africans have been shaped by this outlook, the Rwandan genocide, like other conflicts in Africa, are no more than the expected atavistic struggles in a modern age. This was a view held by a large minority within the African Diaspora.
It is a view that has been termed “the internalisation of racism” by informed opinion within the African Diaspora. Such thinking, or perhaps more accurately, such feelings were by no means restricted to Diaspora Africans whose ancestors had gone through the slave trade. While they are burdened by what has been called a “slave mentality”, many Africans still on the continent or who have relatively recently become part of the African Diaspora, can be said to be burdened with a similar mentality, which we may term a “colonial mentality.”
And this too came to the fore during the genocide. A veteran journalist of Camerounian origin, whom it might be unfair to name, was interviewed by one of the major television news networks and his responses were revealing. He was offended by events in Rwanda and Burundi, he said, because they were responsible for perpetuating Africa’s image in the West as savage and uncivilised. He irritably opined that these countries should refrain from making the rest of the continent look bad.
A million people had been killed in ways that would defy the most depraved imagination and yet for this senior African journalist, the deepest injury was to the image of Africa, the deepest worry, withdrawal of approval from the West. His was by no means a minority view. The former Secretary General to the United Nations Boutros Ghali was clearly of the same mind, when he visited Rwanda and complained of the smell from the dead. It is a view shared by Africans of a certain generation for whom the West’s view of itself as the arbiter of civilisation has become a deeply ingrained belief. For them Africa is indeed the ‘Dark Continent’.
Small Pan-African groups on the fringe in London had anticipated these feelings and had begun to rail against them long before they had been expressed in response to the genocide. For them the genocide was just another battleground against the colonial and slave mentalities. They automatically spoke of the Rwandan conflict as a colonial legacy, anxious to pre-empt and counter feelings of African insecurity and inferiority. They were more right than they imagined. Ethnic divide in Rwanda is a recent political construction that grew from the seeds sown by German and later Belgian authorities. True as this may be however, one is still faced with the fact that it was Rwandans who first accepted alien views of themselves, abandoned their own civilisations and massacred over a million of their compatriots.
When the first European arrivals from Germany arrived in Rwanda and espoused such fantasist ideas that the Batutsi were a different, finer race from the Bahutu, many from the two main ethnic groups did not challenge this view. Instead a number of earlier Batutsi and Bahutu intellectuals took up these ideas. It was these ideas that were repeated in the first massacres against the Batutsi in the 50s and 60s, during which hundreds of thousands died. It is these same ideas that were heard again in 1994.
There can be no rational explanation for the Rwandan genocide or any other genocide for that matter. None the less, when human beings are visited by such overwhelming disasters, they try to seek comfort in asking why and how. From within the African Diaspora, there was and continues to be a collective chorus of why and how. They need, want and demand an explanation.
However there is no explanation for genocide. Why did the Nazis murder six million Jewish souls? Could even the Nazis say why? The best that can be done for Africans in the Diaspora, who ask why, is to explain the circumstances and conditions surrounding the genocide. As for why they were committed, it is for every human being to answer that. Information may help and much needs to be done to provide it. A black American acquaintance asked me where I came from and when I said Rwanda, he asked me whether it was in South America. Most people know more about Rwanda now of course, but not much more.
Many Diaspora Africans have done and are doing much to increase understanding. Programme makers, journalists and writers like Jack Mapanji from Malawi - who offered a poem in response to what he witnessed - and many others. Rwandan communities in the Diaspora can offer information but none of us can answer the question why.
* Vincent Gasana is a Rwandan who lives and works as a broadcast journalist in London.
* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.
April marks the tenth year since the genocide that left a million dead in Rwanda. There will be many acts of remembrance, public and private. Many will be intensely personal. There will be those who wish that we would all forget, that the whole thing would just go away. Many of these will be in prisons in Rwanda, Tanzania or hiding out in capitals around the world. The feelings and reactions about the date will be as varied as the individuals who dared not look away.
Much more complex is the reaction of Africans in the Diaspora. For them as for many others around the world, there was what to make of the scarcely believable horror that forced itself on their lives through television sets. The shock of what was taking place before the world’s eyes froze most people’s analytical faculties. In some sense, the whole world participated in the genocide in Rwanda. Thanks to the miracle of television, we all went along as spectators. Unwilling, reluctant spectators, horrified and yet gripped by the terrifying depths to which human souls could sink. As people watched helplessly, representative governments, chiefly Great Britain, the United States and of course France, worked overtime to ensure that what was happening in Rwanda was not called genocide, because then they would have been obliged to intervene. For them this technicality was all-important.
And so a more convenient, comforting description gained currency in newsrooms. The world was informed that what was taking place in Rwanda was ‘tribal killings’. It was an Old Faithful that never fails to satisfy the questions what and why whenever a conflict in Africa degenerates to such an appalling extent that it forces itself on the attention of a wider world that would rather focus its attentions elsewhere. For most people watching, this line provided some comfort in that it at least provided a context into which they could put the abominable crimes they were being forced to witness.
The line provided a way in which they could distance themselves from what was being done. Such savagery could have nothing to do with them. It could only be done by that ‘other’, the ‘other’ that did not have their sensibilities.
The irony is almost chilling; this is how the organisers of the genocide spoke of their eventual victims. The Batutsi were “snakes” (Rwandans’ horror of snakes should be understood in a biblical sense: an insidious and perfidious killer) that not only could but should be mercilessly destroyed. They were not to be thought of like other people, they were different, they were the other. Upwards of 300,000 children were killed in the genocide, although ‘kill’ is too kind and innocuous a word for how their young lives were ended before they had hardly begun. The leaders of the genocide simply put the rhetorical question to the Bahutu population, “when you hunt for a snake, do you spare its young?” Such reasoning was designed to make even infanticide acceptable.
For Africans in the Diaspora, there could be no such easy comforts. The people committing such unspeakable crimes were no aliens that could be disowned, they were just like them. Diaspora Africans could not distance themselves from the perpetrators of the genocide by seeing them as the other. The other that were not like them, the other that were capable of such inhumanity that they themselves found so abhorrent. They had to endure that terrible unease that must come with witnessing a human being just like you descend into such depths of inhumanity that one would not have even dared to imagine.
The dictionary description of the word empathy, is the power to enter into the feeling and spirit of others. The trouble with empathy is that while it leads one to identify and wish to protect and comfort the victim, it cannot protect itself from the horror of the knowledge that the perpetrator is a human being just like oneself. How could the minds and hearts that could just as easily be theirs, not only perpetrate, or even contemplate such an abomination? How could the eyes that could easily be theirs bear to look upon such evil?
As it should have done, the Rwandan genocide challenged the assumptions for the basis of our own humanity. If a general observation can be made about how Africans in the Diaspora responded to this most profound and personal of challenges, it is that above and beyond the abhorrence that gripped every decent human being, they felt it incumbent upon them to help in some way. And many did. In Britain, a number of organisations both large and small collected money and material for Rwanda, long before the call to respond to the crisis begun to be heard commonly in the mainstream.
A number of individuals organised fund raising events. This was particularly true of those in the media. A number of well known professionals exploited their celebrity status and managed to bring together a number of pop stars and other entertainers for fundraising events. The speed with which this was done was surprisingly impressive and for the few Rwandans then living in the United Kingdom (UK) profoundly touching.
The Diaspora community in the UK is relatively small, powerless and lacks any real organised unity. It was for instance notable that while they were organising events for Rwanda, holding meetings, talks and seminars about Rwanda, neither the individuals nor the organisations involved had any awareness that there existed a Rwandan community in their midst.
While they talked of the need to show support and solidarity with their Rwandan brethren, they had no idea that they could share these feelings and deliver these messages, face to face in the same city. Conversely, the tiny Rwandan community in the UK stoically continued to plough a lonely furrow, doing all it could to support people back home. The community never realised that less than three-quarters of an hour’s drive away, people who thought of them as brothers and sisters were almost desperate for an opportunity to help. With this state of affairs it was therefore most impressive that so many were galvanised into action so quickly and so effectively.
There was however another side to this general picture. In Britain, after the initial shock of the first images from Rwanda, one of the determining factors in black people’s response to the harrowing events in Rwanda, was the extent of their identification with Africans in Africa and Africa itself. This identification or lack of it is in turn influenced by their respective backgrounds. The majority of people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere are descendants of Africans that were forcibly removed from Africa during the slave trade.
From the moment of capture, these Africans were no longer treated as human beings. Once in the Americas or the Caribbean, those that survived the slave ships were soon deprived of everything that any human being takes for granted. They were stripped of their identity, even their names were take away and replaced with those of the slave owners. “Forget you are African, remember you are black” was drummed into their beings, often with whips. To be African was to be a person with a heritage, a family, a name. It was to belong. To be black was to be a subspecies, a beast of burden. For good measure, the idea of Africa was depicted as a dark primitive place from which the slaves should be grateful to have been delivered.
Over centuries, this notion has been burned into the psyche of many people of African descent. It has lain dormant ready to be triggered by any occurrence or happening that might lead to self-awareness or self-analysis. It is an enduring intellectual and psychological war in which many Diaspora African scholars and activists have been engaged for centuries. For many black people whose view of Africa and Africans have been shaped by this outlook, the Rwandan genocide, like other conflicts in Africa, are no more than the expected atavistic struggles in a modern age. This was a view held by a large minority within the African Diaspora.
It is a view that has been termed “the internalisation of racism” by informed opinion within the African Diaspora. Such thinking, or perhaps more accurately, such feelings were by no means restricted to Diaspora Africans whose ancestors had gone through the slave trade. While they are burdened by what has been called a “slave mentality”, many Africans still on the continent or who have relatively recently become part of the African Diaspora, can be said to be burdened with a similar mentality, which we may term a “colonial mentality.”
And this too came to the fore during the genocide. A veteran journalist of Camerounian origin, whom it might be unfair to name, was interviewed by one of the major television news networks and his responses were revealing. He was offended by events in Rwanda and Burundi, he said, because they were responsible for perpetuating Africa’s image in the West as savage and uncivilised. He irritably opined that these countries should refrain from making the rest of the continent look bad.
A million people had been killed in ways that would defy the most depraved imagination and yet for this senior African journalist, the deepest injury was to the image of Africa, the deepest worry, withdrawal of approval from the West. His was by no means a minority view. The former Secretary General to the United Nations Boutros Ghali was clearly of the same mind, when he visited Rwanda and complained of the smell from the dead. It is a view shared by Africans of a certain generation for whom the West’s view of itself as the arbiter of civilisation has become a deeply ingrained belief. For them Africa is indeed the ‘Dark Continent’.
Small Pan-African groups on the fringe in London had anticipated these feelings and had begun to rail against them long before they had been expressed in response to the genocide. For them the genocide was just another battleground against the colonial and slave mentalities. They automatically spoke of the Rwandan conflict as a colonial legacy, anxious to pre-empt and counter feelings of African insecurity and inferiority. They were more right than they imagined. Ethnic divide in Rwanda is a recent political construction that grew from the seeds sown by German and later Belgian authorities. True as this may be however, one is still faced with the fact that it was Rwandans who first accepted alien views of themselves, abandoned their own civilisations and massacred over a million of their compatriots.
When the first European arrivals from Germany arrived in Rwanda and espoused such fantasist ideas that the Batutsi were a different, finer race from the Bahutu, many from the two main ethnic groups did not challenge this view. Instead a number of earlier Batutsi and Bahutu intellectuals took up these ideas. It was these ideas that were repeated in the first massacres against the Batutsi in the 50s and 60s, during which hundreds of thousands died. It is these same ideas that were heard again in 1994.
There can be no rational explanation for the Rwandan genocide or any other genocide for that matter. None the less, when human beings are visited by such overwhelming disasters, they try to seek comfort in asking why and how. From within the African Diaspora, there was and continues to be a collective chorus of why and how. They need, want and demand an explanation.
However there is no explanation for genocide. Why did the Nazis murder six million Jewish souls? Could even the Nazis say why? The best that can be done for Africans in the Diaspora, who ask why, is to explain the circumstances and conditions surrounding the genocide. As for why they were committed, it is for every human being to answer that. Information may help and much needs to be done to provide it. A black American acquaintance asked me where I came from and when I said Rwanda, he asked me whether it was in South America. Most people know more about Rwanda now of course, but not much more.
Many Diaspora Africans have done and are doing much to increase understanding. Programme makers, journalists and writers like Jack Mapanji from Malawi - who offered a poem in response to what he witnessed - and many others. Rwandan communities in the Diaspora can offer information but none of us can answer the question why.
* Vincent Gasana is a Rwandan who lives and works as a broadcast journalist in London.
* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.