Rwandan Genocide: Not the first nor last in Africa

I really shouldn’t be explaining this today!

Rwandan president Paul Kagame told a French magazine that France and Belgium took part ‘in the political preparation of the genocide and the participation of the latter in its very execution.’

Some blame the USA which is quick to poke its long nose in other conflicts but stayed away from Rwanda.

Some blame the Catholic Church whose clergy is said to have participated in the genocide itself and that the Vatican knew about it.

Some blame the toothless Organization of African Union for letting one of its own bleed without intervention.

The list is endless.

No disrespect to the dead, but Rwandans seem to forget that it was Rwandans killing Rwandans and nobody from outside lifted a panga knife.

Bill Clinton is not Rwandan and at the time USA had just been humiliated by street boys in Somalia in the famous Black Hawk Down incident, not to mention the fact that Rwanda had nothing to offer the US especially the Soviet Union having fallen.

France, Belgium, Germany? Well, what does independence mean? Well whatever it means, Rwanda attained it in 1962 and was thus supposed to steer its own ship, the colonialists are thus out of the blame Venn diagram.

OAU? Well, let us not even go there.

Rwanda made international headlines and much of the hype about the genocide owes to Hollywood the internet and CNN, in reality Africa and Africans have always been genocidal.

Let’s start from the very Rwanda. Everyone agrees the Tutsis and Hutus came to Rwanda from somewhere else, nobody says where the Twas came from, of course, because the Twas were the aborigines – the natives.

Right now their population in Rwanda is only 1% for a population that was the original settlers. History books write about them ‘losing land and moving to the hills.’

The Twas, who ruled and owned most of the African countries including Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania were brutally murdered by the other tribes.  In Malawi now, there are almost zero Twas – genocide took them.

Outsiders and some insiders look at Africans as a race with dark skin, big lips, curly hair and maybe huge penis and think them as a race. Big Mistake.

There is not a people on earth that is more variant and more divided than Africans and with the divisions, hatred.

There are about 3000 ethnic groups in Africa, each usually with their own language and some customs and superstitions.

Analysis alert – When the Europeans divided Africa, they needed to create about 3000 countries, with each tribe having a territory, and instead they created less than 60 and housed several incompatible tribes within a country, such as 370 in Nigeria only.

This creates problems, because, despite the tribes of Africa largely being black in colour, they are as incompatible as Jews and Palestinians, as such they are always fighting and arguing and wishing the other tribe vanished.

The Europeans that colonized Africa quickly recognized the divisions, so they emphasized divisions and it worked like charm. African tribes can work with any outsiders perfectly but not their immediate tribal rivals.

During the Biafran War in Nigeria that ended in 1970, over a million civilian died as the Igbo unsuccessfully tried to separate from the other tribes, and some Igbo claim genocide was attempted on them.

Nobody seems to care about the Burundian genocide of 1972 in which the Tutsi dominated army iced about 210,000 Hutus. Actually, some analysts believe that the Hutus in Rwanda had this genocide in mind and were sort of revenging when they launched the 1994 genocide.

Where in Africa are there no signs of genocide? In Kenya for example, when Mwayi Kibaki, of the Kikuyu tribe, was hurriedly sworn in as president in 2008 what happened?  Luo and Kalenjin tribes men went on the rampage killing Kikuyu tribesmen – is it not hard to equate election fraud with icing an innocent guy on his veranda who is the same tribe as the guy on the ballot paper?

You guys remember the Mfecane, the period when Mzilikazi, a king of the Matabele, dominated the Transvaal (1826 to 1836). He ordered widespread killings and devastation to remove all opposition to establish the new Ndebele order.  The whole region became nearly depopulated with about 2 million dead.

Same is true about Shaka the Zulu everywhere he went and met tribes his first instincts was to kill their men and rape the women… all genocidal.

I will take you closer to home, in my country Malawi, a beautiful country that has not seen war yet in modern history, it looks peaceful on the surface but the tribes there hate each other like the African books advises.

In Malawi, the number of a particular tribe in the university or civil service is subjected to scrutiny, if one tribe features more in a national team or a class it is viewed in askance and voting is along tribal lines – is such a country not genocide in incubation?

 

And it’s not just tribes, try being an Albino is Tanzania, people will kill you for being different and in pursuit of your bones for voodoo purposes.

The need to eliminate the other is so entrenched in Africans that even new concepts like Christianity and Islam can be used to spark genocide. I am talking about the Central African Republican, a simple thing as a rosary or a hijab can get you killed.

And it is almost like it is the African’s blood, whether in Somalia or in England or St. Louis or Jamaica there is always something that the African will use to try to take out the other: In Somalia its clans, in England and St. Louis its gangs and drug turf, in Jamaican its politics and drugs.

Some blame years of European domination and the blood peddling Abrahamic religions as having established the spirit of distrusting others , but the arguments falls short as Africans have been bloodthirsty even before Abraham or Jesus were on earth.

So, this week, the world will sit with Rwanda and shed crocodile tears over her dead, but no one will ask after the status of tribal hatred still in Rwanda now, whether the bad blood has been overcome and whether the minority’s firm grip on power helps.

What happened in Rwanda is that the Tutsi grabbed power after the genocide and have ruled since, any Hutu that tries to speak out is jailed or exiled and labeled a Genocide denier. Ridiculous amount of aid have been pumped in and the progress Rwanda is undergoing does nothing to the century old rivalries.

Every day in the ghettos or grazing lands of Africa, is like a war-zone, anyone can kill you for as many reasons as there are ways of killing a cat.

Every African has a genocide gene and Rwanda was just a sort of nuclear test to showcase what an African can do and has been doing.

As long as there are tribes, the biggest influence on the African – more than religion, they will always be room for open seasons on killing each other.

First Posted on Maravipost.com

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