This is my first time in Rwanda and I’ll honestly say this place is one of the best looking cities I’ve ever been to. And I’m not saying the best ‘African’ city, but city in general. The landscape, the cleanliness, the weather, the whole shibang.
But even when we arrived last night/this morning at 3am, going through the streets to the hotel, something made me feel uneasy. I couldn’t articulate what it was. But it was something.
Some people call Kigali the ‘Europe of Africa’ for its ‘non-African’ qualities (e.g. safety, cleanliness, order, etc.) And they may say it in a very benevolent way, but again, it uses ‘Europe’ or ‘Whiteness’ as the benchmark of what is ‘good’ and ‘acceptable.’
I started to learn about the Rwandan Genocide in high school, because my Sister had been working on a project that peaked my interest. From then on, I learned about it in a very cursory way. I knew about the Hutu and Tutsi, but it wasn’t at the forefront of my consciousness. The Genocide challenges your understanding of colonialism and Blackness to another level.
Then as I was teaching a course on Pan-African History at UWaterloo, the Genocide was a module. I’m not an expert in Rwanda, nor the Genocide, but I was aware of what happened and have the ability to teach the history.
But it’s different when you’re standing on the site of a mass grave of 200,000 people like where I was this morning at the Kigali Genocide Memorial.
It was similar, but not the same, to my first experience at the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana. You feel death. You feel trauma. You feel loss.
This was different because it happened in my conscious lifetime. And that it happened with people that I’m engaging with on the street. People my age would have been killed or orphaned. The would have seen their parents and siblings hacked to death with machetes. And the Memorial shows you the death. In colour. The death caused by their communities.
By their neighbours.
By their friends.
(If you can remember the Blue Jays winning the World Series in 1993, or the first Raptors season in 1995, you should have known about the Rwandan Genocide.)
And what was one of the root causes for this death and murder in 1994?
Colonial education.
One main teaching/indoctrination was the ‘Hamitic Myth’ that socially created and reified ethnic differences between Hutu and Tutsi. Colonialism taught and institutionalized hatred. This was not a tribal ‘war’ this was not a backwards state, this was a genocide caused by a colonial power (Belgians at the forefront) to divide and concur a population, based on Eurocentric ideologies.
Ideologies taught and supported by the Church, politicians, curricula, and mainstream media.
Colonial education.
The same colonial education that we still favour and promote, right here in Canada.
The Memorial did a great job of highlighting this in the context of Rwanda, but how many people in Canada, in particular, learn the true impact(s) of colonialism?
We have the ‘anti-woke’ crowd, and politicians, saying that teaching Critical Race Theory will cause divisions and strife. But didn’t their system cause war and genocide?
Be mindful of those that want the status quo when it comes to (colonial) education. It’s much more nefarious than they want to openly admit.
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