Rwanda today cerebrates fifty years of independence from her former colonial master Belgium. Rwanda like other African nations found herself in the sense of hopelessness, colonial pain and burden that replaced our togetherness and national unity.

The 1960s had been described by observers as the golden age of Africa as Europe began to grant limited independence to their colonies, especially in Africa south of the Sahara.  Rwanda like other African nation, transition to independent nationhood produced new problems that continue to haunt it and other African nations today.

The initial euphoria of independence was quickly replaced by a sense of hopelessness as the new elite found the pains and burdens of sustaining the new independent nations, all across of Africa, unbearable. Indeed, towards and after independence, large parts of Rwanda descended into one sort of anarchy or another as new political elites could not agree on the direction in which to move their nation. Totalitarian regimes succeeded each other, in the form of military oligarchies, anarchy and ethnicity soon became the order of the day which saw Rwanda degenerating into chaos of burning and killing of innocent people, and those who survived ended up into exile.

This was the case in some other African nations like Uganda, Angola, Sudan and Nigeria. In the Belgian Congo, the brutal assassination of the newly-elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, and the installation of Mobutu Sesse Seko as the new head of state were clear indications that independence for Africans was only a dream yet to be realized.

Rwandan Politics was built on Ethnicity

The colonial policy of divide and rule did not spare Rwandan politics,  under the leadership of the Catholic church the history and politics of this country  were  deliberately set up to be divided along tribal and ethnic lines. The Rwanda elites at the time of independence who assumed power had been educated and nurtured by the seminaries and they continued to be guided by policies and ideology of their masters. I will not go into the details of Rwandan history in this article, I will only highlight on the bad politics that characterized our country during colonial and post- colonial rule which is even worse under the RPF regime.

With the exception of previously-revolutionary states like Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea Bissau, and to some extent, petty bourgeois states like Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia, as has been alluded to earlier, peaceful transition to independent nationhood in much of Black Africa including Rwanda, independence  only reinforced the historic link of dependence between the former colonies and the metropolitan states of Europe.

In his book, Front Line Nationalism in Angola and Mozambique, David Birmingham (1992)

David describes both political and economic dependence of African nations on their former colonial masters;

“The colonial interlude in Africa was unexpectedly short-lived. Within 50 years, a new ‘neo-colonial’ contract had replaced the old colonial presence in tropical Africa. The colonial legacy was nevertheless profound. The new states adhered almost exclusively to the often very artificial boundaries devised by the Europeans. The new rulers retained the colonial languages for their administration, and in many cases, the colonial currencies for their external trade. The colonial tradition of military authority rather than democratic consent was preserved in a majority of the new states, despite the several attempts to transform the dictatorial colonial legacy into a broader-based system of government. The largest of the ex-colonial states failed to hold together and civil war interrupted the evolution of Sudan and Ethiopia, and more temporarily, Zaire and Nigeria.” (Birmingham, 1992: 4).

 

Liberation movements in Africa.

As already mentioned above Rwanda like other African nations  has had the lion’s share of the colonial legacy which did not only shape the political ideology but also resulted in the genocide of the Twentieth century(20th).  It is on this background that RPF like other African Liberation moments emerged under the mask of restoring democracy and dignity to their respective nations.

Unfortunately the RPF like its predecessor the MRND of the late President Habyarimana which came to power after chaos, killing and burning of houses of innocent people has not only failed to adhere to its former principles of eight point programme, but it has made it worse and unbearable for the civil societies, free media and political parties to freely operate in Rwanda. Therefore the material dividends of democracy in the new RPF dispensation have not accrued for the Rwandan majority and this situation is likely to continue for the generation to come. Hence the gap between the rich and the poor continues to increase, leaving Rwanda, 18 years after the so called liberation and advent of democracy, among the most highly unequal societies in the world.

Ethnicity might have been removed from the Rwandan identity cards but behind the political curtains, political institutions continue to identify themselves on the ethnic lines and if this phenomenon is not treated from the roots, it will widen and threaten the shaky and the semi-democratic institutions in Rwanda as described by the President of the Senator of Rwanda when he was opening the Good Governance conference yesterday in the Parliamentary building.

I therefore I argue that Rwanda like other African nations still need to be freed from the historically-imposed shackles of oppression that previously defined their humanity and essence. This ‘being and essence’ is what the late Leopold Senghor referred to in his novel work as ‘Negritude’.

Jacqueline Umurungi

Brussels.

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