HOW short a time is 20 years. On April 6, 1994, my wife and I were camped on the shores of Lake Victoria next to the incredible Entebbe Botanical Gardens, the place where the early Tarzan movies featuring Johnny Weismuller were filmed.
Around the fire that night, we followed our nightly ritual of tuning into the BBC’s African Service, for whom I had worked for several years as a freelance stringer. The lead story was about a plane crashing as it came in to land in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. The next morning we tuned in again. It had been confirmed that the plane was shot down, and on board were Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira and Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana.
We were on our way to Rwanda and Burundi to track gorillas when the plane was shot down. We nuked those plans, fast, and made our way down the shores of Lake Edward to Kabale, our staging post for the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, to see gorillas from the Ugandan side.
Kabale was in chaos. UN troops were racing around the streets in mud-covered Land Cruisers, their helicopters buzzing the forests. Every day, more foreign aid workers came across the border, wide-eyed, some with bullet holes through their doors. The genocide had begun.
I made a reverse charges call to my editor at the BBC. They put me straight onto a recording line and we did a 10 minute question and answer, a “scene-setter”. My editor asked if they could “shower” me with money to go into Rwanda. They had one correspondent in Rwanda, the incredibly brave Lindsey Hilsum, who lived in Kigali. They wanted me to join her. But I’d had enough of war. And I wanted to listen to the final few weeks of my own country’s final march to freedom on my Sony World Traveller shortwave radio.
On the 10th anniversary of the genocide, Lindsey wrote in the Observer that “Ten years ago, I listened to the gunfire outside my house in Kigali and wondered if I would survive... I learnt that danger lay in the quiet times when bands of killers roamed the capital. Friends called, begging me to save them.
“‘They’re outside – I can see the bodies of my neighbours,’ sobbed one. ‘We’ve locked ourselves in the house. We’re just waiting to die.’ I hear their voices still. The friends who rang were Tutsis, Rwanda’s ethnic minority. The thugs, armed with machetes and clubs, were from the Hutu majority. Their aim was to wipe out the Tutsis, to leave no trace. Memory reduces horror to disconnected images: a baby’s leg half severed by a machete; mutilated bodies of four women buzzing with flies; blood running in a gutter.”
In Kabale, we tuned into Radio Rwanda and Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. In the Sky Blue Hotel, Nathan the Tutsi barman translated for us: “The radio man is warning the Hutus that the inyenzi– the cockroaches – are coming to kill them. They are telling them to pick up their machetes and kill the inyenzi first.”
It was chilling.
By mid-July, between half a million and a million mostly ethnic Tutsis had been hacked, slashed and shot to death. And all the while, the radio stations persisted with their poisonous messages of ethnic hate.
Twenty years on, have we forgotten all the lessons of Rwanda, and the lessons of reconciliation and non-racialism on which our own transition to democracy was built?
Take just three recent examples: on January 8, Jacob Zuma said of Helen Zille “There’s a white woman whom I overheard saying there must be investigations on how the (matric) pass rate was reached. I thought, okay, she is still in the past thinking that a black child cannot pass.”
Then on January 19, Julius Malema told farmworkers that “there are still people who think white people are created by God to own farms and give you jobs... white people don’t vote for black people but you people voted for a white person.”
On January 10, ANC Western Cape leader Marius Fransman weighed in on Zille’s comments on the matric results and said “these offensive references, together with a Verwoerdian belief that blacks cannot do maths and sciences, are old order class and race ideology... it shows the DA is only protecting white past privileges including appointing mainly white managers and only white MEC’s.”
Now in all these quotes above, simply substitute the word Tutsi or cockroach for white and Hutu for black.
That’s how easy hate speech is. And that’s lesson one in how to start a genocide.
tonyweaver@iafrica.com