Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

by Gerard Prunier

  abazungu (Kin):

  Derived from the Swahili word Wazungu, meaning white people.

  afande (Sio.):

  From the Turkish efendi, meaning “sir.” Roughly equivalent to lieutenant, it was brought to east Africa by the British army usage of Egyptian army ranks in the late nineteenth century. A respectful term used by the RPA for officers whose ranks it did not want to make public.

  assimilados (Port.):

  Name given in Angola to those natives who had learned Portuguese and were deemed more civilized than the rest. (See évolués.)

  autochtones (Fr.):

  The word, meaning “natives,” in French is used in the two Kivu provinces to designate non-Kinyarwanda speakers as opposed to the Kinyarwanda-speaking population, who are thus implicitly assigned the position of “foreigner” or “immigrant.”

  Banyaviura (Sw.):

  Name given to the mostly Tutsi Rwandese migrants to Katanga who formed a small community of office workers for the mining companies during the Belgian era.

  bapfuye buhagazi (Kin.):

  “The walking dead.” Name given to the genocide survivors, whether Tutsi or Hutu, who had usually lost most of their relatives.

  candonga (Port.):

  Name given in Angola to the parallel economy.

  contratados (Port.):

  “Those under contract.” A form of indentured labor akin to temporary slavery, practiced in the Portuguese colonies.

  creuseurs (Fr.):

  “Diggers.” The illegal gold or diamond miners in Zaire. (See garimpeiros.)

  dawa (Sw.):

  Literally “medicine.” Although the word still retains its ordinary sense it is also the term used for the “magic medicine” that a number of millenarian-oriented fighting groups (Simba rebels in the Congo in 1964–1965, Alice Lakwena’s rebels in Uganda in 1986, Mayi Mayi guerrillas in the DRC since 1996) use in the hope of gaining protection from enemy fire.

  eiolué (Fr.):

  “Evolved.” Name given by the Belgians to the Congolese natives who had reached an “appropriate level of civilization.” (See assimilados.)

  gacaca (Kin.):

  A form of conflict resolution in traditional Rwandese culture which the government tried to adapt to the postgenocide legal process. This adaptation was difficult because traditional gacaca was supposed to deal with misdemeanors rather than with blood crimes.

  garimpeiros (Port.):

  Illegal miners in Angola. (See creuseurs.)

  gendarmerie (Fr.):

  A corps of rural military police similar to the French Gendarmerie, the Italian Carabinieri, or the Mexican Rurales. It is a major component of military forces in Rwanda.

  génocidaires (Fr.):

  “Those who committed the genocide.” The term was at first purely descriptive. It later acquired a political meaning when it was applied to people who had not taken part in the genocide but who were considered hostile to the new regime.

  gutunga agatoki (Kin.):

  “Pointing the finger.” A process by which real or supposed génocidaires are denounced. Gutunga agatoki became a national sport in postgenocide Rwanda, with people often denouncing each other for political or economic advantage.

  ibipinga (Kin.):

  “Destroyers.” A term used by the RPF regime to stigmatize their enemies, whether Tutsi or Hutu. The term implies a nasty underhanded way of being an opponent.

  icyihuture (Kin.):

  “De-Hutuized,” that is, turned into a Tutsi. A form of social promotion within the Banyarwanda.

  imitima yarakomeretse (Kin.):

  “The disease of the wounded hearts.” The state of mind in which the genocide survivors live.

  indigenas (Port.):

  “Natives.” All those in the Portuguese colonies who were not assimilados.

  Interahamwe (Kin.):

  “Those who fight together.” The name of the former MRND politicomilitary militia. The Interahamwe were at the forefront of the genocide and did most of the killing. After the genocide, while the real Interahamwe kept operating in Zaire, noncompliant Hutu within Rwanda were called Interahamwe as a term of political opprobrium.

  Ingo (Kin.):

  See Rugo:

  Inyangamugayo (Kin.):

  “Those who hate dishonor.” People recruited to be a moral reference in litigation following the genocide. They often ended up in practice being part of the problems they were supposed to solve, even turning into a government militia in some communes.

  Kabaka (Lug):

  Traditional title of the king of Buganda.

  Kinyarwanda (Kin.):

  The Rwandese language. There are many Kinyarwanda speakers in the Congolese Kivus.

  kubohoza (Kin.):

  “To liberate.” The word was at first used by militias of the opposition parties during 1990–1994, when they often violently “liberated” (i.e., brutalized) their pro-government opponents. After the genocide the word was transformed ironically to mean “liberate for one’s benefit” (i.e., confiscate Hutu properties).

  kwitaba inama (Kin.):

  To answer the call to a meeting, an expression transformed by a grim pun into kwitaba imana (“answer the call of God”), that is, to die, because of the RPF killings during “peace meetings.”

  matumbo (Port.):

  From the Portuguese word mato meaning “the bush.” Used as a derogatory term in Angola to talk about the black African peasants of the interior. (See preto.)

  mesticos (Port.):

  Half-caste or mixed-blood person in the former Portuguese colonies.

  mugaragu (Kin.):

  “Client” in traditional Rwandese quasi-feudalism.

  mundele (Lin., pl. Mindele):

  A white person in western, northern, or central Congo, equivalent to Muzungu in Swahili-speaking Katanga or Kivu.

  musseques (Port.):

  Angolan shanty towns whose population has played a key political role in the civil war.

  Mwalimu (Sw.):

  “The schoolteacher.” Nickname of Tanzania’s former president Julius Nyerere.

  Mwami (plural “Abami”; Kin.):

  “King” in Kinyarwanda and in several of the Kivu languages. There were many abami in the small kingdoms that preexisted “Ankole” and the Kivus.

  nokos (Lin.):

  Literally “uncles.” Name given to politically influential Belgians during the colonization of the Congo. Later used for the “big men” of Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s regime.

  preto (Port.):

  Black (derogatory); see matumbo.

  retornados (Port.):

  “Those who have returned.” Bakongo from Angola who had lived in exile in Zaire and returned home after independence in November 1974. (See zairenses.)

  rugo (ingo in the plural; Kin.):

  The basic Rwandese peasant compound.

  shebuja (Kin.):

  “Patron” in traditional Rwandese quasi-feudalism.

  soba (Port.):

  Angolan colonial chiefs; the title is still used today.

  songamana (Sw.):

  From the verb kusonga, “to press together.” A form of crowd control using humiliation practiced by the RPA where many people are made to squat tightly together on the ground while being hectored by an officer.

  umugaragu (Kin. Pl. Abagaragu): Client.

  ’wakombozi (Sw.):

  “The liberators.” The name was first used by the pro-Obote Ugandans who had come back to Uganda in the wake of the Tanzanian army overthrow of Gen. Idi Amin’s dictatorship in 1979. Their excesses soon made them thoroughly unpopular. The term was applied to the NRA in 1986 and later taken to Rwanda by the RPF in 1994. (See Kubohoza for a word of related etymology in Kinyarwanda.)

  wazungu (Sw.):

  White people. Used in Uganda and the Congo, same as abazungu in Rwanda.

  Zairenses (Port.):

  Literally, “Zairians.” Name given to the Angolan Bakongo retornados after their return to Luanda.

/>   DRC War

  Hutu refugees

  War fronts

  Great Lakes Region

  INTRODUCTION

  In 1885, at the heyday of European imperialism, Africa was a continent apart. It had no nation-states, no caliphate, and no empire. It did not even have the crude military dictatorships that at the time passed for states in Latin America. It was a continent of clans, of segmentary tribes and of a few sacred monarchies. Societies were what mattered, and the state was a construct many could live without. Boundaries did exist, but not in the European sense. They were linguistic, cultural, military, or commercial, and they tended to crisscross and overlap, without the neat delineations so much beloved by Western statesmen since the treaties of Westphalia. Colonial European logic played havoc with that delicate cobweb of relationships. New borders were drawn not so much in violation of preexisting ones but according to a different logic. African borders had been porous membranes through which proto-nations were breathing, and the colonial borders that superseded them were of the pre-1914 cast-iron variety. Then, within those borders, vast enterprises of social and economic rationalization were undertaken, all for the good of the natives, of course, and for the greater prosperity of the empire. African social and cultural ways of doing things were neither taken into account nor questioned; they were simply made obsolete. Karl Marx and Rudyard Kipling agreed: empire was progressive. The Europeans rationalized African cultures to death. And it is that contrived rationality that they bequeathed to Africa when they walked away from the continent in the 1960s.

  The problem was that this rationality had not had time to filter down from the exalted spheres of government and philosophy to the real lives of ordinary people. Marxists would have said that, after seventy-five years of colonization, the administrative superstructure bore little relationship to the productive infrastructure. The Europeans had destroyed a traditional culture, planning to rebuild it along wonderfully rational lines at a later date. But history forced them to walk away before they could complete their supposedly benevolent alternative system, thus giving renewed tragic relevance to Antonio Gramsci’s famous remark that the moment when the Old is dead and the New is not yet born is a very dangerous moment indeed.

  Because independence occurred right in the middle of the cold war, political evolution was frozen until further notice. France took as its special responsibility the supervision of the cold storage equipment and turned it into a dearly beloved consolation prize for its waning role as a superpower. As a result Paris was loath to acknowledge the geopolitical earthquake that took place in 1989, and the notion that this primarily European event could have African consequences was not accepted. President Mitterrand’s extremely traditional political worldview did not help.

  The Rwandese genocide acted in this fragile African and international environment like the bull in the proverbial china shop because it was at the same time both typically “African” and typically un-African. Its deepseated causes reached far back into the precolonial culture of Rwanda. But it could never have occurred without the manic cultural reengineering of the Belgian colonial authorities. It was both a traditional logic gone mad and a totally modern artifact. In other words, it was a contemporary African social phenomenon.

  To think that an event of such magnitude, of such concentrated evil and of such political inventiveness could be kept bottled up in the 26,000 square kilometers of the official Rwanda state was naïve. But many people, including this author, hoped against hope that it could be. As for the self-styled “international community,” its standardized worldview could not hide the fact that as far as Africa was concerned it had willy-nilly inherited the mantel of the former colonial empires. Reluctantly trying to face a catastrophe of unheard-of magnitude, the international community attempted to deal with it in the stilted humanitarian style usually dispensed by the United Nations. And although the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda had been the ultimate experience in toothlessness, further bureaucratic remedies were nevertheless proffered after the genocide to a world spinning out of control, as if they would suffice to steer it back on course. Refugee camps were mushrooming, with armed murderers and hapless peasants living side by side, sharing the unreal bounty dumped on them by distant authorities who were choosing not to choose. Victorious victims were cradling their weapons in anticipation of a looming military solution. The diplomatic rout was almost absolute. The French, stunned by defeat and the torrents of blood they had unwittingly helped to shed, were incapable of coherent reaction. Shamed by their post-Somalia passive acquiescence to the genocide, the Americans were trying their hand at steering a situation they did not even begin to understand. And Marshal Mobutu, the longest-serving friend of the former free world, was clumsily trying to reformat the whole thing according to the obsolete parameters he was familiar with. Through a mixture of diplomatic routine and woolly good intentions, more septic material kept being injected into the already festering sores. By mid-1996 the infection was totally out of control.

  Let me be clear: the Rwandese genocide and its consequences did not cause the implosion of the Congo basin and its periphery. It acted as a catalyst, precipitating a crisis that had been latent for a good many years and that later reached far beyond its original Great Lakes locus. This is why the situation became so serious. The Rwandese genocide has been both a product and a further cause of an enormous African crisis: its very occurrence was a symptom, its nontreatment spread the disease.

  In Zaire itself what passed for a government structure was so rotten that the brush of a hand could cause it to collapse. A few mortar shells dislocated it beyond recognition. Paris was stunned for the second time, while Washington gleefully boasted about “New African Leaders.” And all the peripheral conflicts started to roll down into the Congo basin like so many overripe toxic fruits. In Burundi the civil war that started in 1993 had never stopped. Sudan and Uganda were still at each other’s throats and ready to jump, flailing, into the Congolese ring. The so-called Angola Peace Agreement was but a breathing spell between two periods of military campaigns. In Zimbabwe an ethnopolitical elite that had lost any sense of moderation or financial decency was keen to jump in with bright visions of political investments designed to counter South African economic expansion northward. Even in distant Namibia a weak government afraid of the new South African imperialism was ready to follow its supposedly strong protector in Luanda into the general melee.

  Then there were the nervous onlookers, with no immediate connections to the coming maelstrom but with many invisible links reaching into it: Brazzaville and Bangui, where separate conflicts were forever on the edge of blending with those across the great rivers; Tripoli, where Colonel Gaddafi’s perennial grand diplomatic design was back on the drawing board after years of Lockerbie freezing; Lusaka, where President Chiluba was trying to make up for a disintegrating economy by a flurry of diplomatic activism; and Pretoria, where the accession of the African National Congress to quasi-absolute power had created a situation of absolute economic need to empower the blacks without disenfranchising the whites.

  All this is what we could call “the modern state logic of the confrontation,” and it provides a first layer of explanation. Africa was teeming with geopolitical problems that suddenly all found a common locus. But something else is needed to explain the lightning spread and later the sluggish intractability of the conflict. Behind the competing egos of the politicians and the trendy appetites of the new African imperialisms lay some things that are deeper and thicker and that the politicians themselves were quite unable to fully understand and, even less, control.

  First is the uncertainty of Africa’s multiple identities. Governments can manipulate what exists; they cannot create what does not. The violence of the so-called Congolese conflict, which for a while became a continentwide war, was the product of unsettled questions that the Rwandese genocide had brushed raw. What is a country in Africa? What is a legitimate government? Who is a citizen? Why do we live together?
Whom should we obey? Who are we? Who are the “others,” and how should we deal with them? None of these questions had been answered, except by the dry legalistic proviso of the Organization of African Unity charter guaranteeing the intangibility of the former colonial borders. Pretending to answer so many vital questions with one paragraph in a forty-year-old treaty designed for a now obsolete context was unrealistic.

  Then comes the problem of legitimacy. At independence, being black was legitimate enough to qualify as president of a newly decolonized state. Later, U.S. cold war interests and French neocolonialism helped buttress existing governments. The collapse of the communist empire shook up these arrangements, which had never taken the ordinary African into account. Ordinary people on the continent began to insist on being treated like citizens and not like subjects. Democracy became a new byword. But the problem was that democracy as a form of government presupposes a certain degree of social integration, the existence of a political class with some concept of the national interest, and a minimum of economic development. None of these existed. The African political class was largely made up of “tropical gangsters,”1 and the continent’s economy was a stagnating swamp. Attempts at democracy, although inherently hopeful, tended to end badly either through violence or, more often, through the deliberate perversion of the new institutions, which were promptly emptied of any democratic content. Nevertheless these failures did not help the now beleaguered dictatorships that remained under pressure from their rapidly organizing civil societies and from a newly politically correct international community. Dictators such as Mobutu had not been asked too many questions as long as they helped the West fight international communism. To their great surprise they were now held accountable for previously irrelevant items such as human rights and good governance. Only in Paris were these uncomfortable innovations largely spurned as “Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy.” As a result, caught between impotently fermenting democratic ideals and the realities of persistent institutional authoritarianism, Africa started to drift into a de facto legitimacy vacuum.