Two Tough Movies

I've just finished watching two very tough movies: Shake Hands With the Devil; and Hotel Rwanda. The first is Romeo Dallaire's story of his return to Rwanda and to sanity after the genocide which he was unable to prevent. The second is the story of a Hutu hotel manager who protects Tutsis during the genocide in Rwanda.

I couldn't watch either straight through. I needed sanity breaks.

The Rwandan genocide was one of the greatest crimes in recent history ... yes, of course the atrocities committed by the Hutus against the Tutsis, but just as horrifying, the developed world's failure to act, to believe, to care enough, to see that African deaths are just as important as those of white people.

Three pieces of literature that have helped to clarify the situation for me have been these two films and and the novel, Sunday Afternoon at the Pool in Kigali.

Shortly after that blood bath, a nun from Uganda visited my cottage with a mutual friend, a Malawian. She told me about the rivers running red and clogged by bodies floating downstream, and how her younger brother just "had to see for himself". He was sixteen. He didn't sleep for months after seeing the carnage. On an emotional level I could certainly understand without having to see for myself, even if I had trouble distinguishing intellectually between Hutus and Tutsis. The details were raw and horrifying enough.

On this last trip to Kenya I met two young Rwandans who helped me understand a little more.

One had been a Tutsi child at the time. Every night he would stuff cotton into his nostrils in an attempt to stretch them so that he would look more Hutu than Tutsi ... so that he wouldn't have to face the bullying in school ... so that when the genocide finally occurred he would be indistinguishable.

The other man, half Hutu-half Tutsi, told me about watching his Tutsi mother run away to Uganda leaving the children behind. She was terrified that the machetes would be turned on her next. I guess she hoped that the children might be safe. In this case they survived. In too many cases they did not.

What we are seeing in Kenya is very different, but in both countries, unfair distribution of power is at the root. In Rwanda, the Belgians favoured the Tutsis, likely because they looked more European than the Hutus. When they handed over power to Rwandans, the Hutu majority had built up a tremendous resentment against the Tutsi minority which had been given all the plum positions during the colonial period. In Kenya, the Kikuyu have been the favoured tribe ever since Independence. Jomo Kenyatta did not distribute power or land fairly. In both countries the minority was resented by the majority.

In Rwanda, the Hutu head of state was killed when his plane was shot down right after a peace accord had been signed. Rule of law abruptly disappeared. In such a situation anything can happen. Total disorder and emotions running amok, and a plan already in place to kill off the Tutsis.

Kenya has been a stable country for a long time. In Kenya, tribalism is far more diffuse ... far more tribes for one thing. There has never been a plan to rid Kenya of Kikuyu. In Kenya the anger stems from the fact that the election was not fought or counted fairly. That anger has spilled over from anger with Kibaki to anger against his tribe ... the tribe that has generally been better educated, richer, and more powerful politically. And it is poor young men who can be manipulated who are doing most of the fighting, poor young men who feel they have been cheated all their lives.

I watched these two films trying to get a sense of what must be happening on a far smaller scale (1000, not 800,000 killed), and I wept ... for the Tutsis of Rwanda ... and for Kenyans.

I have been reading comments on Yahoo about the Kenyan news reports that make me want to weep for us here in Canada. One 63 year old man who calls himself the Jokester would like us to ship container loads of machetes to Kenya so that they can finish each other off.

In one scene in Shake Hands With the Devil, Dallaire speaks to Rwandan university students ten years after the genocide, and he says that the western countries believed something very like what the Jokester expressed, and that is why they let Rwanda down in its hour of greatest need. They didn't see black Africans as fully human. That is why the UN ignored Dallaire's pleas for help; why individual countries ignored the news footage that international journalists were sending them.

That was thirteen years ago.

I read the Jokester's comments yesterday and feared that it could happen again, perhaps not in Kenya, but somewhere in Africa. The west might very well turn a blind eye and choose not to help because Africa doesn't matter; because Africans are not as fully human as North Americans or Europeans.

Just how far have we evolved?