THE extent to which the French go in oppressing the indigenous people of countries they colonised is very disturbing.
They are no different from their kinsmen, the British and the Dutch, who showed their disdain for blacks as Rhodesians and Boers here in southern Africa.
Our suffering at the hands of the whiteman is a universal experience for blacks all over the world.
To fully comprehend the next acts of human rights violations by France, we shall have to look at the history of our kinsmen in the central African nation of Rwanda. In past articles, we looked at the history of neighbouring Congo which was once one nation with Rwanda and Burundi.
Rwanda was so named because it was inhabited by people who spoke the language kiNyarwanda.
Likewise, Burundi was so named because the inhabitants predominantly spoke kiRundi.
The linguistic connections of these languages to chiShona are many.
For example, the use of ‘ki’ as we would use ‘chi’ in the words kiRundi and chiShona.
They are Bantu languages that are purer than Swahili which is mixed with Arabic.
At the Berlin Conference of 1884 CE, Germany was allocated the nation of Rwanda.
Because of German’s fall after the first pan-European war that they inappropriately coined First World War, there was not much notable physical presence of Germans in Rwanda.
However, Belgium, which was one of the allies fighting against Germany, capitalised on the chaos and colonised Rwanda in 1916.
Belgium is a tiny nation, but it had also laid claim to the massive Congo.
Even Marcus Garvey said: “Belgium has control of the Congo which they have no capacity to fully develop.”
Their greed was fuelled by the likes of King Leopold II who wished to make their country an imperial power.
When the Belgians arrived, they noticed there were at least three ethnic groups in Rwanda that were living together peacefully.
The earliest inhabitants of the land were the Twa; a short statured pygmy people. Then there were the Hutu and the Tutsi.
The Hutu were predominantly farmers and the Tutsi, livestock keepers. Their trades complemented each other.
There was inter-marriage and some Hutus could be mistaken for Tutsis if they possessed the other group’s features.
The Tutsi were the minority between the two groups in question.
When the Belgians came they noticed that most Tutsis were tall, slim and had less broad noses than the Hutus who were relatively stouter.
The Belgians then began working along with the Tutsi to subdue all the indigenous people under Belgian colonial rule.
Before long, the ethnic specification of Twa, Tutsi, Hutu or neutralised would mandatorily be required on each Rwandan’s national identity card.
In this process, some Hutus were classified as Tutsi and vice-versa.
Because Belgians were favouring the Tutsis, some Hutus who were wealthy were allowed honorary Tutsi ethnicities on their IDs and also because some Hutus were tall.
Belgium began making ridiculous claims of Tutsis being descendants of people from places like Egypt as opposed to the Hutus.
Are they suggesting ancient Egyptians were any different from any of the sub-Saharan blacks of today?
Science tells us that the Hutus and the Tutsis both carry the sub-Saharid ‘Y’ DNA marker E1b1a which was found in the genetics of ancient Pharaohs like Ramses III, and can be found in most other groups in southern, central and western Africa.
Europeans are always far-fetched in trying to identify differences between Africans they find living together.
Since their hypothesis was neither scientifically or archeologically based, why did they not imagine that maybe Hutus and Tutsis were brothers, the former short and the latter tall and their descendants kept their ancestors’ features.
How then can the claims of Belgium hold weight when according to archaeological evidence, both groups probably migrated to Rwanda, fleeing the desertification of the Sahara?
Yet they are these and more similar claims that eventually led to unprecedented tribal division and conflict between Hutus and Tutsis.
The Tutsis were made to feel non-African and superior and the Hutus too African and inferior, along with the Twa.
The people of Rwanda were eventually going to want independence from Belgium. As long as the Tutsis were in cahoots with the coloniser, it was inevitable this independence would also mean the deposing of Tutsi authorities.
By 1959, the Hutus had managed to fight off the Tutsis and many of them were fleeing to neighbouring countries.
This foundation of the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis can holistically be blamed on the Belgians who found these people co-existing and speaking the same language before they colonised them.
In 1962, the Hutus won independence from Belgium and got into Government.
The Belgians almost instantly began supporting the Hutus so as not to lose their colonial interests in the country.
The Belgians sold out the Tutsis by holding a referendum to abolish the Tutsi Nyiginya Kingdom’s authority, whose hegemony extended to Burundi.
At this point, Rwanda was separated from Burundi.
By the late 1950s, reports of Tutsi killings were increasing and Belgium did not want to be seen as compromising its new stance to support Hutus.
The Tutsis who fled to the north formed a rebel army called ‘RPF’ and over the years, not much was done in Belgium or Rwanda to tone down this tribal conflict. In Zimbabwe, our ethnicity is not written on our National IDs; if so it would be black or African.
Micro ethnic grouping such as dividing Zimbabweans into maKaranga, maZezuru, maNdau and so on, showing it on National IDs and then choosing to favour a people of specific tribe would have inevitably led to a similar situation in Zimbabwe as that in Rwanda because the other groups are equally Zimbabwean.
Yet this is what was done in Rwanda and by 1990, a new generation had grown up in these divisions, some as children of Tutsi rebels and others as children of Hutu extremists.
On the other hand, most Tutsis had remained in the country under the Hutu Government and many Hutu Government leaders were working and living peacefully with Tutsis.
The latter would be called Hutu moderates because they hold no ill will towards Tutsis and saw themselves collectively as Rwandans.
The Hutu extremists hung on to the Belgian claims that Tutsis were not originally from sub-Saharan Africa and wanted to chase them from the country for that reason.
An armed struggle between the Rwandan National Army and the Rwandan Political Front ensued in October 1990.
France began supplying the Rwandan National Army with weapons in 1989.
The French were aware of the coming danger and had prepared the Government for it.
They deliberately misinformed other parties, saying their attackers were Ugandans who did not like Rwanda, instead of Tutsi refugees who had joined the rebel army. The RPF claimed they were not fighting exclusively for Tutsi rule, but the overall ousting of the caste system which was created by the Belgians and was being abused by France.
Political killings of Hutu moderates escalated from then on as Hutu extremists increased.
The breaking point was on April 6 1994 when a missile was fired and killed the Rwandan President Habyarimana in his plane.
The President was Hutu and thus it is suspected Tutsi rebels were responsible.
However, after seeing the organised massacre of the Tutsis that took place shortly after the assassination of the Rwandan President, it is also suspected Hutu extremists were behind the bombing in order to justify a premeditated genocide.
Some also blamed the Belgians for doing it.