Out of Africa

Chris McGreal The Guardian, March 27, 2009

Chris McGreal began repor- the infection spread across Africa. ting from Africa at a time of pro- But running in parallel were the found change. He witnessed both worst of times. Weeks after watching the unbridled optimism of Nelson Mandela vote, I was standing at a Mandela’s release and the hor- church among thousands of corpses ri- rors of the Rwandan genocide. sing from the ground. It was about 3am Two decades later, in his final and I had just listened to a small group dispatch, he relives the moments of nuns in the Rwandan town of Kibuye that affected him most deeply, describe the massacre of thousands of and asks what the future holds for Tutsis in the Roman Catholic church. this great continent Eleven thousand died there in a single “”hey were the best of times in day. Another 10,000 were murdered in Africa, and the worst. They were the the football stadium the next. years when South Africa was swept The bodies were swiftly buried away by the belief that it was a na- around the church but rains washed tion blessed, a moral beacon to the the soil away, and everywhere the re- world, symbolised by a single moment mains of people frozen in futile de- as Nelson Mandela stood outside a fence against bullets and machetes small KwaZulu school in April 1994, were emerging from the soil. Women, dropped his vote into the ballot box children, old men - no one was spared, with a cross next to his own name, and not even the priest. Bullet holes speck- undid what an entire system had been led the church’s corrugated iron roof. constructed to prevent. In the backrooms, bloody handprints The world swooned as the great adorned the walls. man was sworn in as president a few I had met the man responsible for days later and the white generals, who all this a few hours earlier. Clément had built a fearsome military and bat- Kayishema was a doctor and, at one tled across the hinterland of southern time, head of the local hospital, but Africa to avoid this day, turned to sa- by the time of the genocide he was a lute him. True, the ideal of the “rain- political force as the governor of Ki- bow nation” was more a vision than an buye province. When I turned up in expectation, some might say a self de- his town, he directed that I be held lusion, given South Africa’s knotty mix in a hotel-turned-barracks. One day he of race and history. Yet the belief and would have cause to regret that. hope of those years was contagious and I had arrived in Africa four years

1 2 earlier, not really knowing what to enthusiasm and humour for the chance, expect. As I was growing up in the at last, to have a say in who gover- 70s, news from Africa was domina- ned them. They spoke of a new era, an ted by Idi Amin and Ian Smith, end to war, corruption and the oppres- whose stand for white rule in Rhode- sive “presidents for life” who claimed sia was amply justified in my parents’ the right to rule perpetually because eyes by Uganda’s bloody tyrant. Anti- they had liberated their countries from apartheid boycotts were beginning to colonial subjugation. Promise was all take hold, even if there was still wi- around. despread sympathy in Britain for the But then the new breed often tur- white regime in Pretoria. The mood ned out to be like the old breed, and hardened with the beginning of the So- the old breed clung on for dear life weto uprising and the state’s brutal where it could. Angola was flung back response a few years later. The long into war. Nigeria’s army didn’t like the war in Angola was brought to our li- election result and imposed its most ving room principally through the trial brutal dictatorship to date. The new of British mercenaries, as Washington rulers of Zambia and Malawi proved to and Moscow fought out their cold war be as corrupt as their predecessors. In at the cost of African lives. It was only Zimbabwe, the first election that posed about a decade after independence for a threat to president Robert Mugabe’s most countries, but already the conti- power marked the beginning of a de- nent was being written off as a basket cade of decline and bloodshed that is case run by buffoons and thieves. still frustrating the will of its people. That was then. I was landing in Calamitous failures of leadership 1990 in what promised to be a very left millions dead and perpetuated the different Africa. Alongside the fall of struggle for existence of millions more. apartheid, the talk was of a “new bree- Even South Africa, where the courage d” of African leaders rejecting cor- of FW de Klerk and Mandela had seen rupt, authoritarian one-party regimes a nation reborn, watched its new de- preying on their own people. Britain mocracy eroded by the authoritarian was flinging money at Uganda’s new and sometimes paranoid leadership of ruler, Yoweri Museveni - a paragon of president Thabo Mbeki. leadership compared with Amin - who Books have been filled with the promised not only clean, accountable shortcomings of African leaders since government but adherence to the pre- independence, from the corrupt “big vailing western orthodoxy of privati- men” and military rulers propped up sation and free markets. Other great by the west because of their anti- hopes would follow : Ethiopia’s Meles communist credentials to the former Zenawi and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. Marxist leaders who wallow in the mo- The expectation infecting South ney they made selling off the state as- Africa was creeping north, sometimes sets they once seized in the name of the forcing out the old but always bringing people. Yet, after two decades of wat- some kind of change. People turned out ching failed leadership, the Africans in their tens of millions to vote, wai- that have made the greatest impres- ting in lines for hours in Zambia, An- sion on me are the extraordinary in- gola, Malawi, Nigeria, Zimbabwe with dividuals who stood against that tide. 3

In South Africa there is Zackie Ach- - albeit one made in part out of des- mat, an HIV-positive gay Muslim man peration at the realisation that their of Indian extraction and ANC mem- country was otherwise headed for the ber, who led the campaign against abyss. Mbeki’s perverted denial of life-saving But of all the silent heroes, per- anti-Aids drugs to poor black people. haps none was more unusual than Sos- In doing so, Achmat did much to keep thene Niyitegeka. The Hutu shopkee- democratic accountability alive under per and pastor risked everything - his governments that have badly subver- own life and that of his wife and chil- ted the institutions of the country’s dren - to save every Tutsi in his vil- new democracy, particularly the judi- lage at the height of the Rwandan ge- ciary, while corruption flourishes. nocide, with a plan that mixed ap- Other names are less well known, peals to human decency with black- such as those of the women in eas- mail and infiltration of the militia lea- tern Congo who venture into the most ding the killing. Niyitegaka’s story is dangerous areas to rescue other women extraordinary because Rwanda stands from years of systematic mass rape apart. There have been plenty of other by the gangs of armed militias that mass graves across those two decades amount to the only form of authority and before. But Rwanda left a different over vast territories. Or the Nigerian mark. It offered the darkest insight into journalists who risked assassination or the fragility of society, and it is the long sentences in hellish prisons to ex- legacy of that tiny country’s genocide pose the truth about the military dic- and its tragic failures of leadership that tators plundering their country. Not a a good part of Africa continues to live few were murdered or slung in jail by with today. military courts. My encounter with Clément Kayi- And there are those who names shema in Kibuye was brief. He happe- cannot, for now, be revealed. They ned to be in the main square when I include the Zimbabwean doctors who arrived and he asked what I was doing have for years lived with the risk of ar- there. I tried to fob him off with some- rest, torture and even death to run an thing about assessing the refugee situa- underground railroad to help the vic- tion, but he ordered some soldiers to tims of Mugabe’s sustained and bloody hold me in a crumbling lakeside hotel terror against his people. Thousands of taken over by the army. The soldiers the beaten and near-dead have been drank through the evening and passed rescued and spirited to private clinics, out. secretly operated on and kept beyond I slipped away in the night to talk the clutches of the intelligence organi- to the nuns, who recounted in detail sations. the events at the church. They told of Sometimes whole groups of people the mobs armed with machetes, gre- proved heroic in their own way. White nades and guns, and how Kayishema South Africans, particularly the all- had told the priest to walk away or too-often vilified Afrikaners, set aside die. Then he led the massacre, wiel- fear and years of indoctrination to sup- ding a sword. Those who survived the port the transition to black rule in a initial onslaught of explosives and bul- referendum. It was a huge leap of faith lets were hacked to death or lined up 4 and clubbed one by one. Some of the played a role, but the unleashing of women were gang raped and had their what was intended to be the final so- eyes gouged out. Many of the killers lution to the “Tutsi problem” was a were from the town. The nuns recogni- raw power-play by an educated elite sed them : teachers, civil servants, po- that feared losing control to democracy licemen, peasant farmers. and power-sharing with Tutsi rebels. After three hours of listening to the An entire government, military and a nuns, I made my way to the church large part of the population was orga- to see first-hand the evidence and then nised to hunt down and murder hun- get out of town before dawn. My four- dreds of thousands of people, which hour drive to the Zaire border was dot- they did with remarkable success by ted with roadblocks manned by Hutu killing close to a million in 100 days. militiamen with clubs, machetes and In the following weeks, as the go- guns ; but by then most of the Tutsis vernment of murderers retreated in the were dead, so they were usually more face of a rebel onslaught, the prime mi- drunk than menacing. nister, Jean Kambanda, told me how I was back in Kibuye a couple of the Tutsis had brought it on them- weeks later. It was a Sunday and the selves. The chief of staff in the defence people were shuffling into the church, ministry, Théoneste Bagosora, the ar- neat in their best clothes. Someone had chitect of the slaughter, attempted to tried to scrub the place clean, but the portray the mass murder as a sponta- smell of the torrent of blood that see- neous bloodletting born of fear and an- med to have worked its way under the ger that no one could stop. very skin of the church was still un- I met Bagosora a few times, but it bearable, and worshippers prayed with was only a few weeks after the geno- cloths held to their faces. cide that I sat down to talk to him The church had a new Hutu priest. properly. He was in Zaire along with He was available because he had over- about a million other Hutus who had seen the bulldozing of his former fled defeat. Perched on his chair, a sa- church in another part of Rwanda, with tellite phone at his side and flashing its Tutsi congregation still inside. The gold jewellery, Bagosora was unapo- priest made no mention of the dead. logetic, belligerent and conflicted. On Some of the worshippers denied there the one hand he was clearly pleased had been a massacre ; a woman who with his handiwork in organising the said it was all a lie refused to look at a slaughter of about 800,000 people. On foot sticking out of the ground beside the other, he needed to maintain the her. fiction that the killings were a sponta- Rwanda was about as catastrophic neous outburst of anger against Tut- a failure of leadership as Africa has sis. So he settled for questioning that seen. The genocide has been explained it had happened at all. away as the unleashing of ancient eth- “People say Bagosora did this or nic hatreds and the legacy of the Eu- that, that I have the blood of the Tutsis ropean colonial obsession with the spu- on my hands. But where are all these rious science of racial hierarchy, which people who were killed ? If they died in this case regarded Tutsis as gene- it is because they are rebels or because tically superior to Hutus. All of that the people were angry with them. They 5 didn’t need Bagosora to tell them who decent thing. Others weren’t so co- to kill,” he said. “But it’s true that the operative, but the preacher knew a Tutsis are trouble. Now they have ta- thing or two about who was sleeping ken over the country, a Hutu country. with who - the kind of thing that makes We will fight them again until all the people co-operative. In a daring move, Tutsis are gone.” he sent people he trusted to drink in Bagosora was a cold, frightening fi- the bar where the militiamen tanked gure. The head of the UN mission to themselves up on beer before begin- Rwanda described meeting him as like ning their hunt for human victims. The shaking the hand of the devil. Yet, like spies sent back word and, over the fol- others who have wielded so much po- lowing weeks, a sinister form of hide- wer of life and death, he might in dif- and-seek unfolded as Niyitegeka mo- ferent circumstances have been mista- ved Tutsis between about 30 houses, ken for a lowly civil servant. always keeping one step ahead of the Out of all this also came Sos- Interahamwe. Sometimes dozens at a thene Niyitegeka. The Hutu, Seventh- time were hurried into the maize fields day Adventist preacher had a small or the hills as the militia hunted their shop, a wife and nine children to pro- quarry. tect. But he saw what was about to At one point, Niyitegeka persuaded occur with moral clarity as the Hutu the local council that the militia mem- militia, headed by the village primary bers were always drunk and thieving school teacher, handed out crate-loads from people’s houses, and should not of grenades “like sweets”, as Niyitegeka be entrusted with the search for Tut- put it. sis. So the council appointed the pastor When a Tutsi woman, a nurse with to lead it, and he appointed a group of her children in tow, knocked on his friends who were hiding Tutsis to help door he let her in. A day or two la- him. When the rebels arrived and the ter there was another woman on his Interahamwe fled, every Tutsi hidden doorstep. She had been stripped na- by Niyitegeka was still alive. ked, carved up by machete and had Most Hutus did not take a di- nearly lost her arms. Niyitegeka’s re- rect role in the genocide. Many passi- putation drew others - businessmen, ci- vely opposed the murder of their Tutsi vil servants, peasants - to his house. friends and neighbours. But only a few “They were the kind of people that, if actively resisted it. I asked Niyitegeka you hid them, you could get yourself why he did it. killed for. Some were really desperate. “Any person could see this was Running by night, hiding by day,” he wrong. How could killing children be said. right ? How could it be right to kill the After 10 days he was sheltering neighbours you have lived with all your 104 people in his house and the maize life ? But Rwanda is a strange coun- field out the back. But members of try. People do things because the go- the the Hutu extremist militia, known vernment tells them to. They do not as the Interahamwe, were watching, think for themselves. When these lea- and Niyitegeka knew he had to find ders say : ’Kill your neighbours while better hiding places. He appealed to we get rich,’ they do not think that is those neighbours he trusted to do the wrong.” 6

I had much the same discussion for abandoning the Tutsis, to then re- with another Hutu. Theoneste Nzigiyi- fuse to make a small contribution to mana was a bank cashier. A badly bat- what little justice there was for the tered woman who had been raped and dead and survivors. Kayishema is ser- beaten, Madalena Mukariemeria, step- ving life in a prison in Mali. ped up to the counter. Behind her was The international tribunal has done a Hutu militiaman, and Nzigiyimana a good job of capturing and trying quickly realised the woman’s life de- those responsible. Bagosora, the mas- pended on her being able to give the termind of the genocide, was convicted armed man money. The cashier looked and jailed for life along with many of at Mukariemeria’s account and it was the military and political leaders who virtually empty. So Nzigiyimana with- oversaw the slaughter. But the trials drew 20,000 francs - just £30 but a were protracted and seemed distant large amount in Rwanda at the time to the survivors and those rebuilding - from his own account and handed it their lives. to the woman. The Rwandan government came at In the coming weeks, Nzigiyimana it differently. A few months after tes- handed over a lot more cash, then took tifying at the international tribunal, I out loans when his own money ran out watched three men and a woman tied to help save 10 Tutsis and their fami- to wooden posts and shot in public in a lies. This at a time where mobs of ar- Kigali stadium for their role in the ge- med militia were terrorising the popu- nocide. Another 18 people were execu- lation and butchering anyone who hel- ted on hilltops across the country be- ped Tutsis. fore crowds of taunting and cheering “I was seeing the leadership was survivors. The executions were widely doing things that weren’t good, so in condemned. Some recoiled at the me- my heart I knew it was wrong,” he told dieval practice of killing people in front me. “These are people we used to share of a baying crowd. Amnesty Interna- things with, living together, marrying tional said they would do nothing for each other, working together.” reconciliation in Rwanda. That wasn’t Rwanda left its mark on everyone, the point. Almost no one had apolo- Hutus and Tutsis, peacekeepers and gised for the genocide. The only regret aid workers. Reporters too. I agreed among those who organised it was that to testify against Kayishema, the go- they had failed to carry through the vernor who organised the massacres in extermination of the Tutsis. In the ab- Kibuye, at the international tribunal sence of remorse, the survivors wanted for Rwanda. The prosecution wanted a price to be exacted for the destruc- me for one small thing : to establish tion of their families. It was hard not that he continued to wield authority at to agree with them. a time when he claimed to have been I watched one of those hauled be- stripped of power. fore the firing squad with particular in- There is a debate among reporters terest. Froduald Karamira was the lea- over whether we should take the stand der of a Hutu extremist faction whose at international courts, but it seemed call to murder pounded across the air- difficult to me, after writing of the ways at the height of the genocide. blood on the hands of western leaders That he was a Tutsi who reinvented 7 himself as a Hutu and became a fana- fled Rwanda as the Tutsi rebels sei- tic to prove his loyalty only added to zed power. Tens of thousands died of the horror. When he wasn’t on the ra- cholera on a hellish landscape of volca- dio, Karamira was on the streets killing nic rock in Goma, as the sky darkened by example. with ash. It smacked of divine retribu- I met Karamira a few times and sat tion, except that so many of the dead through his trial on a wooden bench were children. behind him at a packed and dilapi- Africa is still living with the legacy dated old court in Kigali. For three 15 years later. What began as civil days, he again fascinated and appal- strife in a tiny country reverberated led Rwandans with a performance that across central Africa, bringing down swung from defiant denial of reality to one of the continent’s longest standing a taunting of the court, all of it broad- dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko, and dra- cast on the radio. He knew he would wing a host of countries into the sub- be shot, and told the judges he would sequent wars in the Democratic Repu- be happy to die if it made the Tutsis blic of Congo. Millions died in the per- happy. petual conflict that followed. But the bravado fell away as the Rwanda had other consequences, witnesses spoke. One listed all the too. Guilt over the west’s failure to members of his family murdered at act prompted the British intervention Karamira’s behest. They included his in Sierra Leone that put an end to its wife, five children, mother, four sisters rebel war and horrific crimes against and two nephews. I spoke to Karamira civilians. Rwanda went on to become some time later in prison. He didn’t re- a regional power of note, drawing pa- gret a thing. rallels with Israel as a country driven He was shot in the stadium in to fight by the need to survive. But which he had led many rallies de- the killing and dying in eastern Congo nouncing Tutsis, and from which he continues on a terrible scale, throwing made some of his radio broadcasts. His up difficult questions about one of the execution left me cold. As I thought most complex and interesting African back on the immense suffering cau- leaders of these times, Rwanda’s pre- sed by Karamira and his cohorts - the sident Paul Kagame - for some in the slow tortured deaths by machete, the west, the great new hope for Africa. pain of the Tutsi orphans who could The former Tutsi rebel leader who barely comprehend what had happe- ended the genocide has been heral- ned, the women murdered slowly af- ded as the Abraham Lincoln of Africa, ter they were gang-raped and infected a visionary dragging Rwanda away with HIV - my long-held view that the from ethnic politics and dependency death penalty was wrong, no matter on foreign aid. But Kagame has also what, fell away. Before Rwanda, I could been condemned as bloodthirsty ty- not have imagined saying this, but I rant, whose army has exploited wes- would not have saved Karamira even if tern guilt to suppress political oppo- it had been in my power. I looked at sition at home and allow his army to him and believed he deserved to die. murder and plunder its way through The genocide, though, proved to be Congo. just a beginning. Two million Hutus The Rwandan leader is intelligent, 8 articulate and hardened by a streak Where almost no one looks for mo- of ruthlessness. He has a better grasp ral example any more is South Africa. of reality than many of Africa’s power Mandela’s legacy was squandered over brokers. At home, Kagame has embar- the years, sometimes through the real- ked on the ambitious project to change politik of international relations but, the way a nation thinks about itself. more disturbingly, by the authorita- As one official put it to me, Rwandans rian tendencies of his successor, Thabo are like steel ; they were bent to think Mbeki. Mbeki took over the presidency one way about Hutus and Tutsis for in 1999, offering the vision of an Afri- 40 years and now they have to be bent can renaissance that would not only back. But if it’s done too hard or too change how Africa was governed, and fast, they will break. the relationship between the people Kagame also seems determined to and their rulers, but how the rest of shift his country away from its historic the world saw the continent. South dependence on foreign aid, with ima- Africa by then had the most progres- ginative schemes to turn it into the sive constitution in the world, even IT hub of central Africa. There has, though Mandela was initially none too quietly, been plenty of vengeance for happy about the entrenching of gay the genocide over the years - but the rights. state has also sought to rehabilitate A decade later, Mbeki’s failed lea- and reconcile as it grapples with the dership is principally remembered for reality that it does not have the re- sacrificing the lives of hundreds of sources to try and imprison all of the thousands of people while he fidd- guilty. And yet it sometimes seems that led around in league with a group the survivors are marginalised and loo- of maverick scientists who questioned ked down upon by this new English- the causes of Aids and the establi- speaking Tutsi elite, which grew up shed methods of keeping HIV-positive in exile in neighbouring Uganda and people alive. Mbeki’s blocking of the came back to take over a country. life-saving drugs to millions of people Across Rwanda’s border with was his greatest crime, but his sta- Congo, it is another matter. Kaga- ture was further eroded abroad by me’s army has as much blood on its his malign manipulation of Zimbab- hands as any of the myriad of armed we’s political crisis to help keep Mu- groups that have killed and plundered gabe in power. When he wasn’t squan- their way through that desperate, vast dering South Africa’s moral authority country. For years the Rwandans got over Zimbabwe, Mandela’s successor away with it, but the perpetual suf- was wasting it at the UN security coun- fering of the Congolese has begun to cil protecting Burma’s military regime. erode the moral authority bestowed on South Africans have other concerns Rwanda’s leadership by the genocide. too, principally Mbeki’s legacy of a Still, Kagame is viewed by many, in- self-enriching, authoritarian and some- cluding his friend Tony Blair, as the times corrupt ruling elite, and his un- hope for the future. He may be. Or he dermining of the institutions of South may just be another desperate attempt Africa’s new democracy to pursue his by the west to latch on to a leader with political enemies and protect friends promise. such as the country’s police chief, who 9 was consorting with, and probably ta- ment. king money from, the mafia and trying Zackie Achmat and his Treatment to cover up a murder. Action Campaign spoke up for those Through it all, there has been a doomed by Mbeki’s Aids policies : poor steady rise in corruption amid a sha- and working-class black people. Their meless pursuit of money by political vigorous agitation, on the streets, leaders who equate wealth with libe- through the unions and in the courts, ration. As Mbeki’s former spokesman, held Mbeki and the ANC up to the Smuts Ngonyama, famously put it, he light of public scrutiny and accounta- himself “didn’t join the struggle to stay bility in a way that had not happened poor”. before. Mbeki’s ludicrous pronounce- It’s an uphill task to persuade ments were ridiculed, his lies challen- South Africans that the ANC isn’t soft ged, his misrepresentation of statistics on corruption when the party is put- exposed. Achmat won the day in the ting so much energy into keeping its courts, and forced the government to leader and candidate in April’s pre- supply the life-saving drugs. But they sidential election, Jacob Zuma, from achieved more than that. They opened going on trial for bribery and racketee- the door to other legitimate criticisms ring. The ANC is shameless in its to- of the ANC government, particularly lerance of corrupt officials. When Tony on economic policy and the abuse of Yengeni, the party’s former parliamen- power ; criticisms that a few years ear- tary chief whip, was convicted of fraud lier might have been regarded as a be- as part of an arms deal, he was carried trayal of the liberation struggle. This to the prison gates on the shoulders in turn may have gone a long way to of ANC officials as if he were a hero. rescuing South African democracy, and Among those on hand to cheer him it’s a trend being seen in other parts of was Baleka Mbete, now South Afri- Africa, too. The “big men” failed. The ca’s deputy president. The authorities new breed was a letdown. saw to it that Yengeni served just three There is, however, plenty of rea- months of his three-year sentence, and son for continued caution. The African he is again serving in the highest eche- Union instinctively leapt to the defence lons of the party. of Sudan’s president after he was indic- The ANC’s answer to an array of ted as a war criminal, and it has just revelations of corruption in its ranks elected the repressive and murderous has been to abolish the independent in- Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, as vestigations unit that brought the pro- its chairman. secutions against Zuma, Yengeni and It says a lot about the state of the others. Yet in the midst of these sprea- continent’s leadership that the world’s ding abuses, courageous voices stand biggest cash prize, millions of dollars out again. A lot more lives would offered by a Sudanese-born British te- have been lost, and democracy corro- lecommunications entrepreneur, is gi- ded even further, if it hadn’t been for ven to African leaders for giving up a courageous collection of South Afri- office without plundering the national cans who struggled against apartheid, coffers. It is, essentially, a reward for but who were prepared to break a ta- following their constitutional duty. boo and criticise the liberation move- But perhaps now, bad leaders will 10 matter less than in the past. The There are a rising number of voices growth of civil society, a broader and willing to say no to what is wrong. more critical media, access to the wi- But I fear it will take another 20 der world through satellite television, years to realise the fruits of all that. the web and mobile phones, and even, in some cases, privatisation of the eco- • Chris McGreal starts work as nomy, are laying the ground for what the Guardian’s new Washington cor- has so often been lacking in the past. respondent next week. The Guardian’s A younger generation is more willing new Africa correspondent is to be Da- to challenge and demand that govern- vid Smith, at present a senior reporter ments do what they are elected to do. on the Observer.