Out of Africa

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.

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