April 7, 2004

Ten years ago this month, South Africa and Rwanda showed the world the best and the worst of late 20th century Africa. Voters lined up patiently to elect Nelson Mandela president of a country that just years earlier had seemed on the brink of apocalyptic warfare. The serene confidence with which ordinary South Africans cast their votes, and then the grace and generosity with which their new leader led a traumatized nation, inspired the world. Maybe it was possible to transcend the bitterness and animosity of African colonial history, to honor its ghosts, rather than be forever haunted by them.

But as if to scold optimists and dreamers, Rwanda delivered a very different message in the spring of 1994. Bitterness and animosity can lay in wait, biding time beneath an apparently peaceful exterior, and then burst bloodily into the open, infecting a mass population with a long-fermented spirit of evil. In just a few months, while South Africa celebrated, ordinary Rwandans killed 800,000 of their countrymen, mostly hand-to-hand with hatchets and machetes. They killed unarmed men, women and children, often their own neighbors, in their homes, alongside the streets where they lived, in schoolyards, hospitals, and even churches. The Roman Catholic church in Ntarama became a slaughterhouse for thousands, and later a memorial to those who died there.

South Africans and Rwandans have struggled to find the right ways to remember the events of 1994. Having sidestepped a darker destiny, South Africa laboriously revisited the horrors of apartheid through the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was an effort to purge the national soul, an alternative to denial, festering rage, and endless litigation. The TRC has had its critics and defenders, but few would deny that it represented a good faith effort to face painful history rather than walk away from it, and it probably helped the new government to move forward rather than be dragged backward into the past.

In addition to the TRC, the government of South Africa has consistently looked for opportunities to highlight and remember the key events of its tumultuous history. This month, ten years after Mandela's election, the nation will be inundated with memorabilia of every imaginable sort. At a time when South Africa is approaching national elections once again, and the government is under attack on various fronts, this orgy of nostalgia will look to some like an effort to distract voters from governmental failures and shortcomings. This is the sort of debate one might find in any democratic country, and in that sense, it underscores the enormity of what was achieved ten years ago in South Africa.

For Rwanda, the acute horror of a sudden and massive genocide--one with complex and mysterious origins--is far more difficult to memorialize. The PBS program Frontline recently aired an illuminating documentary about the genocide, Ghosts of Rwanda. In it, we see a village court attempting a chaotic, local version of the truth and reconciliation approach. The background to this proceeding is that international judicial powers have managed to convict a handful of the leading Hutu extremists who led the genocide. The next tier of the culpable is being slowly tried in Rwandan courts. But as so many ordinary citizens also have blood-stained hands, much more is needed. These local courts were tapped to help fill the gap. In the hearing Frontline aired, Tutsi survivors do not participate. They had left this particular village and had no desire to return. The result is Hutus accusing one another and denying accusations about things that happened a decade ago. For some of the villagers observing, the result is more comic than tragic, and the laughter evoked as one accused man quivers in the face of contradictory evidence, speaks volumes about the difficulty Rwanda faces in trying to incorporate the 1994 nightmare into any kind of coherent sense of history.

The Hutu extremists who orchestrated the slaughter were defeated in July, 1994, by Tutsi rebels, and today, Rwanda has a Tutsi-led government under President Paul Kagame. Many exiled Tutsis have now returned to the country, and having not experienced the killings, they--like the Hutu majority--often prefer to ignore or make light of it.

We on the outside are also unsure about how to memorialize the Rwandan genocide. International media is presently filled with reflections on Rwanda ten years later. There's almost a sense that the world wants to pay its dues to the genocide before moving onto the more uplifting task of remembering South Africa's first election. Afropop Worldwide is no exception here. Since 1994, we have no less than five hour-long programs using music to tell the ongoing story of South Africa's emergence from the apartheid era. [This week's program pulls together highlights from two of our past South Africa shows.] As I write, Sean Barlow is again in South Africa, preparing a new, 3-part series on the country's dramatic and ongoing evolution.

During those same 10 years, we have offered far less about Rwanda's struggle to remake itself. On the one hand, we are a cultural program, and South Africa has long been a cultural powerhouse, with one of the most diverse, innovative and dynamic music industries on the continent. Rwanda offers nothing remotely comparable in terms of music to help tell its story. We did run a story on Rwanda's Ballet Inganzo last year, but we have not found ways to tell Rwanda's story as part of our radio program. Afropop Worldwide has a mission to reveal African stories through music, incorporating beauty into a narrative that is often dominated by relentless negativism in the mainstream media. We see ourselves as offering a kind of emotional--rather than political--balance to news accounts about Africa. At the same time, we have no wish to whitewash African history, and we will look for musically compelling ways to incorporate Rwanda into our radio program, ideally at a time when the genocide is not splashed across newspapers around the world.

Perhaps the most meaningful gauge of the how well these events are remembered by the outside world comes in the realm of international politics. Regarding South Africa in particular, western democracies have a mixed record, both on their actions to end the apartheid regime, and on their efforts to help the new system prosper. But as far as drawing larger lessons, we must acknowledge that what happened in South Africa 10 years ago was unique. A combination of pressures led to a series of decisions by white South African leaders, and they effectively conceded defeat without the civil war that so many expected. Because there was no war, the opportunity to make a radical, and peaceful, transition became possible. Add to this the extraordinary leadership of Nelson Mandela, whose freedom from bitterness despite nearly 3 decades in prison alone makes him a candidate for sainthood, and you have a pretty much unrepeatable set of circumstances. Maybe one lesson is that there is value in applying pressure--sanctions, etc--to immoral, rogue regimes, and that even when it seems they are having no effect, they may in fact be paving the road to eventual change.

Sadly, the situation in Rwanda has many historical parallels, and ethnic cleansing--as we call it these days--occurs regularly around the world, sometimes very publicly, sometimes not. President Clinton visited Rwanda in 1998 and expressed regret that he had not done more to stem the violence four years earlier. He suggested that U.S. leadership might have saved half of the lives that were ultimately lost. (Frontline's film makes it abundantly clear why Clinton has regrets; America badly squandered its supposed moral leadership during the Rwanda crisis.) And yet, even as all this remembering of Rwanda goes on, another ethnically motivated mass killing, this time in Sudan, is getting underway. President Bush has paid admirable and overdue attention to Sudan's longstanding Muslim-Christian conflict, but this time, government-backed, Arab Muslims are not killing Christians, but rather African Muslims, by some estimates as many as 30,000 so far. At a time when US forces are pinched between rival Muslim factions in Iraq, it would require extraordinary focus and leadership for the Bush administration to make a useful contribution to the worsening situation in Sudan, and it remains to be seen what they will do.

Within the horror of the slaughter in Rwanda, there are inspiring stories of courage and bravery, such as that of Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, head of the U.N. peacekeeping force, who went to amazing lengths to save people even though he received little or no support from his organization, or of Captain U.S. Diagne of Senegal, who used courage and personal charm to save hundreds of Tutsi lives, and eventually died in that effort.

Within the exultant story of South Africa, there are many disturbing aspects--the myriad brutalities inflicted during apartheid, mostly by white oppressors but also by black partisans. Today, perhaps the greatest threat to South Africa's success may be the AIDS pandemic. Mandela regrets not taking it more seriously. His successor, Thabo Mbeki, has been criticized for neglecting and distorting the problem today. If South Africa had a more viable political opposition, would this issue have emerged earlier? And if the country now becomes effectively a one-party state, forever trapped in nostalgia for 1994 and unable to legitimize other political voices, what future problems will fail to get the attention they deserve? As we remember these two very different African stories, it is important to ask such questions, even as we reel from the powerful emotions these memories inevitably awaken.
Contributed by: Banning Eyre