For the last decade or so, I’ve been puzzled about how the global academy has proved impotent in helping societies clarify social problems. In Kenya, for example, academics whine about the “loss” of African cultures at the hands of “the white man,” and yet they fail to articulate the imperial and material roots of many of our problems. With all the condemnation they express for “the white man”, and sermons they preach on “decolonizing the mind,” you would think that Kenyan academics would be bothered by the “capacity training” to which we are subjected and in which we are treated like idiots as we are trained on foreign agendas. But I rudely discovered that we see no contradiction, because the few times I’ve raised this issue, I’ve been politely scolded for not appreciating the work of others.
At some point, my questioning led me to the colonial era. I traced our intellectual cowardice to the moralism of Carey Francis who, unfortunately, set the tone for schooling in Kenya. But also, my investigation took me to the Democratic Party in the US, and particularly to Thomas Frank’s book Listen Liberal! which is a fascinating account of how highly educated leaders of the Democratic Party became out of touch with working class America. Frank wrote his book before Trump’s first presidency, but there was an upsurge in interest in his book following the disastrous defeat of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Interestingly enough, the American Left still refuses to look squarely at the major role that American elitist education plays in demobilizing the mind, yet the problem has been flagged by William Deresiewicz in his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, or better still, by Carter G Woodson in The Miseducation of the Negro and Marimba Ani in Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior.
There is a major spiritual and psychological problem with what the Euro-American empire has exported abroad as “education.” It renders people spiritually and intellectually impotent, obsessed with morality, and notoriously scared of contradictions in which there are no obvious heroes to praise, victims to plead on behalf of, and villains to condemn. Western education trains people to equate moral condemnation with astute political critique. And since that education is notoriously racist, when it comes to Africa, there is little effort to carry out historically nuanced analysis. Instead, the liberal media and American Left settle for a Hollywood-type simplistic narrative of heroes, victims and villains, and then they condemn those who question the narrative as supporters of massacres and genocide.
That, unfortunately, has been the case of the crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
This article is not directly about the crisis, but about the moral suffocation in the discussion of the crisis. The American Left and pan-African media have framed the discussion in a way that acts as liberal intellectual blackmail. According to their framework, you either condemn Rwandan president Paul Kagame or you are supporting his invasion of Congo and the atrocities happening in eastern DRC. Pointing to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi as a major factor in the crisis is called giving excuses and disregarding the violence. In fact, that IS the point of violence, especially in the Western conception of politics. Violence is, ironically, weaponized to guilt-trip people who have a different political perspective, on the grounds that they are “wasting time” on theories that won’t save the people who are being brutally slaughtered. The real agenda of pointing to violence is not empathize with the victims, or to search for a political end to the violence, but to block the work of thinking, historicization and nuance. As David Graeber said, "violence is the only way to influence people without really understanding them."
There is a major spiritual and psychological problem with what the Euro-American empire has exported abroad as “education.” It renders people spiritually and intellectually impotent, obsessed with morality, and notoriously scared of contradictions in which there are no obvious heroes to praise, victims to plead on behalf of, and villains to condemn. Western education trains people to equate moral condemnation with astute political critique. And since that education is notoriously racist, when it comes to Africa, there is little effort to carry out historically nuanced analysis. Instead, the liberal media and American Left settle for a Hollywood-type simplistic narrative of heroes, victims and villains, and then they condemn those who question the narrative as supporters of massacres and genocide.
That, unfortunately, has been the case of the crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
This article is not directly about the crisis, but about the moral suffocation in the discussion of the crisis. The American Left and pan-African media have framed the discussion in a way that acts as liberal intellectual blackmail. According to their framework, you either condemn Rwandan president Paul Kagame or you are supporting his invasion of Congo and the atrocities happening in eastern DRC. Pointing to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi as a major factor in the crisis is called giving excuses and disregarding the violence. In fact, that IS the point of violence, especially in the Western conception of politics. Violence is, ironically, weaponized to guilt-trip people who have a different political perspective, on the grounds that they are “wasting time” on theories that won’t save the people who are being brutally slaughtered. The real agenda of pointing to violence is not empathize with the victims, or to search for a political end to the violence, but to block the work of thinking, historicization and nuance. As David Graeber said, "violence is the only way to influence people without really understanding them."
Oversimplification
According to this narrative of the takeover of eastern Congo by the M23 rebels, the problem is only one: Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his logistical and military support for the rebels. For the sake of argument, let’s accept this assessment. An inconvenient question arises: how is it that Rwanda, over 80 times smaller than DRC, is able to inflict such havoc? That’s easy to answer, we’re told. It’s the imperialists. They feel guilty for the role they played in the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, so they are supporting Kagame to do whatever he wants in Congo. It’s the equivalent of US support for Israel. For instance, the folks at Break Through News believe that Kagame is the Netanyahu of Africa.
The comparison to Israel is disturbing. It comforts the idea that Africa cannot be understood except through analogies of Western history. No effort is made to draw a direct blow by blow comparison of what is happening in Goma with what is happening in Gaza. The Break Through News discussion glosses over it by saying that just like the Palestinians are fighting against Israel and America, Congolese are fighting against Rwanda and its imperialist backers.
But that explanation is not enough. With the Palestinian liberation struggle, thousands of hours have been put into explaining the colonial roots of the Zionist project, the colonial settler ideology and the link to the Holocaust. A trajectory of 105 years. When it comes to DRC, this meticulous attention is conspicuously lacking.
And then, the question also arises: why is the wrath against imperialism directed at Kagame and barely any at Washington and Brussels? But as we know in the case of the genocide in Gaza, American citizens have been meticulous in detailing the support of the US for Israel. They have combed through the ideology of Zionism and have made it clear that criticizing Zionism doesn’t make one anti-Semitic. They have made American politicians pay the cost of supporting Israel, including refusing to vote for Kamala Harris, even when not supporting her attracted accusations of sexism and racism. American citizens have told the world about the funding that makes their politicians too impotent to criticize Israel. They have articulated the ideological, financial and political dynamics of the settler colonialism from 1919 when the Zionist project was first declared.
Is similar political and intellectual work being done for articulating the DRC crisis? Oh no. If we bring up the 1994 genocide as a factor in the crisis, we’re told that that is going too far back, because that was 30 years ago. One person even told me that the issue of the FDLR, the rebel group based in DRC with genocidaires among its ranks, does not count because those who committed the genocide are too old to fight. That is already an admission that the genocidaires are in Congo, it’s just that they’re too old. And the premise of that rebuttal is that the ideas that propelled the genocide cannot still be alive 30 years later in a new generation of Africans, because no, Africans do not think. We act on instinct. Even the genocide in 1994 was an instinctive reaction.
Actually, this argument has been fought against, since some African intellectuals committed themselves to combat genocide denial. One of the most insidious threads of the denial is the commitment to proving that Africans were not capable of employing the logics of the state to organize a genocide. According to this logic, the genocide against the Tutsis in 1994 was not a meticulously planned program with its own ideology, organization, political network and social context. It’s Africa, after all. Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness," to be precise. In places like those, as French president François Mitterand famously said as the slaughter waged on, genocide is not a big deal. Nothing is political in Africa. We do not think, we do not plan, we are incapable of institutional life. Every evil afflicting Africans comes from who we are, and is not organized by any institution, idea or socio-political context.
This kind of denial is so insidious, because it leads to the absurd situation where we Africans have to fight for the right to consider ourselves human enough to meticulously organize evil.
But let’s work with the argument that M23 are not rebels, but the Rwanda Defense Forces, as has been argued on Break Through News. The problem is, if the people fighting in the Congo are the Rwandan army, then we should not be talking of “rebels,” but of a foreign incursion into a sovereign territory. But again, that would lead us back to the question of how a country so small would annex territory of another over 80 times its size.
Ideally, that question should lead us to the Congolese elite, who seem to be lacking in political imagination. At the time of the Break Through News interview, president Tshisekedi was at Davos, and Patrick Muyaya, the Minister of Communications, was in Paris, and Vital Kamerhe, the president of the DRC National Assembly, was in Vietnam. As I write, Tshisekedi has been avoiding forums with African leaders, preferring to attend others in Europe. Those are the people whom the Congolese citizens are holding to account as they demonstrate in Kinshasa, and whom the rest of the continent should call to account for what is happening in Congo.
But, unfortunately, we never get to hear a Congo-focused perspective of the crisis. All we get are the speeches and photo-itinerary of the travels of Tshisekedi and his foreign minister, Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, who was appointed in May 2024. Wagner, of Congolese and German parentage, is good for the optics. She worked in Rwanda, and later in Goma. She speaks English, so she can speak directly to the Anglo-American imperial media without suffering the interruption of translation. And having worked in an international aid agency, GIZ, the German equivalent of USAID, to be precise, she can move fairly seamlessly between Western political spaces. But in the Western liberal views on the crisis, the Congolese government is exempt from accusations of being imperial lackeys. That accusation is reserved for Kagame, and occasionally for president William Ruto after announcing that the first person he called on the crisis was French president Emmanuel Macron.
Not only are we told that we cannot go back to even 30 years, the West is kind enough to give us a simple explanation to all this. It’s the minerals. Everybody wants Congo’s minerals. Kagame is sabotaging the DRC government’s efforts to settle on mining deals that would benefit the Congolese economy, and that’s why he’s supporting the M23 rebels. Or shall we say, that is why he is invading DRC.
The comparison to Israel is disturbing. It comforts the idea that Africa cannot be understood except through analogies of Western history. No effort is made to draw a direct blow by blow comparison of what is happening in Goma with what is happening in Gaza. The Break Through News discussion glosses over it by saying that just like the Palestinians are fighting against Israel and America, Congolese are fighting against Rwanda and its imperialist backers.
But that explanation is not enough. With the Palestinian liberation struggle, thousands of hours have been put into explaining the colonial roots of the Zionist project, the colonial settler ideology and the link to the Holocaust. A trajectory of 105 years. When it comes to DRC, this meticulous attention is conspicuously lacking.
And then, the question also arises: why is the wrath against imperialism directed at Kagame and barely any at Washington and Brussels? But as we know in the case of the genocide in Gaza, American citizens have been meticulous in detailing the support of the US for Israel. They have combed through the ideology of Zionism and have made it clear that criticizing Zionism doesn’t make one anti-Semitic. They have made American politicians pay the cost of supporting Israel, including refusing to vote for Kamala Harris, even when not supporting her attracted accusations of sexism and racism. American citizens have told the world about the funding that makes their politicians too impotent to criticize Israel. They have articulated the ideological, financial and political dynamics of the settler colonialism from 1919 when the Zionist project was first declared.
Is similar political and intellectual work being done for articulating the DRC crisis? Oh no. If we bring up the 1994 genocide as a factor in the crisis, we’re told that that is going too far back, because that was 30 years ago. One person even told me that the issue of the FDLR, the rebel group based in DRC with genocidaires among its ranks, does not count because those who committed the genocide are too old to fight. That is already an admission that the genocidaires are in Congo, it’s just that they’re too old. And the premise of that rebuttal is that the ideas that propelled the genocide cannot still be alive 30 years later in a new generation of Africans, because no, Africans do not think. We act on instinct. Even the genocide in 1994 was an instinctive reaction.
Actually, this argument has been fought against, since some African intellectuals committed themselves to combat genocide denial. One of the most insidious threads of the denial is the commitment to proving that Africans were not capable of employing the logics of the state to organize a genocide. According to this logic, the genocide against the Tutsis in 1994 was not a meticulously planned program with its own ideology, organization, political network and social context. It’s Africa, after all. Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness," to be precise. In places like those, as French president François Mitterand famously said as the slaughter waged on, genocide is not a big deal. Nothing is political in Africa. We do not think, we do not plan, we are incapable of institutional life. Every evil afflicting Africans comes from who we are, and is not organized by any institution, idea or socio-political context.
This kind of denial is so insidious, because it leads to the absurd situation where we Africans have to fight for the right to consider ourselves human enough to meticulously organize evil.
But let’s work with the argument that M23 are not rebels, but the Rwanda Defense Forces, as has been argued on Break Through News. The problem is, if the people fighting in the Congo are the Rwandan army, then we should not be talking of “rebels,” but of a foreign incursion into a sovereign territory. But again, that would lead us back to the question of how a country so small would annex territory of another over 80 times its size.
Ideally, that question should lead us to the Congolese elite, who seem to be lacking in political imagination. At the time of the Break Through News interview, president Tshisekedi was at Davos, and Patrick Muyaya, the Minister of Communications, was in Paris, and Vital Kamerhe, the president of the DRC National Assembly, was in Vietnam. As I write, Tshisekedi has been avoiding forums with African leaders, preferring to attend others in Europe. Those are the people whom the Congolese citizens are holding to account as they demonstrate in Kinshasa, and whom the rest of the continent should call to account for what is happening in Congo.
But, unfortunately, we never get to hear a Congo-focused perspective of the crisis. All we get are the speeches and photo-itinerary of the travels of Tshisekedi and his foreign minister, Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, who was appointed in May 2024. Wagner, of Congolese and German parentage, is good for the optics. She worked in Rwanda, and later in Goma. She speaks English, so she can speak directly to the Anglo-American imperial media without suffering the interruption of translation. And having worked in an international aid agency, GIZ, the German equivalent of USAID, to be precise, she can move fairly seamlessly between Western political spaces. But in the Western liberal views on the crisis, the Congolese government is exempt from accusations of being imperial lackeys. That accusation is reserved for Kagame, and occasionally for president William Ruto after announcing that the first person he called on the crisis was French president Emmanuel Macron.
Not only are we told that we cannot go back to even 30 years, the West is kind enough to give us a simple explanation to all this. It’s the minerals. Everybody wants Congo’s minerals. Kagame is sabotaging the DRC government’s efforts to settle on mining deals that would benefit the Congolese economy, and that’s why he’s supporting the M23 rebels. Or shall we say, that is why he is invading DRC.
The Wakanda Complex
A number of us Africans, like Nigerian journalist David Hundeyin and myself, no longer accept the mineral argument. In his brilliant TED Talk, Hundeyin criticizes the Wakanda Complex, which he defines as the “state of political and economic consciousness in Africa that places an exclusive and destructive focus on the alleged abundance of mineral wealth under Africa’s soil.” The Wakanda Complex sees minerals as giving value to Africans, rather than the other way round. Drawing on the film Black Panther, Hundeyin takes a swipe at the ridiculous idea that everything in the fictional kingdom of Wakanda, from food to healthcare, depends on the single mineral of vibranium. The film implies that there is no need to think of politics, culture, social services, hell, of the people, because all of that can be summarized by the one mineral under the ground.
The minerals in Africa, Hundeyin rightly argues, are barely unique to Africa. Similar minerals can be found around the world, sometimes in larger quantities. But it is only when it comes to Africa that the people who live in the location of the minerals are rendered invisible. No effort is put into understanding politics or history of those people. Focus on the minerals, we are told.
This narrative is not only racist, but has an explicit financial purpose: to make mineral mining in Africa extremely cheap. If the Kenyan experience is anything to go by, the places where mineral deposits are located are deliberately kept poor and in conflict, because then, the multi-national companies or local comprador elite do not have to deal with an informed population that demands fair wages, social services, respect for environmental protocols and a share of the revenue. What the West likes about mining in Africa is not the so-called quality or abundance of the minerals. It’s the fact that mining is cheaper than anywhere else in the world, thanks to the poverty of the people, which is maintained by the corruption of the African elites serving imperialism.
And this racist deal comes with bonga points, in the name of a racist narrative that Africa is the space beyond humanity. When things get really bad, a few pictures of miserable children and the sweet voice of a Hollywood star are enough to give the US the moral capital to raid the country in the name of a humanitarian response, and to get even more minerals while at it.
And that has been the story of DRC for over five centuries now. The Congo was raided by slave traders in the 16th century, looted by the Portuguese in the 17th century, turned into King Leopold’s personal property in the 19th century, and tortured in 20th century for American war interests. This history is not just for information. It’s an explanation not only as to why Congo is poor, but also why it must remain poor. The Congolese people must never have education, institutions, or even a viable economy that is not necessarily linked to the minerals. Congo is just like Wakanda, but a worse version. Africans must not be educated, because that would make it difficult for companies to waltz in for minerals, waltz out after wreaking havoc on African lives, and not have to account for their actions at all. Imagine if those minerals benefited the African people. The whole continent would blossom, and the West knows that. So central Africa must be kept mired in poverty and war, by fetishizing one leader, fueling identity wars, and everybody, especially Africans who do not know the history of the region very well, will accept whatever explanation they get.
That distraction and exploitation of ignorance is linked to the fact that Belgium deliberately undereducated Africans in its former colonies, which is, ironically, the common ground of both DRC and Rwanda. The Belgian colonial policy on education was, simply put, “no elites, no problems.” The ruthlessness with which the Belgians barred education from expanding in Congo is, cruel to say the least, as is reflected in Barbara Yate’s observations in 1981:
The minerals in Africa, Hundeyin rightly argues, are barely unique to Africa. Similar minerals can be found around the world, sometimes in larger quantities. But it is only when it comes to Africa that the people who live in the location of the minerals are rendered invisible. No effort is put into understanding politics or history of those people. Focus on the minerals, we are told.
This narrative is not only racist, but has an explicit financial purpose: to make mineral mining in Africa extremely cheap. If the Kenyan experience is anything to go by, the places where mineral deposits are located are deliberately kept poor and in conflict, because then, the multi-national companies or local comprador elite do not have to deal with an informed population that demands fair wages, social services, respect for environmental protocols and a share of the revenue. What the West likes about mining in Africa is not the so-called quality or abundance of the minerals. It’s the fact that mining is cheaper than anywhere else in the world, thanks to the poverty of the people, which is maintained by the corruption of the African elites serving imperialism.
And this racist deal comes with bonga points, in the name of a racist narrative that Africa is the space beyond humanity. When things get really bad, a few pictures of miserable children and the sweet voice of a Hollywood star are enough to give the US the moral capital to raid the country in the name of a humanitarian response, and to get even more minerals while at it.
And that has been the story of DRC for over five centuries now. The Congo was raided by slave traders in the 16th century, looted by the Portuguese in the 17th century, turned into King Leopold’s personal property in the 19th century, and tortured in 20th century for American war interests. This history is not just for information. It’s an explanation not only as to why Congo is poor, but also why it must remain poor. The Congolese people must never have education, institutions, or even a viable economy that is not necessarily linked to the minerals. Congo is just like Wakanda, but a worse version. Africans must not be educated, because that would make it difficult for companies to waltz in for minerals, waltz out after wreaking havoc on African lives, and not have to account for their actions at all. Imagine if those minerals benefited the African people. The whole continent would blossom, and the West knows that. So central Africa must be kept mired in poverty and war, by fetishizing one leader, fueling identity wars, and everybody, especially Africans who do not know the history of the region very well, will accept whatever explanation they get.
That distraction and exploitation of ignorance is linked to the fact that Belgium deliberately undereducated Africans in its former colonies, which is, ironically, the common ground of both DRC and Rwanda. The Belgian colonial policy on education was, simply put, “no elites, no problems.” The ruthlessness with which the Belgians barred education from expanding in Congo is, cruel to say the least, as is reflected in Barbara Yate’s observations in 1981:
At independence in 1960 Zaire had no black army officers, only several score senior level black administrators in the civil service, and no more than several dozen Zairian college graduates, the first having obtained his degree in 1956. While there were no Congolese physicians, engineers or agronomists, there were 600 Congolese Catholic priests and approximately 500 ordained Protestant pastors.
The most important resource for any country, as Hundeyin says, is her people, and it is the one resource that Belgian colonialism viciously suppressed. At independence, the region therefore started on such a weak foot that few of us Africans appreciate. When so few people are allowed to look beyond their immediate needs and their borders, and when outsiders are always trooping in and out, it is inevitable that identity becomes the dominant rubric with which the people read politics. And of course we know that this problem is built into Western capitalism. And now, we know from the USAID leaks, that the US government pours money into fanning those flames.
The point here isn’t that Congo is suffering because it did not have a developed western schooling system at independence. As I noted at the opening of this essay, western schooling is problematic and stands as an obstacle to producing a politically conscious and productive population. Neither is my point that other colonial powers were better at providing education than Belgium was. In Kenya, at least, the number of Africans who had gone to school by independence was largely the result of efforts of Africans themselves, a point which Walter Rodney makes. Left up to the colonial government, fewer Kenyans would have gone to school by independence, especially given the powerful lobby of settlers who were scared that education would “spoil” Africans and turn them against accepting their place at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
The point of raising the education problem is this: under the racist, colonial logic, Africans must always be confined to their skin color and labor. They must never be seen as capable of thought, of work, of politics or of history. That is why they are denied education. This Belgian policy against education for Africans was explained by a representative in his report to the United Nations on the Trusteeship of Ruanda-Urundi in 1946:
The point here isn’t that Congo is suffering because it did not have a developed western schooling system at independence. As I noted at the opening of this essay, western schooling is problematic and stands as an obstacle to producing a politically conscious and productive population. Neither is my point that other colonial powers were better at providing education than Belgium was. In Kenya, at least, the number of Africans who had gone to school by independence was largely the result of efforts of Africans themselves, a point which Walter Rodney makes. Left up to the colonial government, fewer Kenyans would have gone to school by independence, especially given the powerful lobby of settlers who were scared that education would “spoil” Africans and turn them against accepting their place at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
The point of raising the education problem is this: under the racist, colonial logic, Africans must always be confined to their skin color and labor. They must never be seen as capable of thought, of work, of politics or of history. That is why they are denied education. This Belgian policy against education for Africans was explained by a representative in his report to the United Nations on the Trusteeship of Ruanda-Urundi in 1946:
“The real work is to change the African in his essence, to transform his soul, [and] to do that one must love him and enjoy having daily contact with him. He must be cured of his thoughtlessness, he must accustom himself to living in society, he must overcome his inertia.”
Africans did not need education because they were thoughtless. This ideology laid the ground for leaving Congo with a weak elite who could not put their foot down on the sovereignty of their country. The one man who did, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered by Belgium and the CIA in the most barbaric fashion that makes one wonder at the temerity of Euro-America to call Africans savages. Lumumba had the audacity to imagine that Congo’s people, not resources, should be the primary concern of the Congolese. The lynching of Lumumba was followed by the puppet regimes of Kasavubu and later Mobutu, whom the West drowned in money while the scanty infrastructure and institutions all but collapsed, and as eastern Congo was literally cut off from national development.
All that history is being shaved off the liberal narrative of the DRC crisis. Unfortunately, most English-language speaking African intellectuals are hewn from same the Western liberal block, and so we are most likely to voice the same explanations. The Western school system has trained us to unsee ourselves, as I have reiterated in several of my interviews. In Kenya, it is difficult to get people to focus away from the minerals and more on the people living in the areas where the minerals are found, who are deliberately impoverished. Poor Kenyans dig rocks out of the ground with crude instruments, cannot get decent wages, while local politicians exploit their plight to negotiate with foreign investors and the central government.
All that history is being shaved off the liberal narrative of the DRC crisis. Unfortunately, most English-language speaking African intellectuals are hewn from same the Western liberal block, and so we are most likely to voice the same explanations. The Western school system has trained us to unsee ourselves, as I have reiterated in several of my interviews. In Kenya, it is difficult to get people to focus away from the minerals and more on the people living in the areas where the minerals are found, who are deliberately impoverished. Poor Kenyans dig rocks out of the ground with crude instruments, cannot get decent wages, while local politicians exploit their plight to negotiate with foreign investors and the central government.
The Brutal dictator
In case the mineral explanation for DRC does not suffice, there’s another response: a dictator. After all, African problems can be explained by demonizing one leader and everything else is supposed to explain itself. And Kagame fits the role. But funnily enough, this fetishization of Kagame is not a recent narrative. The Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop placed a huge part of the responsibility of the persistence of the narrative on African intellectuals. In 2016, he wrote:
The times we live in are certainly bizarre: these days, it suffices for someone, no matter who, to attribute the worst monstrosities to an African political leader of his choice, and immediately a motley crew of leader writers and other “thinkers,” from Dakar to Maputo, start screaming “down with the brutal dictator.” Why this unwillingness to evaluate, on a case-by-case basis, the available political facts, before turning it all into personal dogma? Such a lack of desire for proof in the case of a subject as serious as the Genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda, has a lot to do with the concept of self-hatred…fairy tales were pre-validated by the bad reputation of African politicians who are seen as cruel, irrelevant, and trivial by definition. That is why no more was required than a few little touches to turn the chief of the Rwandan Patriotic Front into the picture of the typical African tyrant and that was that: you cannot fight against an image with words.
The typical response of Western liberal narrative is that such an argument “justifies” Kagame, or worse, supports dictatorship in Rwanda, or worst, supports the massacre of the Congolese. This accusation cannot be avoided because it is typical of liberal moralism.
My only rebuttal is that we’ve been here before. Africa is often denied the discursive space to complicate issues. Only simplistic explanations are accepted. When Sekou Toure defied France and led Guinea to vote for complete independence, the French punished him by destroying the little infrastructure they had built, and constantly undermined his regime afterwards. Eventually, Sekou Toure became paranoid and began to persecute his perceived enemies. But pointing to the role of the West in this decline would attract the accusation of supporting dictatorship.
Same thing currently happens with the Alliance of Sahel states, and especially Burkina Faso. Popular African support for Ibrahim Traore has attracted the ire of the East African liberal commentariat who have scolded Africans for endorsing “military dictatorship.” No amount of history on the destabilization of the region through the US bombing of Libya, or the exploitation of the region by France, moves the needle on the moral outrage. But such is the nature of simplistic, liberal morality. There are only two sides to every issue, a villain and a victim, and to try to render the issue more complex attracts accusations of supporting the villain and being heartless towards the victim. And now with the revelations of David Hundeyin about the role of USAID in disrupting social media conversations in Africa, it is difficult to brush away suspicion that the accusations of supporting dictatorship are a concerted effort to engineer consent.
And what is with the obsession with Kagame? It is difficult to fathom, but the most plausible explanation is the fact that it was under his leadership that the genocide against the Tutsi was ended. It was Africans who ended the genocide. That truth has proved very difficult for the West and African liberal intellectuals to accept, presumably because it doesn’t fit the African hopelessness narrative. Africans are supposed to be rescued by Western intervention, yet the truth is, the West ran away from Rwanda when the genocide began in 1994. The UN withdrew its peacekeeping force, and Bill Clinton refused to jam the radio airwaves to block the RTLM from giving instructions to the killers. The best the West could do was provide tractors to dig out the bodies that were washed into Uganda through the Kagera river.
In typical parasitic fashion, the West finally found its voice only when the work of ending the genocide was already done. The West was belligerent in raising concern about the refugees fleeing to Goma, but often avoided the conversation about what the refugees were fleeing, and the crimes committed by some who were among them. It was easier to come up with a double-genocide narrative, in line with Mitterand’s ideology that genocide in Africa is not a big deal. Even Victoire Ingabire, the West’s favorite voice of democracy in Rwanda, began her political career espousing that narrative, and only later replaced it with the simpler one that Kagame has outlived his tenure and needs to step down.
Granted, Kagame handing over power is a fair argument. The same for Museveni in Uganda. So is the focus on human rights record of their governments. I am not qualified to confirm or deny truth in the stories about Kagame's ruthless dealings with his opponents or critics, or of his corruption. But the truth is, he’s not a devil operating in a sea of innocence. He arises from specific historical circumstances that affect many people, some of whom have a legitimate reason to be afraid of a regime without him in power. If such people feel under siege, when the criminals who committed genocide are still across the border, actively pushing genocide denial in a world that couldn’t care less, to a new generation which is espousing their ideas, it is normal for such citizens to wonder if Western liberal democracy is a bargain for the risk of the horror they experienced resurfacing.
If our dear pan-Africans really want Kagame to step down, they should assure Rwandans of support and safety. Outside of the Kagame critics who are educated enough to access international media spaces, many Rwandans are deeply suspicious of the west. Unfortunately, Rwandans know from 1994 that everybody – Africans included, walked away when they most needed international help. The person who withdrew UN peacekeeping troops was an African, Kofi Anan, and when refugees fleeing the genocide came to Kenya, the Kenya government sent them back. Kenya also voted against UN intervention in the name of our cowardly, fence-sitting foreign policy of non-interference.
The simplistic formula of regime change without democratization or regional solidarity is one which is imposed everywhere by American hegemony. Even Kenya grapples with it, despite its progressive constitution and its successive presidents. US diplomats in Kenya have been key in initiatives to whittle down the constitution, sometimes making proposals about reducing counties, or supporting the Building Bridges Initiative that sought to mutilate the constitution. They have even voiced underhand support of tribalism through patronizing attribution of electoral malpractice to “age-old rivalries.”
And there is a material interest of the African intellectual elite in promoting liberal democracy. The agenda is readily accessible, and gets one access to international publications and meetings. It means grants and international platforms. Better still, it saves one the trouble of being accused of supporting genocide and dictatorship.
My only rebuttal is that we’ve been here before. Africa is often denied the discursive space to complicate issues. Only simplistic explanations are accepted. When Sekou Toure defied France and led Guinea to vote for complete independence, the French punished him by destroying the little infrastructure they had built, and constantly undermined his regime afterwards. Eventually, Sekou Toure became paranoid and began to persecute his perceived enemies. But pointing to the role of the West in this decline would attract the accusation of supporting dictatorship.
Same thing currently happens with the Alliance of Sahel states, and especially Burkina Faso. Popular African support for Ibrahim Traore has attracted the ire of the East African liberal commentariat who have scolded Africans for endorsing “military dictatorship.” No amount of history on the destabilization of the region through the US bombing of Libya, or the exploitation of the region by France, moves the needle on the moral outrage. But such is the nature of simplistic, liberal morality. There are only two sides to every issue, a villain and a victim, and to try to render the issue more complex attracts accusations of supporting the villain and being heartless towards the victim. And now with the revelations of David Hundeyin about the role of USAID in disrupting social media conversations in Africa, it is difficult to brush away suspicion that the accusations of supporting dictatorship are a concerted effort to engineer consent.
And what is with the obsession with Kagame? It is difficult to fathom, but the most plausible explanation is the fact that it was under his leadership that the genocide against the Tutsi was ended. It was Africans who ended the genocide. That truth has proved very difficult for the West and African liberal intellectuals to accept, presumably because it doesn’t fit the African hopelessness narrative. Africans are supposed to be rescued by Western intervention, yet the truth is, the West ran away from Rwanda when the genocide began in 1994. The UN withdrew its peacekeeping force, and Bill Clinton refused to jam the radio airwaves to block the RTLM from giving instructions to the killers. The best the West could do was provide tractors to dig out the bodies that were washed into Uganda through the Kagera river.
In typical parasitic fashion, the West finally found its voice only when the work of ending the genocide was already done. The West was belligerent in raising concern about the refugees fleeing to Goma, but often avoided the conversation about what the refugees were fleeing, and the crimes committed by some who were among them. It was easier to come up with a double-genocide narrative, in line with Mitterand’s ideology that genocide in Africa is not a big deal. Even Victoire Ingabire, the West’s favorite voice of democracy in Rwanda, began her political career espousing that narrative, and only later replaced it with the simpler one that Kagame has outlived his tenure and needs to step down.
Granted, Kagame handing over power is a fair argument. The same for Museveni in Uganda. So is the focus on human rights record of their governments. I am not qualified to confirm or deny truth in the stories about Kagame's ruthless dealings with his opponents or critics, or of his corruption. But the truth is, he’s not a devil operating in a sea of innocence. He arises from specific historical circumstances that affect many people, some of whom have a legitimate reason to be afraid of a regime without him in power. If such people feel under siege, when the criminals who committed genocide are still across the border, actively pushing genocide denial in a world that couldn’t care less, to a new generation which is espousing their ideas, it is normal for such citizens to wonder if Western liberal democracy is a bargain for the risk of the horror they experienced resurfacing.
If our dear pan-Africans really want Kagame to step down, they should assure Rwandans of support and safety. Outside of the Kagame critics who are educated enough to access international media spaces, many Rwandans are deeply suspicious of the west. Unfortunately, Rwandans know from 1994 that everybody – Africans included, walked away when they most needed international help. The person who withdrew UN peacekeeping troops was an African, Kofi Anan, and when refugees fleeing the genocide came to Kenya, the Kenya government sent them back. Kenya also voted against UN intervention in the name of our cowardly, fence-sitting foreign policy of non-interference.
The simplistic formula of regime change without democratization or regional solidarity is one which is imposed everywhere by American hegemony. Even Kenya grapples with it, despite its progressive constitution and its successive presidents. US diplomats in Kenya have been key in initiatives to whittle down the constitution, sometimes making proposals about reducing counties, or supporting the Building Bridges Initiative that sought to mutilate the constitution. They have even voiced underhand support of tribalism through patronizing attribution of electoral malpractice to “age-old rivalries.”
And there is a material interest of the African intellectual elite in promoting liberal democracy. The agenda is readily accessible, and gets one access to international publications and meetings. It means grants and international platforms. Better still, it saves one the trouble of being accused of supporting genocide and dictatorship.
The monster of racism
Ultimately, there is no way to get the bottom to understanding the DRC crisis within the Western liberal intellectual framework of hapless victims and obvious villains. Most of all, we as Africans cannot arrive at a lucid analysis without confronting the demon of racism, and especially so, in the treatment of central Africa for the last five centuries. Congo is, unfortunately, the center of racist imagination, where everybody, including African comprador elites, satisfies their thirst for looting at a large scale that they would not get away with in their home countries. Even Kenyan politicians are behaving like the colonial settlers they ape, because some are farming in Congo as they undermine Kenyan agriculture on behalf of foreign interests. But we Africans are blinded to that implication by intellectually weak narratives about the challenges we face.
What is particularly sad, however, is the role that African intellectuals play in propping the narratives. As we learn from Jemima Pierre’s study of Ghana, the one word that African studies avoid mentioning is racism. Since independence, we African intellectuals raised on that intellectual tradition restrict European racism to the anthropological documents of colonial times, or to images of Africans in contemporary Western media. But when it comes to bureaucratic forms of control, like foreign policy, the United Nations, and loans from World Bank and IMF, the word “racism” is conspicuously missing. In Kenya when we protest the debt imposed on us, we go through the statutes, write to world bodies, and rarely address the racist elephant in the room.
I also do not think it is a coincidence that this narrative sanitizing the role of the Western racism in the crisis is being ramped up at this time. Since the genocide in Gaza started, strange narratives on the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 have been showing up on social media. It appears that there is a concerted effort of some intellectuals from the Great Lakes region to take advantage of the interstices of Israel's assault on Gaza, to promote genocide denial when it comes to Rwanda. The hope, it seems, is that people who do not know much about Rwanda can use the lens of Israel to sanitize the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994.
One tell-tale sign of genocide denial is the idea that the genocide in 1994 was ethnic, rather than committed by the then Rwandan state. After October 7, 2023, I noticed an increase of this narrative not only on social media, but also in Kenyan university circles. Because Kenyan university education is hostile to learning about regions outside one’s own, many lecturers lack the regional consciousness to detect these narratives in the students’ work. I have also confronted bizarre cases in my classes, like that of a Congolese student, from Kinshasa, who had never heard of Lumumba, or a Burundian student unable to tell her own country’s history and instead preferring to write a whole paper criticizing Kagame. The student was puzzled when I asked: is there nothing to say about Burundi, surely? The reply was that since Kagame and Rwanda are on everybody's lips, she thought that that is the only thing to talk about. These experiences reveal to me an intellectual gap in what we Africans from East and Central Africa know about ourselves and each other.
What is particularly sad, however, is the role that African intellectuals play in propping the narratives. As we learn from Jemima Pierre’s study of Ghana, the one word that African studies avoid mentioning is racism. Since independence, we African intellectuals raised on that intellectual tradition restrict European racism to the anthropological documents of colonial times, or to images of Africans in contemporary Western media. But when it comes to bureaucratic forms of control, like foreign policy, the United Nations, and loans from World Bank and IMF, the word “racism” is conspicuously missing. In Kenya when we protest the debt imposed on us, we go through the statutes, write to world bodies, and rarely address the racist elephant in the room.
I also do not think it is a coincidence that this narrative sanitizing the role of the Western racism in the crisis is being ramped up at this time. Since the genocide in Gaza started, strange narratives on the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 have been showing up on social media. It appears that there is a concerted effort of some intellectuals from the Great Lakes region to take advantage of the interstices of Israel's assault on Gaza, to promote genocide denial when it comes to Rwanda. The hope, it seems, is that people who do not know much about Rwanda can use the lens of Israel to sanitize the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994.
One tell-tale sign of genocide denial is the idea that the genocide in 1994 was ethnic, rather than committed by the then Rwandan state. After October 7, 2023, I noticed an increase of this narrative not only on social media, but also in Kenyan university circles. Because Kenyan university education is hostile to learning about regions outside one’s own, many lecturers lack the regional consciousness to detect these narratives in the students’ work. I have also confronted bizarre cases in my classes, like that of a Congolese student, from Kinshasa, who had never heard of Lumumba, or a Burundian student unable to tell her own country’s history and instead preferring to write a whole paper criticizing Kagame. The student was puzzled when I asked: is there nothing to say about Burundi, surely? The reply was that since Kagame and Rwanda are on everybody's lips, she thought that that is the only thing to talk about. These experiences reveal to me an intellectual gap in what we Africans from East and Central Africa know about ourselves and each other.
African political consciousness
It is time for Africans to make a more concerted effort to understand global geopolitics. Our ignorance about each other, even within our own countries, is nothing short of criminal. Our naiveté about the African continent’s position at the bottom of the global racist hierarchy is reckless. We also seem unable to reckon with the extent to which African elites are a continental class used by the West to keep the continent and its education in check. And it is not coincidental or inadvertent. Imperialism knows that if it controls the African mind, exploiting African resources is a walk in the park.
But the focus should not be on our material conditions alone. The truth is that our misery as Africans is central to the identity of the West. This is a factor that infects the stories it tells about Africa and the stories it tells us about fellow Africans.
In all the moral handwringing and scolding about DRC, there is no discussion of Congo itself, its history, and the aspirations of the Congolese people. Accusations of imperialism are reserved for Rwanda and none are used for the top Congolese officials traveling around the West. Most of all, there is no questioning of the Wakanda logic that condemns Africans to experience underground resources a curse, yet the West sabotages our education, healthcare and democracy. And this limitation is not unique to DRC. When people like Assimi Goïta, Abdourahmane Tchiani and Ibrahim Traore are forced to leave the barracks to take over their countries, the sleeper cells of African intellectuals are also whipped into action to condemn “military dictatorships.”
Ultimately, the concern here is with the simplistic, moral narratives on the complex and POLITICAL problems of central Africa. We Western-trained African intellectuals must be honest and face the fact that liberal democracy is inadequate addressing the challenges that face our people. Liberal education makes us naïve to the racist global geopolitics, and it confines us to discourses of liberal democracy in the name of being “objective.” We must find the intellectual courage to offer explanations for African problems more sophisticated than moral blackmail and Wakanda narratives. We Africans must also think in layered ways. But that layering requires work, and we must do the work.
If we really care for the pan-African project, our concern should be for getting the Western middlemen politicians and narratives out of the hair of the Congolese and the Rwandans, for the citizens of those countries to hold their leaders to account, and to have the social resources necessary to do so. We should be calling for the political elites of the two countries to talk to each other without the noise of the West ringing in their ears. DR Congo and Rwanda are neighbors, surely. They share common people and cultures. They share a common painful past. They can agree to bring culprits of past crimes to book, and to fight against the identarian, genocidal ideologies with a humanist, pan-African one. Both countries can succeed together, not each on its own. We derive no benefit from trying to prove which president is more of an imperial lackey than the other. And intellectuals, those whom Fanon said fight on the battleground of history, should do better in clearing the intellectual ground needed for those dreams to become a reality.
But the focus should not be on our material conditions alone. The truth is that our misery as Africans is central to the identity of the West. This is a factor that infects the stories it tells about Africa and the stories it tells us about fellow Africans.
In all the moral handwringing and scolding about DRC, there is no discussion of Congo itself, its history, and the aspirations of the Congolese people. Accusations of imperialism are reserved for Rwanda and none are used for the top Congolese officials traveling around the West. Most of all, there is no questioning of the Wakanda logic that condemns Africans to experience underground resources a curse, yet the West sabotages our education, healthcare and democracy. And this limitation is not unique to DRC. When people like Assimi Goïta, Abdourahmane Tchiani and Ibrahim Traore are forced to leave the barracks to take over their countries, the sleeper cells of African intellectuals are also whipped into action to condemn “military dictatorships.”
Ultimately, the concern here is with the simplistic, moral narratives on the complex and POLITICAL problems of central Africa. We Western-trained African intellectuals must be honest and face the fact that liberal democracy is inadequate addressing the challenges that face our people. Liberal education makes us naïve to the racist global geopolitics, and it confines us to discourses of liberal democracy in the name of being “objective.” We must find the intellectual courage to offer explanations for African problems more sophisticated than moral blackmail and Wakanda narratives. We Africans must also think in layered ways. But that layering requires work, and we must do the work.
If we really care for the pan-African project, our concern should be for getting the Western middlemen politicians and narratives out of the hair of the Congolese and the Rwandans, for the citizens of those countries to hold their leaders to account, and to have the social resources necessary to do so. We should be calling for the political elites of the two countries to talk to each other without the noise of the West ringing in their ears. DR Congo and Rwanda are neighbors, surely. They share common people and cultures. They share a common painful past. They can agree to bring culprits of past crimes to book, and to fight against the identarian, genocidal ideologies with a humanist, pan-African one. Both countries can succeed together, not each on its own. We derive no benefit from trying to prove which president is more of an imperial lackey than the other. And intellectuals, those whom Fanon said fight on the battleground of history, should do better in clearing the intellectual ground needed for those dreams to become a reality.
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