Philip Gourevitch - We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

Standing there—as a looter, really—in Mobutu’s “liberated” study, reading this banal document that had been rendered remarkable only by the enormity of intervening events, I was struck again to think how completely the world was changed by the genocide in Rwanda. It wasn’t necessarily a nicer or a better world, just a few years and a million deaths ago, before the genocide. But in central Africa it was a world in which the very worst was still unknown.

In 1994, during the height of the extermination campaign in Rwanda, as Paris airlifted arms to Mobutu’s intermediaries in eastern Zaire for direct transfer across the border to the génocidaires, France’s President François Mitterrand said—as the newspaper Le Figaro later reported it—“In such countries, genocide is not too important.” By their actions and inactions, at the time and in the years that followed, the rest of the major powers indicated that they agreed. Evidently, it did not occur to them that such a country as Rwanda can refuse to accept the insignificance of its annihilation; nor had anybody imagined that other Africans could take Rwanda’s peril seriously enough to act.

The memory of the genocide, combined with Mobutu’s sponsorship of its full-scale renewal, had “global repercussions, wider than Rwanda,” Museveni told me, “and here in Africa we were determined to resist it.” Just as Mobutu was what Museveni called an “agent” of his Western puppeteers, so the Rwandan génocidaires, who had once again threatened to reduce the entire region to blood, owed their sustenance to the mindless dispensation of Western charity. The West might later wring its hands over the criminal irresponsibility of its policies, but the nebulosity known as the international community is ultimately accountable to nobody. Time and again in central Africa, false promises of international protection were followed by the swift abandonment of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the face of extreme violence. Against such reckless impunity, the Congolese rebellion offered Africa the opportunity to unite against its greatest homegrown political evil and to supplant the West as the arbiter of its own political destiny.

I OFTEN FOUND it helpful to think of central Africa in the mid-1990s as comparable to late medieval Europe—plagued by serial wars of tribe and religion, corrupt despots, predatory elites and a superstitious peasantry, festering with disease, stagnating in poverty, and laden with promise. Of course, a key process that had helped European peoples pull toward greater prosperity and saner governance was colonialism, which allowed for the exporting of their aggressions and the importing of wealth. Ex-colonies don’t enjoy such opportunities as they tumble into the family of modern nation-states; whatever forms of government they come up with, in their struggles to build sustaining political traditions, are likely to be transitional.

Long before Rwanda became a case study in international negligence, Museveni once said, “A little neglect would not be so bad. The more orphaned we are, the better for Africa. We will have to rely on ourselves.” And the extent to which the Congolese revolution took the outside world by surprise exposed a stubborn misconception that had dominated Western attitudes toward post-Cold War Africa—that Africans generate humanitarian catastrophes but don’t really make meaningful politics.

Appeasement had been the wrong policy toward Nazi Germany, and so it had been in Goma, too. Yet the very vacuum of responsible international engagement at Goma had created an unprecedented need and opportunity for Africans to fix their own problems. Although Kabila’s foreign backers were openly skeptical about his capacities to serve as more than a temporary leader of the Congo—and even in that role he would quickly disappointment them—the Alliance’s swift sweep to victory inspired Uganda’s President Museveni, speaking at Kabila’s inauguration, to proclaim that the war had “liberated not only the Congo but also all of Africa.”

As the political godfather of the new central African leadership, Museveni was listened to closely. He called for national and international solidarity, and for economic order and physical security as the basis for political development. Hearing him, one could almost forget that central Africa’s prospects remained terribly bleak. What was left of much of the region looked a lot like this:

The infrastructure of the country, especially the roads, had almost totally collapsed. Most of the country was inaccessible… There was a critical shortage of trucks… Utilities, such as water and power supply, had severely deteriorated… Manufacturing plants were either closed or operating at very low rates… There was a total lack of basic consumer goods such as sugar, soap, and paraffin. Goods were being smuggled into and out of the country, and sold on the parallel (“black”) market. The economy had become completely informal and speculative.

This passage from Museveni’s autobiography described Uganda in 1986, when he installed himself as President after more than a decade of armed struggle. When I told him I thought I was reading about the Congo—or, for that matter, much of Rwanda after 1994—he said, “Same situation, exactly.”

Uganda’s annual economic growth in the early 1990s averaged close to five percent, and in 1996 it exceeded eight percent. Decent roads laced the country. There were good state schools, improved medical care, an independent judiciary, a rather feisty parliament, a boisterous and often contrarian press, and a small but growing middle class. Insecurity remained, especially in the rebellion-plagued north and west of the country. But Uganda, a decade after the ravages of Idi Amin and Obote, set a standard of promise that had to make anyone who called the Congo or Rwanda “impossible” or “hopeless” think again.

MUSEVENI WAS A heavy-handed manager, technocratic, pragmatic, accustomed to having things very nearly his way. He was a man of enormous energy, not only as a politician but also as a cattle breeder, and he possessed a frontiersman’s inventiveness. On the morning that I visited him, the state-owned New Vision newspaper announced: “Yoweri Museveni has disclosed that a local grass species he recently introduced to Egyptian researchers has been processed into a highly effective toothpaste which has been called Nile Toothpaste.”

The item about the toothpaste unfolded as a classic Musevenian parable of African self-reliance. As a child in the bush, Museveni had learned to chew a grass called muteete and found that it left his teeth perfectly clean and smooth. Then, at a British colonial secondary school, he was introduced to Colgate, to cure him of his bumpkin ways. “But,” he said, “when you use this Colgate and you pass the tongue over your teeth you feel these ‘roadblocks.’” The white man’s toothpaste was inferior. As President, he remembered the muteete, and modern science confirmed his memory. The grass, he said, possessed “the best toothpaste agents ever found.” Nile Toothpaste would soon be on the market, and Uganda would collect royalties. Museveni urged his compatriots to pursue similarly market-oriented research. He thought banana juice might make a hit in the soft-drink industry. He noted that Ugandan flower exports to Europe were soaring, and exporters elsewhere were running scared. The message was clear: seek the value in a devalued Africa; we are on a roll.

Uganda’s capital, Kampala, was just an hour’s flight north of Kigali, near the shore of Lake Victoria, yet it seemed another world entirely: a boom town with an air of promise. Of course, it was easy to find people who complained about the government, but the problem that animated them most—whether the regime was moving toward becoming a liberal democracy too slowly, too quickly, or not at all—was the sort of problem that Rwandans, whose chief preoccupation was their physical security, could only yearn to discuss without fear.