I have said that a false view of history is a toxin in the bloodstream of my country. With the start of the civil war the myth-making machine went into high gear. There was suddenly no distinction between Tutsis and exiled RPF rebels; they were lumped into the same category of rhetoric. The war itself was cast as an explicitly racial conflict. And ordinary Rwandans started to arrange their lives around this idea.
My troubles with the president began when I refused to wear his picture on my suit jacket.
I suppose it was my private act of rebellion against President Juvenal Habyarimana, who I considered a criminal and a blowhard. He was a bit on the fat side, and walked with a slight limp that was said to be an old Army injury. He sparkled in his suits, which were all tailored in Paris. I was especially irritated by his habit of clearing out the national parks of tourists so he and his cronies could go on big game hunting trips. In my position it would have been incredibly unwise to give voice to these thoughts, so I kept them to myself. But I drew the line at those stupid portrait pins.
Like many African “big men, ”Habyarimana had a penchant for plastering his face on billboards and public spaces everywhere throughout the nation. I suppose it is a combination of vanity, insecurity, and old-fashioned advertising strategy that makes leaders do this. If enough people get used to associating his name with pomp and power over the years they’ll become reluctant to want to ever throw him out of office. Suffice it to say, Habyarimana loved his own face so much that he eventually decided that his subjects should carry it on their breasts. He designed medallions with his own photograph in the middle. These were sold to various people-commune administrators, priests, wealthy businessmen-with instructions to wear them while acting in their official capacities. The Roman Catholic archbishop of Kigali helped set the tone by wearing the portrait pin on his cassock while saying mass.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Rwanda ’s independence, a big state dinner was held at the Hotel Mille Collines. All the national big shots were there, as well as foreign dignitaries, including the king and prime minister of Belgium. I wore my best white suit for the occasion. But, of course, I had no portrait pin in my lapel.
One of the president’s thugs came over to me just before the ceremony was to begin.
“You are not wearing your portrait of the president, ” he told me.
I agreed with him that this was the case.
He grabbed me by the collar, yanked me out of the receiving line, and told me that I would not be greeting the president that night. It took the well-timed intervention of my boss, the chairman of Sabena Hotels, to make things right. Either I would be restored to my place in the receiving line or the hotel would refuse right then to be the host of the Independence Day dinner. It was probably a bluff, but it worked. I went back into the line and shook the president’s hand without his face grinning up from my lapel.
The very next morning another of his goons showed up at the front desk of the Mille Collines and asked for me. When I didn’t appear he handed the headwaiter a brown envelope and told him to deliver it to me. It was stuffed full of Habyarimana medals.
“From now on, ” he told the headwaiter, “your manager will wear one of these every time he comes to work. We will be watching. The rest of these medals are to be given to the employees.”
The next morning I showed up to work without wearing a medal. A black car arrived at the front door roundabout and I was escorted over. They told me I now had earned “an appointment” at the office of the president. I followed them there in a hotel car and allowed myself to be led into a side office, where I was screamed at for several hours.
“You do not respect the boss, our father!” they screamed at me.
“What did I do wrong?” I asked, although I knew.
“You stupid man, you did not wear your medals! Why not?”
“I don’t see the benefit in doing that, ” I said.
It went around and around like this before they kicked me out of the office-with a literal foot planted on my butt-and a command to be back the next morning. And the next day, they screamed at me for hours and gave me another kick in the butt before they let me go.
It went on like this every day for a month. I was no longer working at the hotel, just reporting to the office of the president. His thugs became my daily escorts. We started to get used to each other and exchanged morning pleasantries before the daily screaming began. And I would always tell them the same thing: “I really don’t see why I should wear the medal.”
The irony of this show of muscle was that the president was not really in control of his own power base. Everybody who was well informed in Rwanda knew that he was essentially a hollow man, largely the pawn of his own advisers. He had risen up through the defense ministry and was put in charge of the purge against the Tutsis in 1973 that had been responsible for the deaths of dozens and wasted the futures of thousands more, including my friend Gerard. In the midst of all the chaos, Habyarimana launched a coup and took over the presidency of Rwanda, promising to bring an end to the violence. His real talent was squeezing money out of international aid organizations and Western governments while at the same time shutting down any internal opposition. He formed a political party called, without apparent irony, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development and conferred mandatory membership on the entire country. Every person in Rwanda was supposed to spend their Saturdays doing work for the government: highway repair, digging ditches, and other tasks. If it ever occurred to him that this was basically a repeat of the forced labor policies of the Belgians and the mwami he never showed much concern about it.
The people who benefited most were Habyarimana’s friends from the northwest part of the country. We called these people the akazu, or “little house.” Their main channel of access to the riches of government was actually not through the president but his strong-willed wife, Madame Agathe. If you weren’t from the northwest, or weren’t close with Madame, you stood little chance of advancing. I had discovered this unfortunate reality of life in 1979, when Tourist Consult had to use that strong-arm tactic so that I, a man from the south, could get a college scholarship. Having friends in the akazu became even more important after the world price of coffee plunged in 1989 and the Rwandan economy collapsed with it.
Empty suit that he was, Habyarimana had managed to stay in power through the depression with the help of the government of France, and particularly because of the French president, François Mitterrand. These two presidents got along famously and shared many dinners. Mitterrand even gave our president his own jet airplane. Loads of development money and military assistance flowed to us from Paris throughout the years. When the RPF launched its attack in 1990 and the Rwandan Army exploded in size from five thousand soldiers to thirty thousand to counter the threat, France was there to help train the new recruits. In some cases white French soldiers came quite close to actually fighting the rebels, with some instructors aiming artillery cannons at RPF positions and stepping back to let Rwandan soldiers press the fire button. As much as twenty tons of armaments a day were airlifted into Kigali courtesy of Habyarimana’s friends in Paris.
The French love affair with Rwanda was, you might say, also a product of a pervasive national mythology. “France is not France without greatness, ” Charles de Gaulle had said, and the preservation of that status as a global leader defines much of the policy thinking in the offices of France’s Foreign Ministry on the Quai D’Orsay in Paris. Maintaining a strong web of economic and diplomatic interests in their former African colonies is seen as a key part of that strategy. And so in places like the Ivory Coast, the Central African Republic, and Chad, where the French tricolor flew until the 1960s, France has provided monetary support, trade links, and frequent military intervention almost from the day that these countries gained their independence. Its eagerness to play such a father-figure role earned it the nickname “the policeman of Africa.” The French army, in fact, has executed nearly two dozen military campaigns on the continent since the era of independence-a level of microinvolvement far out of proportion to any other great power. France never was much of a player in Rwanda during colonial times, but they now considered us worthy of attention for their own psychologically complicated reasons.