If Rwandans are obsessed with height, then the French are obsessed with tongues. A large part of that mystical greatness in the French mentality is centered on the preservation of the pure French language and the repelling of all attempts to marginalize it in favor of the international tongue of commerce, aviation, and diplomacy that is English. President Habyarimana and the Hutu elite were considered exemplary guardians of the French language and the kind of cultural values that it represented. At the urging of his French friends, our presidential “father” instituted new educational guidelines in schools, and new ways of teaching mathematics and the French language to young people.

The RPF invaders, by contrast, had spent most of their lives exiled in the former British colony of Uganda and were therefore English speakers, part of what amounted to a representation of the old Anglo-Saxon hordes that had been dogging France for the last thousand years. And I believe they were not entirely wrong-I believe the English speakers did have their own ambitions to achieve hegemony in the region and control the entire space between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. So at the Quai D’Orsay the logic went like this: If the RPF rebels should become strong enough to overthrow Habya-rimana it will spell the loss of a small but important Francophone ally in Central Africa, which could soon be speaking English as an official language, reviving unpleasant tribal memories of the Battle of Agincourt and the Hundred Years War. While the French publicly supported peace talks, they were, in reality, working behind the scenes to preserve Habyarimana’s shaky hold on power.

I am not saying this mentality is logical, but if there is anything that being a Rwandan has taught me, it is that most politics is an outgrowth of emotions that may or may not have any relation to the rational.

So when I decided not to wear the president’s portrait on my lapel I was putting my thumb in the eye of a very insecure man. My friends told me later that I had been taking a stupid chance. I should have just worn the stupid thing to make the flunkies happy and not risked my job or my family’s welfare on a symbolic matter. I knew Habyarimana and the akazu didn’t much care for me, anyway. It would have cost me a huge amount of self-respect to have worn that dictator’s face on my jacket. If this was a risk, it was a calculated one.

I never told my father about my run-in with the president. I didn’t want him to worry about my job-or my life. But if I had told him, I like to think it would have made him laugh.

While peace talks with the rebels dragged on the programs on RTLM got worse and worse. I do not know how I managed to keep listening to it. Perhaps it was out of a need to understand exactly where popular opinion was heading. Or perhaps it was just morbid fascination.

Either way, I began to hear the racial slur “cockroach” so frequently that it lost whatever power it had to shock. I heard myself being lumped in with those who were considered less than human. The enormously popular singer Simon Bikindi had recorded a song played over and over on RTLM called “I Hate These Hutus.” He was talking about people like me-those people of the majority group who didn’t have a taste for racial politics and refused to join in the crude political movement that became known as Hutu Power. To Bikindi they were nothing but traitors:

I hate these Hutu, these arrogant Hutus, braggarts who scorn other Hutus, de ar comrades.

I hate these Hutus, these de-Hutuized Hutus, who have disowned their ident ities, dear comrades.

The anger on the airwaves became so common that it didn’t seem particularly out of line when RTLM broadcast the tape of an address made at a political rally in the northwest town of Gisenyi. The speaker was a government official named Leon Mugesera and, I have to say, he knew how to whip up a crowd. Copies of this speech had already been circulating around the country like bootleg treasures, with people commenting favorably that here was a man who really understood the threat to Rwanda. “Do not let yourselves be invaded, ” he kept exhorting the crowd, and it gradually became clear he was making an allusion to the ruling party being “invaded” by moderates who wanted to engage in peace negotiations with the predominately Tutsi rebels. In words that would become widely repeated throughout Rwanda, he also recounts a story of saying to a Tutsi, “I am telling you that your home is in Ethiopia, that we are going to send you back there quickly, by the Nyabarongo.” Nobody in Rwanda could have missed what he was really saying: The Tutsis were going to be slaughtered and their bodies thrown into the north-flowing watercourse.

His final exhortation to the crowd could have served as a summary of the simpleminded philosophy of those who were screaming for Hutu Power the loudest: “Know that the person whose throat you do not cut will be the one who cuts yours.” He was preaching an ideology-and an identity-based on nothing more than a belief in the murderous intentions of the enemy.

I think that was the most seductive part of the movement. There is something living deep within us all that welcomes, even relishes, the role of victimhood for ourselves. There is no cause in the world more righteously embraced than our own when we feel someone has wronged us. Perhaps it is a psychological leftover from early childhood, when we felt the primeval terror of the world around us and yearned for the intervention of a mother/protector to keep us safe. Perhaps it makes it easier to explain away our personal failures when the work of an enemy can be blamed. Perhaps we just get tired of long explanations and like the cleanliness of an easy solution. It is for wiser people than me to say. Whatever its allure, this primitive ideology of Hutu Power swept through Rwanda in 1993 and early 1994 with the speed of flame through dry grass.

The grand purpose, as I have said, was not really to avenge the slights committed by the Tutsi royal court sixty years earlier. That was merely the cover story, the cheap trick that could rouse a mob into supporting the strong men. And that was the true purpose of all the revolutionary rhetoric: It was all about Habyarimana and the rest of the elite trying to keep a grip on the reins of government. It seemed almost irrelevant to point out that Hutus had been in a position of undisturbed power for thirty-five years and that the Tutsi were in a position to affect very little of Rwanda’s current miserable situation-even if they had wanted to. It was a revolution, all right, but there was nobody to overthrow.

The Hutu government wanted all the anger in Rwanda pointed toward any target but itself. RTLM was officially a private venture with an independent editorial voice, but the extent to which it was an arm of the government was kept a secret from most Rwandans. Few people knew, for example, that the station’s largest shareholder was actually President Habyarimana himself. The other financiers had close ties to the akazu. They included hundreds of people, including two cabinet ministers and two bank presidents. The station was officially in competition with the government station, but was allowed to broadcast on their FM 101 frequency in the mornings. Like most radio stations, RTLM had an emergency power source in case of blackouts, but this one was not a generator on the back lot. It was apparently an electrical line that led straight into the house across the street, which happened to be the official residence of none other than President Habyari-mana.

I have mentioned those talk radio “debates” on RTLM that were really just shouting matches between two people who only disagreed about the best way to make the Tutsis suffer. You might wonder how any audience could stand to listen to such obvious garbage. How could the Tutsis-and those who loved them-not have made a protest or at least fled the country when they heard such irrational anger growing stronger and stronger? Could they have not read the signs and understood that hateful words would soon turn into knives?