We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (25 page)

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I ONCE MET a woman from the southwestern Ugandan town of Mbarara, who had been in secondary school with Paul Kagame in the early 1970s. I asked her what he was like back then. “Skinny,” she said, and then she laughed, because calling Kagame skinny was like calling water wet. You couldn’t see him without wondering if you’d ever seen a skinnier person. He stood an inch or so over six feet, and his trouser legs hung as if empty—the creases flat as blades. His Giacometti-like stick figure looked as if it had been dreamed up by Hutu Power cartoonists at
Kangura,
with the fine skeletal fingers that you’d expect of a chief of the cockroaches.

One of the popular cultural myths about Tutsis is that they like to drink milk but don’t much like eating, and although I’ve watched any number of Tutsis eat heartily, the myth has some basis, at least as a comment on manners. “Tutsi wives are lousy cooks because their husbands aren’t interested. We just pick a little here and there,” a Tutsi told me. He had made something of an informal study of Tutsi arcana. “You’ve noticed, we’ll invite you to drink, and of course later there’s some food, but we’ll never say, ‘Philip, I’m so hungry, let’s feast.’” I had noticed. The custom was explained to me as a residual trait of aristocratic refinement, like moving slowly or speaking softly, which are also alleged to be Tutsi manners. The idea was that vulgar people, peasants, are driven by appetite and tend to run around and shout unnecessarily in the confusion of their coarse lives, while people of standing show reserve. Hutus often describe Tutsis as “arrogant,” and Tutsis tend to find no cause for apology.

But the Ugandan woman had seen the teenage Kagame differently. When she said he was skinny, she added, “He was a refugee,” suggesting that his build told of misfortune, not aristocracy. She also said that he was a top student, and liked music—“I used to see him hang about the record shop until closing time”—but that was about the limit of her recall. “I didn’t pay much attention to him,” she said. “He was Rwandan.”

This was what mattered in Uganda: he was a foreigner. Uganda’s population, like that of most African countries, is distributed among so many tribal and regional subpopulations that there is no majority group, just larger and smaller minorities. When Kagame was growing up in Uganda, people of Rwandan descent constituted one of the larger groups. Most are believed to have been Hutu by ancestry, but in the Ugandan context the labels Hutu and Tutsi stood for little more than different historical experiences: nearly all Tutsis were political refugees, while Hutus were primarily descendants of precolonial settlers or economic migrants. Despite the widespread assumption that Hutus and Tutsis carry a primordial germ of homicidal animosity for one another, the exiled Rwandans got along peacefully in Uganda, in Kenya, in Tanzania, and—until Hutu Power politics spilled over in the early 1990s—in Zaire. Only in Burundi did refugees find the politics of Hutu and Tutsi inescapable.

“In exile, we saw each other as Rwandans,” Tito Ruteremara, one of the RPF’s founders and political commissars, explained. “Living outside Rwanda, you don’t see each other as Hutu or Tutsi, because you see everyone else as strangers and you are brought together as Rwandans, and because for the Ugandans, a Rwandan is a Rwandan.”

So the refugees understood themselves to be as their neighbors imagined them, and they recognized in this identity not only an oppression or humiliation to be escaped but also a value to be transformed into a cause. Here was “the sentiment of national unity” and “the feeling of forming but one people” that the historian Lacger had observed underlying the colonial polarization. And to the founders of the RPF, Rwanda’s postcolonial Hutu dictators had, in the name of majority rule, done even more than the Belgians to subvert that idea of the nation. The counterrevolution the RPF eventually proposed followed from this straightforward analysis. To salvage the spirit of Rwandanness for all Rwandans, from the skinniest to the fattest, lest the possibility of solidarity be destroyed forever—that was the idea.

IN 1961, KAGAME watched Hutu mobs torching Tutsi compounds around his parents’ home on the hill of Nyaratovu, in Gitarama. He was four years old. He saw a car his father had hired for the family to flee in coming up the road, and he saw that the arsonists saw it, too. They dropped what they were doing and began running toward his house. The car got there first, and the family escaped north to Uganda. “We grew up there,” he told me. “We made friends. The Ugandans were hospitable to us, but we were always being singled out. There were always reminders that we’d never be accepted because we were foreigners.”

Naturalization is rarely an option in Africa; only a few Rwandan refugees ever acquired foreign citizenship, and those who did often obtained it through bribery or forgery. In Uganda, discrimination and hostility toward Rwandans intensified in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s under the devastating dictatorships of Milton Obote and Idi Amin. By then, international aid for Rwandan refugees had largely petered out. In contrast to the outpouring of attention for those who fled Rwanda in 1994 after the genocide, Kagame said, “for more than thirty years we were refugees, and nobody talked about us. People forgot. They said, ‘Go to hell.’ They would say, ‘You Tutsi, we know you are arrogant.’ But what does arrogance have to do with it? It’s a question of people’s rights. Do you deny that I belong to Rwanda, that I am Rwandan?”

Refugee politics in the early 1960s was dominated by the monarchists, and thirty years later Hutu Power propagandists loved to point out that Kagame himself was a nephew of the widow of Mutara Rudahigwa, the Mwami who had died in 1959 after receiving an injection from a Belgian doctor. But as the RPF’s Tito Ruteremara, Kagame’s elder by nearly twenty years, told me: “People of our political generation, whose consciousness was formed in exile, as refugees, despised the monarchists—despised all the old colonial ethnic corruption, with the Hamitic hypothesis and so on.” Kagame agreed: being a Tutsi, or a monarchist, was an ancestral problem, and neither identity seemed likely to do anyone much good.

Political leaders often love to tell about their childhoods, those formative years, happy or sad, whose legend can be retroactively finessed to augur greatness. Not Kagame. He was an intensely private public man; not shy—he spoke his mind with uncommon directness—but entirely without bluster. A neat dresser, married, a father of two, he was said to like dinner parties, dancing, and shooting pool, and he was a regular on the tennis courts at Kigali’s Cercle Sportif; his soldiers revered and adored him and had put his name in many chants and songs. He was certainly the most discussed man in Rwanda, but he did not care, in his public life, to be charming or, in any conventional sense, charismatic. I mean, he gave off very little heat, and yet his coolness was commanding. Even in a crowded room, he cut a solitary figure. He was a tactician; his background was in military intelligence, reconnaissance, and guerrilla warfare; he liked to study and anticipate the moves of others, and to allow his own moves to carry a surprise.

“I have wanted to be original about my own thinking, especially in regard to my own situation here,” he once told me, adding, “Not that I don’t realize that there are other people out there to admire, but it is just not my habit to admire anybody. Even if something has worked, I think there are many other things that could work also. If there’s anything else that has worked, I would certainly pick a bit from that. But if there could be another way of having things work, I would like to discover that. If I could have some original way of thinking, that would be OK with me.”

Except for the phrasing, he sounded like the poet Rilke on love and art, but Kagame was speaking about leadership in governance and in war, and most of all—as always—about being Rwandan. He wanted to find an original way of being Rwandan, and Rwanda clearly needed one. Still, originality is a dangerous enterprise, and Rwanda was a dangerous place. Kagame said he wanted to be “exemplary,” so he was careful about his own example, and perhaps it was his quest for an original response to his truly original circumstances that made him wary of allowing others to imagine the lost world of his childhood. There were influences, of course, but the only one he ever seemed inclined to talk about was his friendship with another Rwandan refugee boy named Fred Rwigyema.

“With Fred,” Kagame told me, “there was something personal on either side. We grew up together almost like brothers. We were so close that people who didn’t know automatically thought we were born of the same family. And even as kids, in primary school, we would discuss the future of the Rwandans. We were refugees in a refugee camp in a grass-thatched house for all this period. Fred and I used to read stories about how people fought to liberate themselves. We had ideas of our rights. So this was always eating up our minds, even as kids.”

In 1976, when they were in secondary school, Rwigyema dropped out to join the Ugandan rebels, led by Yoweri Museveni, who were fighting against Idi Amin from bases in Tanzania. Kagame didn’t see Rwigyema again until 1979, when Amin fled into exile, and Kagame joined his friend in the Museveni faction of the new Ugandan army. In 1981, when the former dictator Milton Obote again seized power in Uganda, Museveni returned to the bush to fight some more. His army consisted of twenty-seven men, including Rwigyema and Kagame.

As more young Rwandan exiles in Uganda joined the rebel forces, Obote cranked up a virulent xenophobic campaign against the Rwandan population. Mass firings and inflammatory speeches were followed, in October of 1982, by a campaign of murder, rape, and pillage, and close to fifty thousand Rwandans were forcibly expelled and sent back to Rwanda. Habyarimana stuck them in camps, where many died, until they were forced back to Uganda in 1984. Two years later, when Museveni took power, at least twenty percent of his army was of Rwandan origin. Rwigyema was near the top of the high command, and Kagame became director of military intelligence.

It was against this backdrop that Habyarimana had declared, in 1986, that there could be no further discussion of a right of return for Rwandan refugees. The RPF was founded the next year as a clandestine movement committed to armed struggle against the Habyarimana regime. Tito Ruteremara led the political wing, and Rwigyema spearheaded the fraternity of Rwandan officers in the Ugandan army who became the core of the RPF’s military force. “We had felt the beginnings of this, fighting in Uganda,” Kagame said. “Fighting there was to serve our purpose, and it was also in line with our thinking—we were fighting injustice—and it was perhaps the safest way to live in Uganda at that time as a Rwandan. But deep in our hearts and minds we knew we belonged in Rwanda, and if they didn’t want to resolve the problem politically, armed struggle would be the alternative.”

I once asked Kagame whether he had ever considered at that point that he could become the Vice President of Rwanda and the commander of its national army. “Not by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “It was not even my ambition. My mind was just obsessed by struggling and fighting to regain my rights as a Rwandan. Whatever that would propel me into was a different matter.”

IN EARLIER GENERATIONS, when Africans spoke of “liberation” they meant freedom from the European empires. For the men and women who formed the RPF, and for at least a half dozen other rebel movements on the continent in the 1980s and 1990s, “liberation” meant climbing out from under the client dictatorships of Cold War neocolonialism. Coming of age in an ostensibly free and independent Africa, they saw their predatory leaders as immature, as sources of shame rather than of pride, unworthy and incapable of serving the destiny of their peoples. The corruption that plagued so much of Africa was not just a matter of graft; the soul was at stake. And to this rising generation, the horror was that the postcolonial agony was being inflicted on Africans by Africans, even when the West or the Soviet Union had a heavy hand in it. Museveni, whose example in rebellion and later in building up Uganda from bloody ruin had stimulated the RPF, once told me that Africa’s failure to achieve respectable independence could no longer be blamed on foreigners: “It was more because of the indigenous forces that were weak and not organized.”

Because Museveni was under intense domestic pressure in the late 1980s to rid his army and government of Rwandans and to strip Rwandan ranchers of much of their land, he has often been accused of organizing the RPF himself. But the mass desertion of Rwandan officers and troops from his army at the time of the invasion in October of 1990 was a surprise and an embarrassment to the Ugandan leader. “I think at one point Museveni even called us treacherous,” Kagame told me. “He thought, ‘These are friends who have betrayed me, and never let me get involved.’ But we didn’t need anybody to influence us, and in fact the Ugandans were very suspicious of us. They didn’t even appreciate our contribution, the sacrifices we had made. We were just Rwandans— and really this served us very well. It gave us a push, and it helped some weak people in Uganda feel that they had solved a problem when we left.”

More astonishing even than the secrecy of the Rwandans within Uganda’s army was the RPF’s intensive international campaign to mobilize support in the Rwandan diaspora. “It was funny,” an Ugandan in Kampala told me. “In the late eighties, a lot of these Rwandans were becoming very involved with their heritage, organizing family gatherings. They would get everybody together and make a tree, listing every other Rwandan they knew: names, ages, professions, addresses, and so on. Later, I realized they were making a database of the entire community, and well beyond Uganda—through all of Africa, Europe, North America. They were always having fund-raisers here for engagements, weddings, christenings. It’s normal, but there was pressure to give a lot, and you couldn’t understand the money involved. At one wedding of two big shots, it was fifty thousand dollars. So you’d ask about the great parties they must be having with so much money, but no—everything was bare bones. Well, we didn’t get it at the time.”