Tying Our Past to Rwanda’s Present

At first glance, all that appears to connect us to the Central African nation of Rwanda are a scrapped Clinton administration initiative to offer humanitarian assistance to the refugees returning home from Zaire, and our feelings of helplessness and sadness. The latter surely emanates from the haunting images of refugees, the empty stares of starving children, the abandoned corpses strewn along the otherwise empty stretches of road leading from eastern Zaire back to Rwanda.

However, as a historian and an American of African descent, I suspect that were we to fine-tune the television-like images flickering through our collective mind’s eye, a glimmer of recognition and human connectedness might await us. It would be more profound, more telling and considerably more painful than even what the nightly news has served.

The Rwandan conflict, though gruesome and tragic, is not a human aberration. Fate seems to provide every nation, every society, every ethnicity with its own periodic turn to rise above the brutal, acquisitive aggression so common to the history of humankind. It is a test in which a consummate temptation--the resource war--dangles within easy grasp. As Rwanda has shown, the goal of this particular form of human aggression is to expropriate land and other resources in order to improve one’s living standard at the expense of a technologically or militarily less advanced neighbor.

In the process of accomplishing its goal, this type of warfare characteristically dehumanizes its victims while conveniently depopulating their lands as well. The Rwandans, Tutsi and Hutus alike, have certainly flunked the test.

But how smug ought we Americans be, in the guise of humanitarian concerns, as we gawk at the human tragedies of the Rwandans? Let’s not forget that when 17th century Europe began to suffer its own population pressures, more than 70 million victims fled Europe’s class-induced structural scarcities, religious and cultural intolerance and inequitable land distribution policies. In seeking refuge in the Americas, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, these Europeans launched their own resource wars, aimed at removing the native peoples from the most productive agricultural lands. Of course, in past centuries, no global news network existed to capture the anguish of the victims. But the standard of living enjoyed by Americans today is at least as much a result of pre-20th century resource war expropriations from native peoples and the profitability of slavery as it is a consequence of the cultural factor we prefer to acknowledge--Yankee industriousness.

Seen in another way, if today’s 210 million United States citizens of European origin were forced back into an already densely packed motherland, the specter of an even bigger Rwanda could not be far off. After all, Europe represents a continent whose periodically erupting paroxysms of resentment have already initiated two world wars in this century and the Holocaust.

Rwanda may offer us vital ecological lessons as well. In many ways, American society, wealthy as it is, may not be immune to the ravishes of economic downturn and ecological impacts. The per capita income of the average American in our technologically advanced nation need not sink to $700 a year, as is currently the case in that African state, for us to see the Rwandaization of American politics. The growth of Aryan militias in America’s heartland, the Oklahoma City bombing, the black church fires ought to remind us that political resentments are fueled by expectations rather than absolute degrees of diminution in living standards.

In Rwanda, we so clearly have seen how each ethnicity despises and blames the other for the population’s diminishing standard of living, while the real culprit lies elsewhere. That Central African nation represents an ecologically ravished region, with one of the highest rural population densities in the world.

Even so. America is not to blame for Rwanda’s current troubles. Nor is our nation’s history more predatory than anybody else’s, be they European, African or Asian. But we do need to approach African refugee problems with a humility borne of a historical realism and perspective that I find sadly lacking in the current discourse. America’s humanitarian “busyness” vis-a-vis the suffering of “the African other” occasionally strikes me as a convenient escape from national introspection and the evasion of a reality even more painful than the visual images of suffering African refugees. By this, I mean that the prosperity and bountifulness that allows the U.S. administration to offer humanitarian aid to the Rwandans has itself come at an enormous domestic and historic cost.

Acknowledging the sometimes harsh realities of our own history should not be cause for self-flagellation and blame. Rather, it should lead us to transcend some of the emotional distance engendered by our preoccupations with do-goodism in Africa. In so doing, we just might succeed in accessing the deeper humanity that bonds us like resin to the rest of the world, victims and victimizers, Rwanda’s historically privileged Tutsi and victimized Hutu alike.