The PANAFRICAN Review
The Coming of Age of An African Liberation Ideology in Rwanda
Serge Kamuhinda
Rwanda ’ s quest for liberation can be conceived as a mirror for continental liberation . The country celebrated the 27th anniversary since the Rwanda Patriotic Front stopped – through military means – the genocide against the Tutsi , a feat that was also a defeat of ideas based on ethnic politics , thus cementing the truism that a military defeat always comes first as a defeat of ideas . This latter part demands Africa ’ s attention given the recurrent struggles with ethnicity .
Despite this significance , Africans have not adequately engaged this ideological bedrock that explains the Rwanda Patriotic Front ’ s ( RPF ) ability to defeat the genocidal forces and , subsequently . Which leads to the question : how has the RPF led the country out of genocide towards worldwide acknowledged progress and how can this inform liberation struggles on the African continent ?
Was it leadership ? Yes , but through which means ? Critics argue that it was force , but development and reconciliation do not happen at gunpoint . In any case force is not a substitution of ideas but its manifestation , as we know since Clausewitz . In other words , even force is grounded on a certain representation of the world . Thus , searching for the ideological framework of the RPF never stops to be relevant .
Indeed , RPF historians , such as Dr . Jean-Paul Kimonyo , have demonstrated how the responsiveness of the RPF to the genocide against the Tutsi was linked to the ideological preparedness of the RPF . The continuity of RPF ideology has also been recently analyzed by Chemouni and Mugiraneza with sources from the early 1990s .
Critics of the RPF , however , do not see its developmental track record as the outcome of deliberate policy choices . Some blatantly refuse to acknowledge what has been observed by most multilateral development agencies , citing the allegedly legendary manipulative skills of the RPF . This revisionist line of thinking borrows heavily from the Anti-Tutsi hate propaganda by pretending that what you see is not what is real . The same scholars tend to deny the scale of the genocide against Tutsis against the rich body of jurisprudence , testimonies and academic knowledge .
Other critics acknowledge RPF ’ s developmental track-record but look for an external explanation by pointing out at the role of de-
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