Gregory Mthembu-Salter
Rwanda played host this week to one of the largest and most ambitious cultural events ever seen in the country – a festival of “memory against forgetting”.
The Fest’Africa – in Rwanda’s capi-tal Kigali, and the university town of Butare – brought together authors, artists and film- makers from all over the continent to explore the role of the arts in commemorating Rwanda’s genocide of 1994.
Among the Fest’Africa participants was South African poet and playwright Antjie Krog, who delivered an impassioned presentation about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
Krog told her audience how the TRC had rejected retributive justice and blanket amnesty, in favour of a middle way of restorative justice, in order to rebuild South Africa’s chronically fractured morality.
She said no literature could match the powerful testimonies of the victims at the TRC, and expressed her anger that nothing in South African writing had prepared her for the horrors that these testimonies had revealed.
Turning to Rwanda, Krog admitted to being mystified at how people of the same race, culture, language and religion had perpetrated such crimes against one another as they did in 1994.
Krog’s presentation met with mixed reactions. Her frequent references to race were greeted by Rwandans as a South African obsession of little relevance, and her frequent admiring references to former archbishop Desmond Tutu appeared poorly received, too.
Tutu’s visit to Rwanda in 1995, when he chastised Rwandans for killing each other despite their having blackness and culture in common, is generally remembered in the country as a case study in South African insensitivity and arrogance.
Still, Krog’s comments about restorative justice have more resonance in Rwanda then many in her audience would care to admit.
Rwanda’s prisons are overflowing with genocide suspects and after four years of prosecutions the government has acknowledged that it cannot try them all. Instead, and much to the disquiet of genocide survivors, it is reviving traditional gacaca courts, where trials are conducted by the peers of the suspects on the hills where the offences took place, and where the sentences consist of material restitution and community service rather than prison terms or execution.
Fest’Africa has received most of its funding from official French sources, and has been overwhelmingly Francophone in content. Relations between France and Rwanda remain extremely strained, since the Rwandan government, along with most observers, imparts a heavy responsibility to France for the genocide, because of its backing for the regime which organised and orchestrated the killings. This year’s Fest’Africa has thus been perceived as a discreet French gesture of atonement, at the same time reinforcing France’s favoured role as the champion of African culture.