South Africa, Rwanda show the tragic brevity of African memory

South Africa, Rwanda show the tragic brevity of African memory

By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
cobbo@nation.co.ke

In a different time and country, the words of South African street trader Veronica Khoza wouldn't have been surprising.

In a recent story in Britain's Guardian newspaper, Khoza was quoted as showing utterly no sympathy for the African immigrants who had been attacked and killed or run out of their homes by South African criminal hordes.

"They [South African employers] will give the jobs to Zimbabweans because they will work for cheap…" Khoza said, dismissing the latter as cowards. "They have run away," she said. "All they do is complain how horrible Mugabe is to them. Why don't they stay in their country and fight? We fought apartheid. Many people were killed. Many people went to prison, even children. The white soldiers were here, in Alexandria, and they shot people. We didn't run away."

Perhaps Khoza does actually believe that, but as the Guardian accurately reported, South Africans – very many of them – ran away from apartheid oppression, some to "join the liberation struggle and ended up in Zimbabwe, Angola, Tanzania, Mozambique, [Uganda, Zambia, Botswana]. It is a source of bitterness among immigrants from those countries that the hospitality they offered is not reciprocated."

This Khoza-type amnesia is not unique to South Africans. In Zimbabwe itself, Mugabe came to power as a freedom fighter against a racist regime. And he has forgotten that history and imposed a despotism on his country as bad as Ian Smith's supremacist rule.

In Uganda, the NRM government came to power on a strong human-rights platform after a five-year rebellion provoked by a  stolen election in December 1980.

Many populist African governments have swept to power on the promise of ending corruption, and gone on to plunder their countries more than the regimes they replaced.

ONE VIEW IS THAT WE REPEAT these mistakes because Africa "doesn't have a long history of  written records." As a result, people forget the past easily because they don't have constant reminders, and later generations are ignorant because there are few historical accounts for them to study.

If that were the case, then the recent immigrant violence wouldn't have happened because one admirable thing President Thabo Mbeki's rule will bequeath to South Africa is the impressive museums and memorials of the struggle against apartheid.

But even the Hector Perterson Memorial Museum to the victims of the Sharpeville massacre in Soweto, evocative as it might be, still takes some emotion out of the horrors that the apartheid regime visited on the protestors  on March 21, 1960. At least 69 people were killed, and over 180 injured.

Part of the problem is that South African commemoration of the anti-apartheid struggle tends to be devoid of references to the African countries and patriots who supported them. Secondly, a museum seems not to speak powerfully about African tragedies. This point was brought home to me in Rwanda recently.

The Kigali Memorial Centre to the nearly one million victims of  the 1994 genocide used to be a powerful place. In the early years, the mass reburial graves being open so you would begin the tour by viewing the grim handiwork of the genocidaires, and by the time you got to see the photographs, the instruments of death and the video shows inside, you were already shaken up.

Now the graves are full, and they have been sealed. The shock has gone out of it, as they look like giant food drying platforms. The effect on the rest of the centre is strange. It now feels like an exhibition, instead of a memorial.

Africa will continue to have this crisis of memory, because even in Rwanda you get the sense that the genocide is already a faded memory for some people.




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Jean-Louis Kayitenkore
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