EDITOR'S NOTE: The subtext for most Western media coverage on Rwanda is that Africans are so driven to periodically slaughtering each other that they are incapable of governing themselves. But the root cause of the violence is too many people fighting over ever diminishing resources. PNS commentator Emmanuel Ohajah is a London-based Nigerian writer.
By Emmanuel Ohajah, Pacific News Service, London
The entire world is told by media - mostly Western or Western-controlled - that tribal factions have turned Rwanda into a bloodbath, with rival mobs hacking their victims to death. It would seem that all of Rwanda's problems can be put down to a bloodlust peculiar to Africans.
Yet for Africans and those who know the region there is only one root source of the violence: more and more people are competing for fewer and fewer resources. The struggle for ever scarcer resources - and as a direct consequence for political power - is what fuels conflicts in Rwanda, Burundi and elsewhere in Africa. The real problems are economic and social ones, not tribalism.
Each year sub-Saharan Africa repays its Western creditors $10 billion, more than four times the amount the region spends on health and education. The IMF has not helped the situation. It has regularly taken $2 billion more in interest payments than it has provided in loans since 1987.
This flow of wealth, from South to North, has resulted in a decline in new investment in industry and the basic infrastructure of society. The collapse in the prices of key African exports like tea, coffee, tin and other commodities has combined with the wealth outflow to create major hardship throughout Central Africa.
Coffee prices have fallen by more than 34 percent over the past decade. Rwanda is vitally dependent on this commodity and neighboring Burundi receives more than 80 percent of its revenue from coffee. But the endless drumbeat in the Western media about the moral crisis in African society seems more than sensationalist pandering to TV viewers and newspaper readers.
From South Africa to Algeria, African societies are presented as depraved and degenerate. Images of Somali warlords who steal food from aid agencies merge into those of black township youths with necklaces of burning tires and Islamic fundamentalists in the Sudan who crucify Christians at every opportunity.
The unspoken conclusion all this reporting leads to is that Africa is intent on tearing itself apart and therefore is incapable of governing itself. This is not the first time Africa has been the target of this kind of propaganda onslaught.
During the 1950s and 1960s African liberation movements were the targets of incessant vilification. What the colonial powers understood by independence at that time involved their own behind-the-scenes retention of political power and moral authority. And when the liberation movements sought to break out of this stranglehold, the media of the colonial powers struck back by calling into question their ability to rule themselves. Britain, especially, in this way sought to establish its moral superiority and its right to rule, independence or not.
Africa is once again being demonized by Western governments and media. Today's reports and commentaries on Rwanda are long on horror stories but woefully short on explanations for the violence. The idea is to have viewers and readers automatically think "savagery" when Africa flashes on the screen or appears in lurid headlines.
In the 1950s, it was the political power of the colonialists that was being challenged in Africa and throughout the Third World. Today, with the end of the Cold War, the West is grappling with the loss of its own moral certainties even as its moral authority is being challenged throughout the non-Western world. In this context intervention in Africa, whether rhetorical, political or military, offers Westerners an opportunity to walk tall again.
This may explain the growing trend among observers to suggest that Africa needs saving from itself. Whether famine in Somalia, fundamentalism in the Sudan or tribalism in Rwanda, there is always some scourge afflicting Africa which demands that the old imperial powers once again take up the White Man's Burden. The sovereignty of African states is being questioned more and more. Calls to suspend sovereignty, couched in the language of humanitarianism, have already been voiced in regard to Somalia and now Rwanda.
If Africans are not careful, colonialism will be back in Africa before you can say "White Man's Burden."
