Editor,

RE: "Richard Kandt was a brutal enslaver and colonial agent” (The New Times, December 21).

There were no such things as ‘European explorers’; at least as is often implied, as people on a quest to expand knowledge of the world beyond Europe without any pecuniary interest. These were in reality scouts on a reconnaissance mission to identify places and people they could pillage.

There is no reason to be diplomatic about this historic reality.

And, yes, Kandt never founded Kigali; it had existed as an on-and-off capital of the Kingdom of Rwanda for centuries. People should try to unlearn their euro-centric deformation of their own history.

Mwene Kalinda