By joining the TikTok bandwagon, a whole new world has opened up for this 43-year-old—a world of skits, hilariously earnest diatribes and trendy dances. While scrolling through the Chinese App yesterday, two videos stood out for me. The first, by @63creates (the brains behind #The250Stories) and titled ‘OF COURSE WE ARE RWANDAN...’, was a humorous take on the quirks that made us ‘Rwandan’, namely our staring, our tardiness, and our inability to differentiate ‘r’ and ‘l’. After a few minutes on that App, I moved on to Twitter. I'd barely opened it when I was accosted by a tweet titled ‘SA traveler’s views on Africa’s weirdest country’, and as soon as I saw the number of comments and retweets under it, I knew that the African country being described in the video was the one I call ‘home’. The tweet was a TikTok video posted by a lady wearing a Springbok (that’s the name of the South Africa rugby team) jersey explaining why she had “no interest” in ever coming back to Rwanda after being to the country twice. Complaining about the constant security checks, she said that something felt “off”. The cherry on top was her observation that Rwandans didn’t strike her as being “African”. According to her, the true African spirit manifests in people who are “warm, kind, welcoming”. Rwandans, to her, were none of these things; we were, in her words, “robotic”. I noted two kinds of reactions to the tweet. The first, mainly from other Africans, agreed with her. The other (mainly from Rwandans, but some other Africans as well) pushed back on her description; in fact, a few people (rather unkindly, in my opinion) went so far as to compare her nation’s well-known security challenges and xenophobia towards migrants with Rwanda’s renowned safety and welcoming attitude towards African people. Looking beyond all the other comments she made, it was the one about our ‘African-ness’ (or lack thereof) that got me thinking. What I was thinking about was the similarity in the language she used in the TikTok video to ‘other’ us in relation to other Africans and the way the German and Belgian colonizers used similar language over a century ago to do the same thing. Let us recall that after finding a well-organized, centralized kingdom in Rwanda, rooted in its culture, the colonizers chose to describe us as ' ‘difficult to get close to’, ‘enigmatic’, ‘serious’ and ‘unexcitable’. Refusing to believe that mere Africans could behave in a way so foreign to what they had experienced elsewhere, they brought their callipers, measured our heads and noses, and declared that a section of Rwandans were too civilized to be mere Africans; they had to have been descendants of white people. According to them, we were offspring of Jews via the biblical Ham, the son of Noah. And although the colonial Hamitic hypothesis was found to be without merit, its racist undertones continue to manifest in many ways. Yesterday’s TikTok video was one such manifestation. Moving beyond social media videos and whatnot, I’ve been watching the Congolese electoral process with more and more alarm. I knew that the presidential candidates would do and say anything to win; however, I didn’t think that Tshisekedi would go so far as to send death threats President Kagame’s way. But five days ago, he did just that. Addressing a baying crowd in Bukavu, he promised, “je lui promets de finir comme Adolf Hitler” (I promise him to end up like Adolf Hitler). With rhetoric like that, and having armed and financed the Rwandan genocidal militia, FDLR (as proven by the UN itself), you’d think that the international community would treat the tension in the region with seriousness. But as I listened to submissions in the UN Security Council on Monday, I realized that nothing Tshisekedi said (or did) would be treated as the serious breaches they were. I can see that the Biden administration has now taken more than a cursory interest in the DR Congo crisis, which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. However, I suspect that even the Americans cannot put the genie back in the bottle. I doubt that Tshisekedi can be a partner for peace. There has been too much hate speech as well as too many firearms distributed into too many dangerous hands. Perhaps the only way out of this is a change of Congolese leadership, but I doubt that that will happen. But you never know; we are in the holiday period, so maybe a Christmas miracle can happen. Fingers crossed, it will. If not, hold onto your seats. The writer is a socio-political commentator
