Editor,I would like to respond to Joseph Rwagatare’s article, “Of blinkers, glory and out of dark Africa narrative”, published in The New Times on September 10.Mr Rwagatare is a commentator, and as such he has a licence to express his opinion while Jeffrey Gettleman is a reporter who purports to write facts. And as the late US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.”Mr Gettleman attempts to pass off his clearly ignorant opinions on Rwandan issues for incontrovertible facts. But even more importantly, Rwandans have paid a very heavy price for these kinds of narratives that Mr Rwagatare correctly says have been fed by Western prejudices and inaccuracies that have become permanent points of reference, even by Africans.Refusing to believe that the kind of sophisticated social organisation they found in pre-colonial Rwanda could have been the work of mere negroes (whose intelligence they considered barely above that of mere apes), early European missionaries and anthropologists came up with the theory that the Tutsi must be the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel who must have arrived in the Great Lakes of Central Africa via Abyssinia (Ethiopia).Indoctrination in schools and through other means ended up convincing even Rwandans who should have known better that that was indeed our history.We know the consequences of this narrative. We shouldn’t allow the likes of Gettleman – for whom this kind of cartoonish meme of Rwanda and its leadership is a constant – to frame who we are, why we do things the way we do, and where we want to go.Mr Rwagatare has framed the problem of the likes of Gettleman extremely well. Let’s wrest our history and our story from those of his ilk.Mwene Kalinda, Kigali
