If France ever doubted that the new Rwanda was a lost cause then the news that the tiny African state had established a cricket board was final confirmation that it had gone over to the other side. Rwanda's current president decided long ago that he could not be bothered to learn French. His government asked to join the Commonwealth even though the country was never a British colony. And then there are the billboards screaming mobile-phone adverts in English outside the padlocked French cultural center.
Yet little more than a decade ago, France claimed Rwanda as a solid member of the Francophone bloc viewed from Paris as a great family, with itself as a generous and indulgent parent, particularly to its former African possessions. In Rwanda, only about one in eight of the population actually spoke French, but it was the official language, and the people who mattered — the country's political elite in a one-party state — embraced Paris as a source of cultural identity and protection.
Today, not only is English flourishing in Rwanda but France is widely talked of as the enemy. In some quarters, French is thought of as the language of death; of those who killed and those who stayed to be murdered in the genocide of 1994. The young elite posing in the bustling cafes and night clubs of Rwanda's capital, Kigali, flaunt English as the language of the strong, of those who resisted the genocide, of the anti-French.
To understand this remarkable transformation you only have to talk to Venuste Kayimahe. By April 1994, he had worked for the French government for 25 years but it still, he says, left him to die when Hutu extremists unleashed the slaughter that took 800,000 Tutsi lives in 100 days. He was employed as an audio-visual editor at the French cultural center in Kigali and happened to be watching a football match on television there with his wife and two of his seven children on the evening two missiles shot down President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane and kick-started the genocide. Kayimahe is a Tutsi.
"Five of my children were in one place and I was in the cultural center and the killing had started and I couldn't get to them. I was wondering how I would protect them," he says. "It was quite impossible to escape Kigali because they were killing people all over." Kayimahe hid in the cultural center and called its French director, Anne Cros, to beg for help to get his family to safety. Cros said there was nothing she could do until French troops landed in Rwanda. Two days later, she arrived with the soldiers.
"I thought they were there to save us but she said they were there to collect some official files. I begged for help. I pleaded with her. I showed her my children. She said 'No' and left," says Kayimahe. He later learned that the same day one of his other children, 13-year-old Aimee, was murdered by the notorious machete-wielding Hutu militia, the Interahamwe, meaning "we who work together."
The French army turned its back on many others, including the French embassy's Tutsi staff, who were mostly abandoned to their deaths despite desperate pleas to diplomats they had worked with for years. The French soldiers did rescue some Rwandans. They took the assassinated president's wife (a notorious anti-Tutsi extremist in her own right), and various Hutu politicians who helped organize the genocide. They also remembered the French embassy dog, which was carefully loaded on to an army lorry while a Tutsi man who ran up to beg for help was turned away.
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