The Sunday Mail
IN “Hotel Rwanda” — a film released in 2005 to dramatise the unconscionably senseless ethnic bloodbath and slaughter that took place in the Central African country in 1994 — we are shown Hollywood in all its awesome and riveting story-telling glory.
Directed by Irish screenwriter and director Terry George, the movie is supposedly based on a “real-life” story that both celebrates and romanticises humanity’s ability to rise above toxic tribalism for the greater good.
The hero in this story, who embodies this selfless and humanistic attribute, is Paul Rusesabagina, who, as an ethnic Hutu, went against the murderous instinct of his tribesmen to protect ethnic Tutsis who had taken refuge in Hotel Mille Collines, where he served as general manager.
All in all, he reportedly saved more than 1 000 Tutsis from being hacked with machetes by Hutus who were hell-bent on eliminating them for, among other unfathomable allegations, oppression under colonial rule.
You see, in their typical divide-and-rule style, the Belgians, who had previously superintended over subjugated Rwanda before independence in 1962, had sided with the Tutsis, who were tall, slender and fair-skinned, and hence were regarded as bearing close resemblance to the perceivably superior Caucasian race.
The tables turned when Hutus successfully revolted to usher in black majority rule.
However, to make its story believable, Hollywood cast Rusesabagina as a fallible individual who unethically extracted favours from his politically influential tribesmen — most of who were responsible for the genocide — by plying
them with Cuban cigars (cohibas) and whiskey.
We are told that this gave him the leverage to negotiate clemency for the hapless souls lucky enough to have sought help from him.
Essentially, he became the messiah, while the hotel he managed became the sanctuary in which salvation could be guaranteed.
But, until 2005 when the film was released — 11 years after the genocide that claimed close to a million souls in 100 days of unremitting bloodletting and ghoulish violence — Rusesabagina was a little-known individual.
In fact, in 1996, he left Rwanda to Belgium, where he became a taxi driver in Brussels.
Just imagine!
Why would such a hero who supposedly selflessly served and saved his fellow countrymen as a hotel manager find succour in driving around aliens in a foreign land?
Bishop Lazi really does not know what it is about troubled Africans finding a restful home in Belgium, which was responsible for some of the worst atrocities ever known to man in both colonial and post-colonial Africa.
Tanzanian opposition leader Tundu Lissu, who was resoundingly walloped by the late Dr John Magufuli (may his dear revolutionary soul rest in eternal peace) in the 2020 elections, is now happy to call Belgium home.
What happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — then known as the Belgian Congo — under Belgium’s King Leopold II, who viewed it as his personal treasury chest, was just horrible.
Close to half its population, or 10 million people then, was slaughtered between 1880 and 1902 for various reasons as he pillaged one of continent’s richest countries.
Even after the DRC became independent in 1960, its youthful Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was not only assassinated by Belgian mercenaries, but his lifeless body was dismembered and dissolved in acid.
One of the assassins even kept Lumumba’s tooth as a souvenir.
But the Bishop digresses!
After the film, which was put together at a cost of US$17,5 million, was released, the taxi driver experienced a meteoric rise in fortune.
He became a guest in the hallowed halls of the White House, where he was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom — the US’s highest civilian honour — on November 9, 2005.
Four years later, he moved from Belgium to the US.
Manufactured Heroes
1 John 5 verse 21 warns us: “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols”, while Deuteronomy 12:30-32 adds: “Take care that you be not ensnared to follow them, after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, ‘How did these nations serve their gods? — that I also may do the same.’ You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, for every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.”
But Rusesabagina was far from the noble man who was portrayed in the film.
From his new home in the US, he co-founded the Rwanda Movement for Democratic Change, whose armed wing, National Liberation Front, launched putschist attacks in 2018 and 2019 to oust President Paul Kagame, arguing that “the time has come for us to use any means possible to bring about change in Rwanda. As all political means have been tried and failed, it is time to attempt our last resort.”
The attacks, which were launched from neighbouring countries, killed nine people and injured many others.
After being baited and entrapped by security agents into unknowingly flying into Rwanda, where he was arrested, it later emerged during the trial that his account of how he saved Tutsis during the 1994 genocide was not entirely accurate.
Kagame fittingly called him a “manufactured hero”. Kikiki.
There are critical questions to be asked here. If the mighty US did not as much as lift a finger when people were being mercilessly and horrifically butchered in Rwanda during the genocide, why would they exalt this little-known taxi driver 11 years later?
Why Rusesabagina, who didn’t do anything to stop the violence perpetrated by his tribesmen?
And, for a country that has gone as far as deploying troops and toppling regimes in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan for reportedly harbouring terrorists, why would it take no action against an individual who was actually actively planning and financing terrorism to destabilise a constitutionally elected government in Rwanda from America?
The Bishop deliberately chose to tell you the story of Rusesabagina, who was
convicted and sentenced on Monday, to warn you to be wary of Western-manufactured heroes, whose real objective is to deceive people while they mind foreign interests.
We also have our fair share of manufactured heroes, whose titles are usually invariably prefixed by phrases such as “award-winning” so and so just to give them undeserved gravitas and anoint them as social influencers.
They could be goat-herders who are conveniently called awarding-winning investigative journalists when their only supposed claim to fame is working for a UK broadcaster in a largely obscure and colourless career.
For this reason, and only this reason, they prance around as little gods in the profession, whose integrity and every word must not be questioned.
But their real mission as fixers of Western media is to keep the negative information and publicity flowing to foreign capitals.
These manufactured heroes can be untried UK law lecturers who haven’t even seen a day in court yet they weekly churn out legal opinions to impressionable followers that always crumble each time they are tested before the courts.
Well, their real mission is to present anti-establishment sentiment as enlightened. Or they could be hopeless authors who cannot even hold a candle to literary stalwarts such as Dambudzo Marechera, Charles Mungoshi, Chenjerai Hove, Patrick Chakaipa and Mordecai Hamutyinei, yet we continue to hear their ineffectual works have been nominated or have won “prestigious” awards in Europe.
However, they are only props cast as influential apostles of regime change.
Well, the greatest works are those that win the hearts and minds of the people for which they are intended.
And whatever nonsense these manufactured heroes spew, which is invariably anti-establishment sentiment ventilated through social media, is swallowed hook, line and sinker by starry-eyed followers ostensibly because they have been endorsed by the West.
Films, publishing houses and Western media are part of a “cultural” global construct that minds Western interests and foists its ideologies, values and world view on the developing world.
But manufactured heroes are only an expendable product with a short shelf-life — they can be easily disposed of, once they serve their purpose.
Remember Jamal Kashoggi, a columnist with the Washington Post, who died in the most gruesome of ways and yet the world did not take any notice; Saddam Hussein, who was hanged after falling out of favour with the US, which had incidentally engineered his rise to power.
You should also spare a thought for Afghanistan “interpreters” who collaborated with hostile foreign forces but have now been left to the tender mercies of the Taliban, who are now directly engaging with Washington.
Well, the 67-year-old Paul Rusesabagina will spend 25 years in jail for his transgressions, while life in the US goes on.
Sellouts do not seem to learn, do they?
Bishop out!
