Terry George
Hotel Rwanda

In a nice place, twelve kilometers from Brussels, amidst the obsessive and chilly wind, stands the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Someone told me that by the end of 2010, the current setup, guilty of being considered subtly racist, will be history, and so I thought that maybe, anthropologically speaking, under these conditions, it could also be interesting. I tried, I went there.
Elephants made of pieces of bark await outside, inside a series of exhibitions - the usual: sticks, daggers, masks, animals - so haphazardly thrown together and so unworthy of attention that they don't even have the slightest caption, after all what is there to say about savages who slept on straw!?!
The audience, under these conditions, is obviously mostly composed of elementary school children pressing their cheeks against the glass to observe stuffed animals or gaping at the striped ninja, a sort of Central African ninja dressed in those typical patterns of the "burine" who crowd Italian TV studios. A ninja who, compared to his Asian counterparts, also boasts virility, but you know: Asian junk sells well and all at the expense of quality.
Not a word, however, on Leopold II, not a word on the civil war that flared up over coltan, not a word on Zaire, not a word on Baudouin, nothing. Everything concerning Africa begins and ends with the gaze of the Belgians. History starts when they arrive, history ends when they leave. Simple and painless if you're born in the right hemisphere.
As I exit, with venom rising, I see this mixed couple, with their daughters running around them, wandering the museum gardens. I first think of Spike Lee, "Jungle Fever", I'm a bit ashamed and change my thought, so I turn to Carlo Pisacane and when he wrote that democracy is a sleeper, better nothing before the revolution.
- If I were a negro, Christ - it goes through my body like this, while the wind keeps pissing me off and while the daughters of the guy who looks like Samuel L. Jackson and in a mixed couple keep hopping - if it were up to me, I'd blow up this damn museum. There's not a word about Rwanda. Not one. After all, why should there be if there's not one on Congo? Africa ends in 1960, with the "year of Africa." What humor, bastards. - I tell myself, then I try not to think about it and I leave while the wind keeps pissing me off. With this wind here, everything is impossible.

- So, what is the real difference between a Hutu and a Tutsi?
- According to the Belgian colonialists the Tutsi are taller and more elegant. It was the Belgians who created the division.
- How?
- They selected people: those with smaller noses, lighter skin... they usually measured the width of the nose. The Belgians used the Tutsi to rule the country and when they left they left power to the Hutu and obviously the Hutu took revenge on the Tutsi elite for all the years of repression.

"Hotel Rwanda" is a 2004 film. It is not interesting, the good is good and the bad is bad; it is not stylistically compelling; it doesn't intrigue with characters; it doesn't have a narrative structure that keeps you there, drooling without closing your eyes even for a second. It is not beautiful, at least I would not call it beautiful, but it is necessary. Necessary to bring to light, to common people, to the obtuse, to the mediocre a piece of history that just passed and went unnoticed, among our dinner tables, between a spoonful of soup and a glass of water.
One million deaths in one hundred days - from April to mid-July of '94. Ten thousand deaths a day in general indifference, gruesomely, machete deaths, a river of blood, while the French sold weapons to the Rwandan army, while the UN had other things to think about. So many deaths that I can't imagine them, so many that they seem fake, undetermined, I don't grasp, round number, whatever, but then it goes like this - official data in hand: an entire Naples slaughtered in one hundred days. I shiver. One death changes your life, but what remains of your life after one million deaths, after ten thousand deaths a day?

"Hotel Rwanda" tells the story of Paul Rusesabagina and his struggles, his pain in seeing the pain of his people and the corruption he must constantly carry out to save his family and people, no Tutsi or Hutu, but people, therefore undetermined Tutsi and Hutu. Making a counting mistake, in the turmoil of those days: he will think of eight hundred people, making four hundred missing from the list and packing them all in the Hotel des Mille Collines, Sabena's headquarters in Kigali. Paul Rusesabagina the good one, 100% good, so much so that he realizes he has bowed to the "white" will, having let himself be convinced and captured by the "style", by the Western well-being. Paul Rusesabagina who will become what he is only by realizing that he is not even a negro, but merely an African and as such no one cares about him. Little more than trash. Indeed, even less.

A film about the horrors of colonialism and made, exploiting the grammar of the average man, to make the average man understand that his butt seated comfortably is at ease because someone else's is suffering. Like in a Crass record.
A film about a genocide that is not considered a genocide since the Tutsi and Hutu are not real ethnic, racial, or religious groups, but only the fruit of Belgian fantasy, because you know, every world is a village and if there weren't Walloons and Flemings what would our Belgian satire live on? But yes, let's do it here too, they'll have fun. Just like that.
A film about a B-list genocide, perhaps even C-list considering that the Armenians, although not mattering to anyone, have their own day of remembrance. Oh, but they are Africans, what do you want!?!, they don't even have "propaganda". They only own themselves. Or rather, not even that, but especially: where is Armenia?

One hopes, but there's nothing good in all of this. Nothing. Nothing to hope for.
Today, Paul Rusesabagina, nearly fifty-six years old, lives sheltered in Belgium. Reiteration of pain, I suppose, like going to buy shoes directly from the factory instead of the store. Cement shoes, very comfortable for plowing the depths. There, I hope - that's what I have to hope for - that at least he lives in Matonge.