"Africa’s Murderous Professors" by Michael Chege, in The National Interest (Winter 1996–97), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 540, Washington, D.C. 20036.

When the predominant Hutus savagely eliminated some 850,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, their weapon of choice was the garden machete, and it was widely assumed that the driving force behind this genocide was just as primitive—"tribalism." In fact, says Chege, a citizen of Kenya who is director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville, "The catechism of the madness that... overtook Rwanda was authored not by some African magician extolling the supremacy of the Hutu race in ancient ‘tribal’ wars, but by accomplished Rwandan professional historians, journalists, and sociologists at the service of a quasi-traditionalist and genocidally inclined cabal."

President Juvénal Habyarimana’s Hutudominated regime might have reached a compromise with the Tutsi guerrilla forces— the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF)—in October 1993, Chege says, had it not been "for the determination of a group of Hutu intellectuals and extremists to keep the Tutsis out of power at all costs."

Working with the extremist Akazu faction of the ruling Hutus, Chege says, Leon Mugesira and Ferdinand Nahimana, both professors of history at Rwandan National University at Butare, along with another member of the faculty, Vincent Ntzimana, "manufactured doctrines of Hutu ethnic supremacy depicting all Tutsis as a malignant cancer in the nation’s history that deserved to be excised once and for all."

Shrill calls for the extermination of the Tutsis, broadcast on Rwandan radio and carried in print, mobilized Hutu peasants, militias, and the urban unemployed for murder. After the massacres, Emmanuel Bugingo, the new rector of the university’s Butare campus, lamented that "all the killing in Rwanda was carefully planned by intellectuals and those intellectuals passed through this university."

After the Tutsi RPF seized the capital of Kigali in May 1994, Prime Minister Paul Kagame’s government provided human rights groups with the names of 463 surviving ringleaders of the 1994 genocide. Many of them have been traced to Kenya. At the University of Nairobi’s Chiromo campus, for example, Charles Nyandwi—number 35 on the Rwandan list of war criminals—was appointed in 1995 to teach applied mathematics.

"Professor Nyandwi and his colleagues are in good company," Chege writes. "The Kenyan government has been repeatedly accused by Amnesty International of the systematic torture of its political opponents." Academics there, too, have joined the regime in fanning ethnic hatred (against the Kikuyu minority). Genocide is also a real possibility in Zaire, Nigeria, and elsewhere in Africa. Hatemongering by African intellectuals, Chege warns, must not be tolerated by Africans—or by Western aid givers.