Zone into Africa and you will notice that Rwanda’s neighbours are Burundi (slightly larger than Rwanda) Uganda (9 times bigger than Rwanda), Tanzania (35 times bigger than Rwanda), and Congo (89 times bigger than Rwanda). Rwanda is the smallest in size, but over the years because of military backing from the West, ( mainly the US) Rwanda has managed to bully all its neighbours, including the largest of them; the DRC or Congo. When my wife heard that she threw her hands up in exasperation and quipped, “ That’s like if Luxembourg were to bully Germany”.

As baffling as it is, I am going to get into why and how Rwanda is doing this, but first I would like to give you some context. One must bear in mind that African borders were drawn in the most senseless and crude manner by western colonisers who invaded Africa ( a continent 3 times the size of Europe ) and merged 10,000 polities (political entities) into just 40 colonies. The new territories were artificial territories that paid no attention the diversity of the people, their monarchies, their chiefdoms, their ethnicities. People who shared no common language, history and even religion inherited what the west thought was a modern Africa. Most colonisers practised the divide and rule policy which basically meant privileging one minority ethnicity over the majority. When the Western colonisers left, it was evident that powerful ethnicities would try to subjugate weaker ethnicities and today certain conflicts quite often has led to ethnic pogroms and genocide.