And towering above this parade of colonial hangover stands the Belgian professor Filip Reyntjens, a man who continues to behave as though his passport came with a lifelong mandate to decide Rwandan history, identity, and politics. He is a self-anointed High Priest of Rwandan history, and perhaps the last surviving missionary convinced that African nations require his perpetual intellectual oversight.
Here you have a man whose expertiseâ€"such as it isâ€"was forged not in the crucible of objective study, but in the cozy corridors of Juvenal Habyarimana's genocidal regime, where he served as the trusted adviser, favoured interlocutor, and sometimes international representative.
He is a good example of colonial arrogance. Imagine the missionary who believed God whispered only to him; the colonial officer who insisted Africans must be 'civilized' at gunpoint. Imagine too, the image of the colonial ethnographer who classified human beings as though arranging butterflies in a laboratory; the scholar who claimed to know African societies better than Africans themselves. Imagine that class remains alive, lecturing, tweeting, summoning, and scolding long after the colonial era died.
Reyntjens embodies a puzzle unique to certain European academics who once enjoyed privileged access to African dictatorships: the powerless expert who cannot accept his irrelevance. Like an exiled monarch deprived of his throne, he still believes Rwanda should kneel when he speaks. And like every colonial intermediary before himâ€"missionaries, administrators, district commissionersâ€"he struggles to understand one simple truth: Rwanda no longer answers to him.
But colonial nostalgia is a stubborn illness. And in Reyntjens' case, it has progressed into a full-blown conditionâ€"one that reveals itself in his writings, pronouncements, and most dramatically, in his extraordinary expectation that Rwandan political leaders must still explain themselves to him.
Finding Relevance on Facebook
On 2 January 2017, Reyntjens took to his Facebook page to perform what he imagined was an academic consultation but what in reality resembled a colonial magistrate calling the 'natives' to account. He posted a draft paper written with two unnamed 'colleagues' and announced that he was 'seeking the opinion of current & former RPF leaders on precolonial history,' particularly the 'military institutions and values in post-genocide Rwanda'. The Rwandan Patriotic Front!
As Franz Fanon observes in his classic, The Wretched of the Earth, (1961) 'colonial authority is never relinquished quietly; it clings in the minds of the colonizer even after the colony claims independence'. Reyntjens' summons illustrates this perfectly.
Tell me, when was the last time a serious scholar sent out an online summons to government leaders demanding they respond to his draft? This was not peer review. This was not a consultation. This was not an engagement. It was an order. The tone was unmistakable: 'You, leaders of the RPF, you will come here and explain yourselves. I require your presence'. The colonial theatre was complete. All that was missing was a pith helmet.
Only someone used to being obeyed by African officials would dare issue such an absurd invitation. Only a man nostalgic for the days when he whispered into the ears of Habyarimana's ministers could imagine that after rebuilding Rwanda from ashes of a genocide, RPF leaders would take time to answer to him.
It is this loss of authorityâ€"this exile from relevanceâ€"that fuels his obsessive attacks on the Rwandan government. He has never forgiven post-genocide Rwanda for becoming independent not only politically, but intellectually.
It is difficult to overemphasize the delusion required to believe that Rwanda's highest political figures, men and women responsible for national recovery and development, would set aside their duties to answer a Belgian academic's public call on Facebook. But Reyntjens has never accepted that the Rwanda of 2017 or 2025 is not the Rwanda of 1978 or 1987, when he was the beloved adviser of President Juvénal Habyarimana, the regime that later orchestrated the Genocide Against the Tutsi.
There was a timeâ€"he remembers it fondlyâ€"when Rwandan ministers and senior military officers deferred to him. When his approval mattered. When he represented Rwanda at international conferences. When he shaped policy behind the scenes. Here was a young Belgian who could warn, whisper, influence, and be listened to. Those days are gone. But he acts as though they were yesterday. In summoning RPF leaders, he was not conducting scholarship. He was performing nostalgia.
Foretelling Genocide
In November 2007, during court testimony in London, Reyntjens recounted his role advising Rwanda's pre-genocide regime. His words articulate far more than he intended: 'I myself and others warned that the attack by the RPF on 1st October 1990 put the Tutsi community at great risk… I mean, there is a clear line going from the attack of 1st October 1990 to the genocide'.
Read that again. But, slowly. Try to imagine a clear line from a civil war to genocide! A Belgian professor, proud advice-giver to a government later responsible for exterminating over a million Tutsi, claims he foresaw genocide 'inevitably' emerging from a rebel attackâ€"as though genocide were a natural meteorological event, not a meticulously planned political project.
Just two categories of people have ever made that claim: genocidaires, who said 'if the Tutsi rebels attack, we shall exterminate all Tutsi,' and their ideological heirs and allies, who later insisted the genocide was an inevitable consequence of warâ€"thus absolving planners of responsibility. Which category does Reyntjens imagine he fits into? The arrogance is astonishing. Only someone deeply entangled with the planners of genocide could speak with such prophetic certainty.
The professor suggests his status as a 'Rwanda specialist' granted him prophetic insight into the inevitability of genocide. Yet the only people who 'predicted' genocide were those who either planned it or sympathized with those who did. Consider what Grégoire Kayibanda said in 1964: if refugees attack Kigali, 'it will be the end of Batutsi'.
Habyarimana's government repeated the same threat. French Presidentâ€"François Mitterrand's officials and diplomats echoed it from Paris and Kigali. These 'apocalyptic warnings' were not extrapolationsâ€"they were policy statements. The so-called predictions signaled intent. They prepared the moral terrain for extermination. To claim that the war caused genocide is to repeat the genocidal logic itself. His testimony reveals a scholar too close to powerâ€"not a neutral analyst, but a political participant.
Misleading History
The professor's long-running struggle centers on one theme: to deny that precolonial Rwanda was unified and to undermine modern Rwanda's efforts to rebuild unity. He insists Rwanda was not a nation. He argues it became a state only in the 20th century. He claims that unity is a myth fabricated by the RPF. This is not scholarship but a political project.
If Rwanda was always divided, then colonialism is absolved. If unity is an invention, then reconciliation is propaganda. Suggesting ethnicity is eternal, then genocide becomes inevitable. And if genocide was inevitable, then no oneâ€"not the Church, not the Belgian state, not the Kayibanda and Habyarimana regimesâ€"can rightly be held responsible. It is an extraordinarily convenient worldview.
To justify this argument, Reyntjens relies almost exclusively on Jan Vansina, a historian who, despite his contributions to academia, is neither infallible nor omniscient. Yet in Reyntjens' telling, Vansina becomes the sole authority whose every word must be obeyed. All other scholars, including those using anthropological evidence, archaeological findings, oral history and linguistic data, are dismissed as fantasists. The irony is enjoyable: The same man who rails against the RPF's 'myths' builds his entire narrative on selective readings, Eurocentric molds, and ideological conviction.
Reyntjens persistently denies that colonial powers invented rigid ethnic distinctions in Rwanda. He tries to downplay the appalling impact of Belgian social engineering and missionary ideology. He does not deny the Bahutu Manifesto exists. Though authored by a group of Hutu intellectuals including Grégoire Kayibanda, its conceptual architects or intellectual authors were two European priestsâ€"Arthur Dejemeppe and Chanoine Ernotteâ€"from the Catholic Church, the same Church through which colonialism exercised its dominion.
Reyntjens does not deny Kayibanda was shaped by the Churchâ€"he simply avoids analyzing the Church's role. He does not deny Belgium introduced ethnic cardsâ€"he simply pretends the categories already existed that way.
The 1957 'Manifesto' was the ideological embryo of genocideâ€"a colonial creation, sanctified by Christian missionaries who saw themselves as social engineers. How convenient that Reyntjens skips over these details. How convenient that he champions the very worldview that priests embedded into Rwanda's political DNA.
And, how useful that he insists ethnic division is timelessâ€"even though the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwandaâ€"ICTR's judgement (1998) in the Jean-Paul Akayesu case flatly contradicts him. 'One could move from one status to another, as one became rich or poor, or even through marriage… one can hardly talk of ethnic groups as regards Hutu and Tutsi, given that they share the same language and culture.'
Furthermore, the ICTR confirmed: 'In the early 1930s, Belgian authorities introduced a permanent distinction… It became mandatory for every Rwandan to carry an identity card mentioning ethnicity.' Identity cardsâ€"invented by Belgians. Cards enforced by the Church and weaponized by genocidaires. But Reyntjens wants the uninformed to believe this was all just ancient African tradition.
He is just like any other ideologue who wants the world to forget that the colonial state created the ethnic atom bomb, then handed the detonators to local extremists. Implicitly, he wishes Rwandans to continue defining themselves through the colonial lens he inherited. Pre-colonial Rwanda like many other countriesâ€"was hierarchical, had inequalitiesâ€" and yes, it had some conflicts. But hierarchy is not ethnicity. Inequality is not racial division. And, conflict is not genocide.
Reyntjens insists Rwanda was shaped by 'wars of conquest,' as though this delegitimizes the pre-colonial state. But what nation has not been shaped by conquest? If one can ask Reyntjens for clarityâ€" Is France illegitimate because of the Hundred Years' War? Is Britain a myth because of the Norman invasion? Does Belgium remain an artificial construction because it was stitched together from disparate regions in 1830? But when it comes to Africa, apparently, normal historical processes become signs of backwardness.
His argument is not historical. It is colonial. It is the belief that African states are artificial, while European states are natural. As Julius Nyerere warned, 'Colonialism leaves a legacy of inferiority and dependence that can poison the soul of both colonizer and colonized' (Nyerere, 1968, Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism).
A man left out
Perhaps no image better captures Reyntjens' predicament than that of a man standing outside a locked gate, holding a key that no longer fits, shouting instructions to people inside who have long since moved on. He cannot understand why Rwanda ignores him. He cannot tolerate that he is no longer consulted. He cannot bear that his authority evaporated with the fall of the regime he once advised.
And his bitterness is magnified by a more noticeable affront: the creation of Rwanda's 2003 Constitution, amended in 2015, without him, without his guidance, without his 'expert' hand shaping the document according to the colonialized vision of Rwanda he once defended. The nostalgia of his consultancy in Rwanda's Constitution of 1978 is real. It was his baby.
This new Constitution dismantled the very ideological edifice he supported. It rejects the rigid racial categories and colonial hierarchies that Reyntjens once defended. It codifies the unity of Rwandans rather than the divisions he insisted were eternal. It enshrines rights and dignity for all citizens, not the privilege of a select few shaped by European paternalism. It refuses to validate the narratives of division he clung to, instead constructing a legal framework that empowers Rwandans to define themselves, rather than obey the dictates of foreign 'experts.' As Kehinde Andrews emphasizes in Back to Black (2018), 'Western intellectuals often fail to see the emancipatory agency of formerly colonized peoples, preferring narratives that reinforce their own authority'.
In short, the Constitution represents everything Reyntjens fought against: A Rwanda that is sovereign in its history, unified in its identity, and equitable in its governance. The fact that he was neither consulted nor even acknowledged in this process is more than a professional snubâ€"it is a symbolic end to the world in which he once wielded unquestioned authority. His obsession with criticizing the RPF, his Facebook summons, his endless historiographical attacksâ€"all these now read like tantrums from a scholar who has lost control over the narrative he once believed was his domain.
Picture him pacing in his study room, surrounded by yellowing notes from the Habyarimana era, sighing in frustration: 'Why will these ungrateful Rwandans not let me define their history anymore? Why do they insist on reconstructing their country using their own sources? Why will they not accept that I, a Belgian professor, know their pre-colonial institutions better than they do? Where are my ministers? Why do they not come when I call?'
Imagine his sadness as he checks Facebook notifications, expecting an RDF general to comment on his draft paper. Imagine his disbelief when none do. Imagine the existential crisis.
If satire is meant to expose absurdity, then Reyntjens is a satirist's dream. He is the missionary who converted no one. He was the colonial officer after independence. He is the choir master after the choir has left the church. He is an expert without a subject. It would be funny if it were not so harmful. He has not merely misinterpreted Rwanda's pastâ€"he has actively contributed to narratives that excuse genocidaires, mislead policymakers, and perpetuate colonial misunderstandings about African political systems.
Rwanda's worst crime, in Reyntjens' eyes, is not authoritarianism, or human rights abuses, or flawed democracy. No, Rwanda's true offense is something else: Rwanda stopped needing him.
He can't accept it, and he will not. And so he wages intellectual war not on Rwanda's government but on Rwanda's right to interpret itself. His struggle is not with facts, but with independence. Not with history, but with sovereignty. Not with the RPF, but with the loss of a colonial worldview in which European scholars sit atop African societies like omniscient judges.
The tragedy of Reyntjens is that he cannot recognize that the world has changed. The tragedy for Rwandans is that his ideas continue to circulateâ€"quoted uncritically by journalists, repeated by policymakers, and adored by those who romanticize colonial anthropology.
Reyntjens' fixation with denying Rwanda's pre-colonial unity is not academicâ€"it is psychological. Precolonial Rwanda contradicts his worldview. Post-genocide Rwanda ignores him. The RPF clearly rejects the categories he prefers. And most intolerable of all: Rwanda has risen without him.
He cannot forgive the RPF for taking Rwanda out of the orbit of colonial academia. He cannot forgive them for building a nation that does not require validation from white professors in Antwerp or Brussels. He cannot forgive the RPF for refusing to worship at the altar of the colonial minded academics' historical gospel.
And so, in his writings, he returns again and again to telling-off Rwanda like a school headmaster correcting disrespectful children.
Perhaps we should beg the professor's pardon. After all, it must be painfulâ€"agonizing, evenâ€"to go from being the regime-favored consultant of Habyarimana's government, the man entrusted to speak for Rwanda in European cities, to being an online scold whose Facebook summonses are ignored by the leaders he once expected to lecture.
Reyntjens has not realized that Rwanda has moved onâ€"and the people he thinks can speak down to no longer look up at him. He has not realized that the ideological empire he defends is goneâ€"buried under the rubble of its own crimes. What remains is a colonial hangover masquerading as scholarship. And, like all hangovers, it is loud, unsteady, and utterly convinced that yesterday's importance still matters today.
Tom Ndahiro
Source : https://en.igihe.com/opinion/article/filip-reyntjens-and-his-colonial-hangover
