Revisiting Rwanda
It’s November 2018, and I’m presenting a talk on some of the latest research from DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence company where I work. DeepMind, widely regarded as one of the top AI labs in the world, shot to fame in 2016 for building AlphaGo, the program that defeated Lee Sedol, a legendary champion of the ancient Chinese game of Go. AlphaGo attained its extraordinary Go skills using a technique called “deep learning”, which is also driving a worldwide boom in AI investment. I’ve now got to the part of my talk where I draw attention to the shortcomings of the usual deep learning methods, and sketch some improvements that might take us closer to the science fiction vision of truly intelligent machines. And just then I’m struck by an uncanny feeling, as if I were in a peculiar dream. You see, I’m not in Europe, America, or Asia, the usual venues for these sorts of talks. I’m in Africa. Specifically I’m in Kigali, Rwanda, at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, whose modern premises are on a busy highway taking traffic to and from the thriving city centre. Well, so what? Why should that give me an uncanny feeling? In the past, Africa might not have been a continent you would associate with cutting edge technology, but these days things are different. No, it’s not just because I’m in Africa. It’s because I’m in Kigali. And the thing is, I’ve been here before. I was here in October 1990, when the Rwandan Civil War broke out, and I haven’t been back since.
Everyone nowadays has heard of the Rwandan genocide. There are books and movies and TV series. Tourists in Kigali can learn the details by visiting the Genocide Memorial Centre on the city’s outskirts, whose graphic exhibitions do not make for easy viewing. The genocide began on 7th April 1994, when the incumbent president’s plane was shot down over Kigali airport. The Centre’s displays document the 100 days of incomprehensible horror that ensued. 800,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered by Hutu extremists, cruelly and brutally. Most were killed simply for being ethnically Tutsi, the outcome of a viciously effective hate campaign. The killing was brought to an end in June by the military actions of the RPF, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda and architect of the country’s remarkable economic revival. Yes, everyone has heard of the genocide. But few people seem to know that the genocide was the culmination of the Rwandan Civil War, which began on 1st October 1990. That was when the RPF, then a refugee army, invaded Rwanda from Uganda.
Moti and I had been planning the trip for months. We were looking for adventure. After lots of research, we worked out that Zaïre (now DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo) was the craziest place we could go. The trouble was, you couldn’t get a visa for Zaïre in London. You had to get one from a neighbouring African country. Such as Rwanda, a nice, safe, stable country, where we could also see the gorillas after we picked up the visas. That was our plan. We arrived on 2nd October 1990. We had no idea what was in store for us. Soon after landing, we learned there had been a rebel incursion in the North East. But we paid little attention to this news, and soon after settling in to our hostel — a sparsely apportioned establishment hosting a handful of Western travellers in a couple of dormitories — we set out for the Embassy of Zaïre. We filled out the necessary forms and handed over our passports, expecting to pick them up in two days, stamped with the requisite visas. But things didn’t work out that way.
In 2018, the older Rwandans I told my story to, those old enough to remember the genocide, were circumspect. “Everyone has a story,” said a guide in Nyungwe forest whose family came to Rwanda from Uganda in 1996. Younger Rwandans are proud of the way their country is today, the pace of change, the economic growth, the potential. The past is something they think about each year on 7th April, when the whole country embarks on a period of remembrance and mourning. For the rest of the year, the future is what matters. In 2018, Rwanda is a country whose institutes of higher education teach courses on artificial intelligence. But if someone had told me in October 1990 that one day I would come back to Kigali to deliver a talk on the future of AI, I would never have believed them.
The diary I kept records what happened on the night of 4th October. “A few gunshots woke me up at about 2 o’clock in the morning, then there was silence, just the singing of the cicadas. Fifteen minutes later and all hell broke loose. There was heavy automatic gunfire, very close, all around us, left and right. Some shots seemed to be in our street and you could hear the bullets ricocheting through the trees. We all ran for cover into the corridor, torches and blankets and foam mats. Then at 4:30 in the morning, just before sunrise, there was a second wave of fierce gunfire, just as close. This went on for fifteen minutes to half an hour. Silence again. The window panes began to lighten and the birds struck up a rousing chorus, with occasional gunfire to provide the rhythm section. Back to our beds for a while. Then, more distant, somewhere near the airport, very heavy fire. Machine guns and artillery or tanks. I saw a single arc of tracer fire across the sky. Booming artillery and staccato machine guns all about the hillside. Then it all started up around here again, even closer than before. More bullets ricocheting through the trees. A couple of shots that must have been almost outside the window. This went on until it was quite light. There was occasional gunfire for hours afterwards.”
At the time, like most of the residents of Kigali, I assumed the city was under attack from the rebels who had crossed the Ugandan border. I believed that soldiers on both sides were fighting and dying just yards from our hostel. The experience was terrifying. But many years later, I read Linda Melvern’s book Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide, which told a different story. It came as quite a shock to read that it was all a deception. The RPF were miles from Kigali. The whole attack was a piece of theatre, staged by the Rwandan government and used as a pretext to round up opponents of the regime, mainly Tutsis, under the cover of a quickly imposed twenty-four hour curfew. “Amnesty International received numerous accounts of torture,” Melvern writes. Many of those arrested were brought to Kanombe military camp, she relates, where they were executed or tortured. Kanombe military camp was near the presidential palace, just a few hundred yards from the hostel where we were staying. But we knew nothing of what was going on outside. Not until a few days later, when we were forced to defy the curfew.
The history and politics of Rwanda in the 20th century is an endless rabbit hole. Occupation by two colonial powers, revolution, independence, civil war, genocide, and war in the Congo. Tangled power structures, opposing agendas, contradictory narratives; there is plenty to keep writers and scholars busy. Primary causes are indiscernible. Ultimate responsibility is almost impossible to assign. Insignificant events grow in importance with the passage of time. Scenes examined from a new angle take on a sinister aspect and simple acts, in the light of history, become consequential. Stories are written, interpreted, and rewritten. Horst Köhler, the former German president, gave a speech in 2014 on “the impossibility of speaking of Africa”. As Europeans, as members of former colonial powers, how can we transcend our Eurocentric thinking? Should we, as outsiders, even try to comprehend the chaos of Rwanda’s past, to reduce it to a set of motifs, let alone to weigh good and evil on a pair of scales? I really don’t know. But for me, a few disturbing scenes, witnessed on the streets of Kigali in October 1990, have come to symbolise all the brutality that followed.
Soon after the “attack” on the city, we learned that the French army would be evacuating French nationals, and we were told we would be able to join the flight. There was only one snag. To catch the flight we needed our passports. But our passports were at the Zaïre embassy. And there was still a twenty-four hour curfew in force. I don’t know what our fate would have been if we’d stayed put, but with hindsight what we decided to do then was foolhardy. We decided we had to get our passports back, curfew or no curfew. So we set out, on foot, for the embassy, bearing only photocopies of our documents. My diary entry for 7th October takes up the story. “We got stopped once by a soldier on the way. He examined our photocopied passports one by one, very carefully. As he took each passport, he put his finger on the trigger of his gun and pointed the muzzle at us — then took several paces back to examine the documents. He let us pass.” When we got to the embassy, no-one was there to help us, so we sat on the ground and waited.
I think it was there, waiting outside the Zaïre embassy, that we saw a man being arrested on the other side of the street. A policeman was dragging him away from the door of a house. There was a small crowd and some jostling and shouting. The policeman pulled him by the arm and hit him with a cosh. I don’t remember what happened next. Perhaps that was the moment our passports got passed back to us through the window. I didn’t really give it much thought. Just some tussle with the police. It was a war zone, and we had our own problems. We had to run the gauntlet of checkpoints and roadblocks once more to get back to the hostel. But in the light of history, this fleeting scene takes on a certain significance. In all likelihood, this man’s only crime was his ethnicity. Most probably, he was one of the hundreds who were arrested in the days that followed the night-time “attack”, accused of complicity with the RPF invaders, and taken away for torture or execution. I wonder what his fate really was. I wonder whether he survived, whether he made it through the genocide, whether he is still alive. Maybe he is the old man I passed in the street today, on the way to give my lecture. Somehow, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s possible.
With our passports back in our pockets we set out for the hostel again. But the journey back was even more nerve-wracking than the journey out. At one point we passed a roadblock. Soldiers were standing around with guns. Behind them we could see a man flat on the ground, his face in the dust, his hands on his head. A soldier was standing over him, poking a gun into his back. We didn’t linger. It was a distressing scene, even at the time. But it was many years before I knew what happened to people who were detained by the Rwandan army in October 1990. Africa Watch, a human rights organisation, collected testimonies shortly after the event. One woman, who was arrested on 6th October (the day before our little excursion through the streets of Kigali), was taken to Gikondo detention centre in the south of the city. “They threatened to starve us to death,” she told Africa Watch, “and told us to lie down in excrement. They put the mouths of some of us in it. There was no food, drink or water. We felt like we were already dead. That was the general feeling. There were a lot of us. There was not enough place to even sit down. We thought about death a lot. … At Gikondo there was a man who was tied to a tree like a goat and shot. He finally died 2 days later after suffering horribly. We heard his cries.”
I need to pause there, just for a moment. What a long way we’ve come from that cosy lecture theatre in modern Kigali where I was delivering my talk on artificial intelligence. Down a long, dark tunnel into the past, and into the darkest recesses of the human heart that Joseph Conrad alluded to when he wrote about Africa in the 19th century. This is the source of that uncanny feeling, the sense of being in a peculiar dream I had in the middle of my talk. It’s hard to believe the Kigali of today, with its neon-lit convention centre, its fancy restaurants and shopping malls, a city whose institutes of higher education offer courses in artificial intelligence, is the same city I visited in 1990.
There is every chance the man we saw pressed to the ground met a similar fate to the woman who testified to Africa Watch, or even to the man whose death she described. And were it not for Moti’s quick thinking, we might have ended up in detention ourselves. Because the most harrowing part of our passport rescue mission was yet to come. Just 100 yards from the hostel we were stopped by another soldier. Although twenty eight years have passed, I remember his demeanour very well. He was young, and he was nervous, although surely not as nervous as we were. He may have been in a soldier’s uniform, but to me he looked like a frightened boy, and a frightened boy with a gun is a very dangerous creature. I’m sure many young men like him, over the ensuing four years, were transformed into génocidaires. His orders were to enforce the curfew. No-one was supposed to be wandering around the streets of Kigali. He waved his gun around and told us to show him proof that we had permission to circulate. Of course, we had none.
I didn’t understand exactly what he said next — it was all in French — but it sounded threatening, and I caught the ominous phrase “jusqu’à la fin de la guerre” (until the end of the war). Fortunately Moti’s French was a good deal better than mine. “He says he’s taking us to the miltary camp,” Moti translated, “where we will stay until the end of the war”. This seemed a pretty unattractive prospect at the time, but given what we now know about what was happening in those miltary camps around Kigali, I think we were in some danger. How would two foreigners, two muzungus who had seen too much, have been treated in one of those camps, where soldiers were beating, torturing, and killing with impunity? It’s hard to say. I’m glad it didn’t come to that. Moti was thinking on his feet. “But the American Embassy are expecting us to return,” he informed the soldier, “and if we’re not back in thirty minutes they will send a search party”.
It was a bluff, of course. The only people who knew what we were doing were the others trapped in the hostel. You could see the dilemma play out on his face. Should he carry out his threat, or should he let us go? Of course, we could be lying. And he had orders. But what if we weren’t lying? Which course of action was least likely to give him trouble? If he just let us pass, who would know? He made his decision. “Allez!” he shouted, and waved us on with his gun. So we got back to the hostel in one piece, our passports recovered. Later that day a convoy of miltary vehicles picked us up and took us to the airport. It was swarming with soldiers, the floor strewn with their equipment. European soldiers. Just as Moti’s bit of deception had saved us from detention in the military camp, so the “attack” on Kigali, whoever was behind it, had drummed up support from France and Belgium, former colonial powers.
We waited in the airport for eight hours, while all the other foreigners around us caught one flight or another out of the country. “There are nine of us left,” I wrote in my diary, “We’re the only people at the airport apart from the hundreds of military personnel. Every corner of every roof has a machine gun post.” Eventually a party of French nationals arrived, and we were all escorted across the tarmac to an army transporter plane. We climbed up the ramp and got strapped in to the hard wooden benches lining the fuselage. As the aircraft took off, I half expected it to be shot at. Several uncomfortable hours later, we arrived in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic. We were safe.
But this story isn’t really about me. The slight inconvenience we experienced back then, and the mild distress the memory evokes in me today; these mean nothing. The real story is what happened to Rwanda. Four years later, the gates of hell would yawn wide, unleashing apocalypse on this small patch of central Africa. Darkness, hatred, and bloodlust were set to engulf hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. We couldn’t see it, but the seal was broken while we were there. Just for a moment, those gates cracked open before our eyes and we caught a glimpse of what lay inside. A policeman wielding a cosh. A man, flat on his stomach in the street. A frightened boy in a soldier’s uniform carrying a gun. Insignificant images in themselves. But take a step back and a small fragment of the larger picture comes into view. A church strewn with blood-stained cloth and human bodies, maimed and torn. How to allude to this? How to speak of the unspeakable? “Things happen”, wrote the poet Geoffrey Hill, euphemistically, who wrestled with such matters, “Too near the ancient troughs of blood / Innocence is no earthly weapon.”
My third and final talk in Kigali is at CMU-Africa, an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, whose computer science department is renowned for AI. The students here come from all over Africa. The youthful faces before me are so full of hope and optimism. The energy in Rwanda today is palpable. My talk is about the future of AI, but the first few slides are about the history of the field. I had prefaced them with a well-known quote from George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In Rwanda, this quotation will have particular resonance, I thought, a double meaning. How clever. But suddenly it looks tasteless and clichéd. So I delete the slide at the last minute. The talk goes down well, I think.
