Post by jakaswanga on May 3, 2014 14:50:05 GMT 3
ARTIST IN POLITICS: KIZITO MIHIGO’S FALL IN RWANDA.
The sound of treason in modern Rwanda goes like this .. as sang by Kizito Mihigo.
But what a path for us! Though the genocide orphaned me,
Let it not make me loose empathy for others.
Their lives too were brutally taken but not qualified as genocide.
Those brothers and sisters they too are human beings.
I pray for them. I comfort them. I remember them.
The Greater good. My dignity and love are not rooted in carnal life
Nor in material possessions, but in humanity .. humane-ness.
Let the words I am Rwandan be preceded by I am HUMAN! --Kizito
That is the rough of it, and Kagame went bonkers! we have to think out why!
It is a topic dear to my heart. The DOUBLE GENOCIDE THEORY and the future of Paul Kagame’s Rwanda. How much falsehoods can a government ram down the throats of her citizens in the official canons of history, before the cultural practitioners piously servicing that propagandistic fraud, suffer a nervous break down and become schizophrenic? ----(introducing the usual techniques of coping, humour, satire, mocking irony, parody, as pre-cursors to a general denunciation by culture of official lies.)
When the last of the believers no longer believe in their hearts, and their art breaks jail, and there is a much publicised fall out, then even the last of the Mohicans must hedge their bets: Contemplate change.
I believe this is what happened to Kizito Mihigo. Push came to shove, and Art took precedent over politics. He broke out of the cyst of patriotic Tutsi fascism which has become the last refuge of the Kigali regime.
But first, the news. freemuse.org/archives/7449
www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-27028206
Singer Composer and pianist/organist Kizito Mihigo has in deed been a 100% Name recognition (brand) in Rwanda. An elevated and celebrated popular artist, touted as exemplary by the powers that be. The court’s leading bard he has been dubbed, winning many awards from the Kagame regime. And he was obviously under the patronage of the Emperor. This is why, his arrest and incarceration on association with terrorism has been hot news. That is, arrests and incacerations of dissidents (genocidaire appologistas) and all kinds of opponents has been routine in Kagame’s Rwanda. So another one would merely be a statistic.
Yet Kizito Mizigo is not. Is not a statistic.
My take is, he is a cultural pivot. Evolving, he had reached a stage of creative consciousness where his talent called him out a fraud to his trade: Art. Art tends to investigate truths, telling stories that challenge accepted notions; art tends to question myth, extending the borders of conceptualizations, rather than celebratively proclaim and affirm them. Creativity, is also the expression of ALTERATIVES. To be creative is to toy with the possibility of an alternative narrative (for instance). An alternative to the official narrative (for instance).
An earlier Kizito made a super career affirming a particular and specific narrative of a post genocide Rwanda under the savior Paul. That is not a crime, artists have to eat too –as Otishotish would quip, and even the Grand Master Poet Homer himself kept on calling every dim-witted incestuous tyrant King, god-like. –Formulaic, like every News Anchor, even if once a critical journalist, accepts pay to call every wretch of a President wrecking any state, His Excellency! (Mortgages and Car Loans! Phew!!
)
Otherwise, like the head of John the Baptist, an artist’s head could be served at dinner for amusement. But Abu Nuwasi, that character from tales of the Arabian nights, is of course the ultimate wit on how to escape the mood swings of unstable tyrants, excel at ones talents while at the same time enjoying the ultimate comforts of opulent patronage, and tell both sides of the tale with honourhumour.
The artist in Kizito, I am convinced, matured and faced the same internal conflict and crisis, and came up with a [re] solution less than ‘’Shakespearean’’, less than Abu Nuwasi the court-knave of Old, and in that process has been busted by a brooding, insecure monster, insane in paranoia.
WHEN NERO OF ROME FAILED TO QUELL AN INFERNO NOR STOP RUN-AWAY INFLATION BY DIVINE EDICT!
The tyrant of Kigali, like the emperor Nero when a situation had been resolved by declaring him a god, faces his own inevitable mortality. But while the act lasts and it is all safe comedy, the script dictates facts and material reality must bend to the will of a god. Well, too bad a fire consuming Rome failed to obey the god Nero’s command to stop raging. Yet the god had of course disbanded the fire brigade. Then inflation refused to obey Nero’s orders to even out! Some economist had to explain that one to the god. One after another, the economists and leading monetary theorists were killed for thwarting the will of the god. Inflation went hyper. Clearly another resolution
had to come, and come from outside the god.
So, wonder of the world, the god was re-declared mortal, then mad, empty-headed and dispatched. A bit like our own Great Tshaka Tzulu.
Man is an interesting creature so to speak! Man can make and kill the creator evidently. Even a God is not safe from man
. A tyrant much less so. Suicide or murder, take your pick. (we historians are never sure. Did young Tutankhamum break his skull in an accidental fall, or was it smashed to pave way for a new regime?)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero
The recent official shift to have Tutsi victimhood monopolise the narrative of the genocide; the narrative of a wholesale ingrained Hutu evil --that there is was never such a thing as a good Hutu, is now revolting even the Tutsi themselves. Grown up Tutsis who, as children, survived the genocide because Hutu parents adopted them overnight and calmly told the marauding interahamwe that they were ‘’own’’ children, now look at the Ugandan Paul Kagame, and recoil at the horror of his lie, that they were no good Hutus. Nor Hutus who paid the ultimate price, charged with treason for being found sheltering cockroaches. It is this recoil in horror, the need to show the equivalent courage of Hutus who rallied to the Tutsi call in their hour of doom, that has seeped up to disturb the comfort zone of artistic Kizito. It has to be expressed some how. It is one of the stories of his generation. He can not tell the story of his generation as an outstanding artist, and ignore or lie about one of its most profound emotional experiences. In his own eyes, he becomes an ordinary cheat. the art in his heart rebels: either shut up forever you cheap leech and fatten off on what you have gathered so far, or, like the poet Okot P'Bitek dangerously taught, immerse yourself in the hearts of our people and tell their tale without a single false note! --fwacking Acholi!
How did the terrified Tutsi boy or girl feel, the arms of the adopting Hutu parents resting on the shoulders, as he or she gazed at the bloodied machete of a killer Interahamwe hunting for cockroaches, standing at the door asking who lives here?
The lingering look of menace, the visitation at every eye to intimidate, the tilt of the head as hands slowly wiped caked blood from the machete, --as the Interahamwe inspector stood at the door seeking meat to colour the machete once more: did not many a hapless Tutsi boy or girl die many deaths in such a moment, if the new parents would betray, or the new siblings would in some discrete way, prove treacherous, and the machete feed?
Rwanda is full of the stories of survived Tutsi children who in those 100 days became the Hutu children of genocidair Hutus. Reality is complex ###. These are stories no tyrant, even of the unique caliber of Paul Kagame, can wrench away from his country. To kill off the institutionalised memory and substitute in falsehoods completely, he would have to kill off the whole population.
Terrorising and intimidation wont be enough.
Truth can be banned from the airwaves, from the internet, or the printed media and text books. But never from the hearts of a people. Propaganda is poor feed## (in Europe I have seen students from Rwanda punched into silence during debates on dictatorships in Africa coz the price of saying something 'wrong' was not payable!)
Forget Hotel Rwanda, it is pure apologist fiction, it is pure feel good nonsense! Paul Rusesabagina aint no hero. No Hutus died saving any Tutsi! All Hutus are evil from A to Z, from the beginning of time to the end of time! ---This is pure hysteria. And it is the hysteria that, like a fit, has seized the narrow clique of Hardline Tutsis perched at the top of the Rwandese state, and has consumed their sanity. Now, it is too sick for the artistic mind of her once greatest court singer, Kizito. Forced into consummate introspectiveness, his creativity has to factor in some irony, some anecdote, some sanity, some relativity, some recoil; he has to create some space for an interplay between the back and forth of truths, and myths, changing as regimes change. Kizito has to resolve loyalty to a regime more concerned with its immediate legitimacy, in opposition to a trade –art—concerned with its eternal credibility.
Art wins pants down, but the artist dies in the dungeons. His tale to be told 200 years later, like the story which has just made Lupita Nyong’o world famous. It is a true story of a free slave ensnared back into captivity and slavery, but lay forgotten for over a century!
So if tomorrow I read on the net, that Kizito Mizigo committed suicide in jail …. I will say: he reached a dead end in his relationship with Tutsi fascism in power, after his sensitive, artistic senses, in premonition, foretold the historical dead end to which the insane regime of Kagame had charted course.
If all Hutus are evil forever, and they become sport and say, very well, the fire next time! No good people will be left in Rwanda! An artist with some imagination immediately conjures up a vision of hell. And the Tutsis in power, have to remain in power forever! Because they recognise, the fire next time.
So barring some strange event, meseems it has to be President Kagame for life, until he becomes corpse-like in power like the recently re-elected Boutaflika of Algeria, or half-dead like the eternal Robert Mugabe.
Kizito the artist recoils from the folly of official doctrine which he perceives is a dead-end for Tutsis in Rwanda. But to imagine a good Hutu, has officially become treason. He takes the plunge, and ends up in chains. He has no choice. This is not about individual fates.
Like the heavens reveal to wildebeests that the migration toward pasture must begin, and whatever happens on the Odyssey the beasts will move, so too do the sensitivities of the artists rush toward honest notes, once the bolt of enlightenment has struck their hearts, and shone their minds. Let the deep rivers swirling with 20 meter leviathan crocs come! Forded they shall be, even if carcasses pile up to form a dam! The future of Afrika is a Kingdom come!
Everybody knows there were good Hutus, otherwise no Tutsi would have survived. And as for the murders committed by Kagame’s forces and the tally? You may want to read all the Rwanda reports which the UN has classified, or, as we say in code, Koffi Annan banned at the behest of the Clinton White House.
The sound of treason in modern Rwanda goes like this .. as sang by Kizito Mihigo.
But what a path for us! Though the genocide orphaned me,
Let it not make me loose empathy for others.
Their lives too were brutally taken but not qualified as genocide.
Those brothers and sisters they too are human beings.
I pray for them. I comfort them. I remember them.
The Greater good. My dignity and love are not rooted in carnal life
Nor in material possessions, but in humanity .. humane-ness.
Let the words I am Rwandan be preceded by I am HUMAN! --Kizito
That is the rough of it, and Kagame went bonkers! we have to think out why!
It is a topic dear to my heart. The DOUBLE GENOCIDE THEORY and the future of Paul Kagame’s Rwanda. How much falsehoods can a government ram down the throats of her citizens in the official canons of history, before the cultural practitioners piously servicing that propagandistic fraud, suffer a nervous break down and become schizophrenic? ----(introducing the usual techniques of coping, humour, satire, mocking irony, parody, as pre-cursors to a general denunciation by culture of official lies.)
When the last of the believers no longer believe in their hearts, and their art breaks jail, and there is a much publicised fall out, then even the last of the Mohicans must hedge their bets: Contemplate change.
I believe this is what happened to Kizito Mihigo. Push came to shove, and Art took precedent over politics. He broke out of the cyst of patriotic Tutsi fascism which has become the last refuge of the Kigali regime.
But first, the news. freemuse.org/archives/7449
Arterial Network – 28 April 2014: Kizito Mihigo: The trial making Kigali singer
Pleading guilty on 28 April, the singer asked for forgiveness – he remains in detention as the trial continues.
_
Tom Paulson of Humanosphere alleged that Kizito Mihigo was arrested and charged with terrorism for having written a song that contends some of the atrocities of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda were commited by the forces of Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame.
Pleading guilty on 28 April, the singer asked for forgiveness – he remains in detention as the trial continues.
_
Tom Paulson of Humanosphere alleged that Kizito Mihigo was arrested and charged with terrorism for having written a song that contends some of the atrocities of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda were commited by the forces of Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame.
www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-27028206
April 30 2014. One of Rwanda's best-known musicians and a leading journalist have been arrested and accused of links to an opposition group and rebels.
Cassien Ntamuhanga, the director of a Christian radio station, was arrested on Monday, a police statement said.
Singer Kizito Mihigo was picked up on Friday.
They are accused of links to both the South Africa-based Rwanda National Congress (RNC) and Hutu rebels, based in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The RNC was co-founding by Patrick Karegeya, who was found dead in South Africa on New Year's Day
Cassien Ntamuhanga, the director of a Christian radio station, was arrested on Monday, a police statement said.
Singer Kizito Mihigo was picked up on Friday.
They are accused of links to both the South Africa-based Rwanda National Congress (RNC) and Hutu rebels, based in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The RNC was co-founding by Patrick Karegeya, who was found dead in South Africa on New Year's Day
Singer Composer and pianist/organist Kizito Mihigo has in deed been a 100% Name recognition (brand) in Rwanda. An elevated and celebrated popular artist, touted as exemplary by the powers that be. The court’s leading bard he has been dubbed, winning many awards from the Kagame regime. And he was obviously under the patronage of the Emperor. This is why, his arrest and incarceration on association with terrorism has been hot news. That is, arrests and incacerations of dissidents (genocidaire appologistas) and all kinds of opponents has been routine in Kagame’s Rwanda. So another one would merely be a statistic.
Yet Kizito Mizigo is not. Is not a statistic.
My take is, he is a cultural pivot. Evolving, he had reached a stage of creative consciousness where his talent called him out a fraud to his trade: Art. Art tends to investigate truths, telling stories that challenge accepted notions; art tends to question myth, extending the borders of conceptualizations, rather than celebratively proclaim and affirm them. Creativity, is also the expression of ALTERATIVES. To be creative is to toy with the possibility of an alternative narrative (for instance). An alternative to the official narrative (for instance).
An earlier Kizito made a super career affirming a particular and specific narrative of a post genocide Rwanda under the savior Paul. That is not a crime, artists have to eat too –as Otishotish would quip, and even the Grand Master Poet Homer himself kept on calling every dim-witted incestuous tyrant King, god-like. –Formulaic, like every News Anchor, even if once a critical journalist, accepts pay to call every wretch of a President wrecking any state, His Excellency! (Mortgages and Car Loans! Phew!!
)Otherwise, like the head of John the Baptist, an artist’s head could be served at dinner for amusement. But Abu Nuwasi, that character from tales of the Arabian nights, is of course the ultimate wit on how to escape the mood swings of unstable tyrants, excel at ones talents while at the same time enjoying the ultimate comforts of opulent patronage, and tell both sides of the tale with honour
The artist in Kizito, I am convinced, matured and faced the same internal conflict and crisis, and came up with a [re] solution less than ‘’Shakespearean’’, less than Abu Nuwasi the court-knave of Old, and in that process has been busted by a brooding, insecure monster, insane in paranoia.
WHEN NERO OF ROME FAILED TO QUELL AN INFERNO NOR STOP RUN-AWAY INFLATION BY DIVINE EDICT!
The tyrant of Kigali, like the emperor Nero when a situation had been resolved by declaring him a god, faces his own inevitable mortality. But while the act lasts and it is all safe comedy, the script dictates facts and material reality must bend to the will of a god. Well, too bad a fire consuming Rome failed to obey the god Nero’s command to stop raging. Yet the god had of course disbanded the fire brigade. Then inflation refused to obey Nero’s orders to even out! Some economist had to explain that one to the god. One after another, the economists and leading monetary theorists were killed for thwarting the will of the god. Inflation went hyper. Clearly another resolution
had to come, and come from outside the god. So, wonder of the world, the god was re-declared mortal, then mad, empty-headed and dispatched. A bit like our own Great Tshaka Tzulu.
Man is an interesting creature so to speak! Man can make and kill the creator evidently. Even a God is not safe from man
. A tyrant much less so. Suicide or murder, take your pick. (we historians are never sure. Did young Tutankhamum break his skull in an accidental fall, or was it smashed to pave way for a new regime?)en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero
Famously known for the apocryphal story that he fiddled while Rome burned in a great fire, Nero has become one of the most infamous men who ever lived. During his rule, he murdered his own mother, Agrippina the Younger; his first wife, Octavia; and allegedly, his second wife, Poppaea Sabina. In addition, ancient writers claim that he started the great fire of Rome in A.D. 64 so that he could re-build the city center.
Yet, despite the numerous charges that have been levelled by ancient writers, there is evidence that Nero enjoyed some level of popular support. He had a passion for music and the arts, an interest that culminated in a public performance he gave in Rome in A.D. 65. Also, while he was blamed for starting the fire, he took it upon himself to organize relief efforts, and ancient writers make other allusions to acts of charity that he performed.
Yet, despite the numerous charges that have been levelled by ancient writers, there is evidence that Nero enjoyed some level of popular support. He had a passion for music and the arts, an interest that culminated in a public performance he gave in Rome in A.D. 65. Also, while he was blamed for starting the fire, he took it upon himself to organize relief efforts, and ancient writers make other allusions to acts of charity that he performed.
The recent official shift to have Tutsi victimhood monopolise the narrative of the genocide; the narrative of a wholesale ingrained Hutu evil --that there is was never such a thing as a good Hutu, is now revolting even the Tutsi themselves. Grown up Tutsis who, as children, survived the genocide because Hutu parents adopted them overnight and calmly told the marauding interahamwe that they were ‘’own’’ children, now look at the Ugandan Paul Kagame, and recoil at the horror of his lie, that they were no good Hutus. Nor Hutus who paid the ultimate price, charged with treason for being found sheltering cockroaches. It is this recoil in horror, the need to show the equivalent courage of Hutus who rallied to the Tutsi call in their hour of doom, that has seeped up to disturb the comfort zone of artistic Kizito. It has to be expressed some how. It is one of the stories of his generation. He can not tell the story of his generation as an outstanding artist, and ignore or lie about one of its most profound emotional experiences. In his own eyes, he becomes an ordinary cheat. the art in his heart rebels: either shut up forever you cheap leech and fatten off on what you have gathered so far, or, like the poet Okot P'Bitek dangerously taught, immerse yourself in the hearts of our people and tell their tale without a single false note! --fwacking Acholi!
How did the terrified Tutsi boy or girl feel, the arms of the adopting Hutu parents resting on the shoulders, as he or she gazed at the bloodied machete of a killer Interahamwe hunting for cockroaches, standing at the door asking who lives here?
The lingering look of menace, the visitation at every eye to intimidate, the tilt of the head as hands slowly wiped caked blood from the machete, --as the Interahamwe inspector stood at the door seeking meat to colour the machete once more: did not many a hapless Tutsi boy or girl die many deaths in such a moment, if the new parents would betray, or the new siblings would in some discrete way, prove treacherous, and the machete feed?
Rwanda is full of the stories of survived Tutsi children who in those 100 days became the Hutu children of genocidair Hutus. Reality is complex ###. These are stories no tyrant, even of the unique caliber of Paul Kagame, can wrench away from his country. To kill off the institutionalised memory and substitute in falsehoods completely, he would have to kill off the whole population.
Terrorising and intimidation wont be enough.
Truth can be banned from the airwaves, from the internet, or the printed media and text books. But never from the hearts of a people. Propaganda is poor feed## (in Europe I have seen students from Rwanda punched into silence during debates on dictatorships in Africa coz the price of saying something 'wrong' was not payable!)
Forget Hotel Rwanda, it is pure apologist
fiction, it is pure feel good nonsense! Paul Rusesabagina aint no hero. Rwanda's government has accused Paul Rusesabagina, the Rwandan exile played by actor Don Cheadle in the movie Hotel Rwanda, of being a "revisionist" who "harbors the Double Genocide Theory."
A "revisionist," in Rwanda, is someone who dares to challenge the received history of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide. The "Double Genocide Theory" is the belief that Hutus, as well as Tutsis, were victims of genocidal violence in 1994.
Read more: digitaljournal.com/article/289105#ixzz30eCe8QGG
A "revisionist," in Rwanda, is someone who dares to challenge the received history of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide. The "Double Genocide Theory" is the belief that Hutus, as well as Tutsis, were victims of genocidal violence in 1994.
Read more: digitaljournal.com/article/289105#ixzz30eCe8QGG
Art wins pants down, but the artist dies in the dungeons. His tale to be told 200 years later, like the story which has just made Lupita Nyong’o world famous. It is a true story of a free slave ensnared back into captivity and slavery, but lay forgotten for over a century!
So if tomorrow I read on the net, that Kizito Mizigo committed suicide in jail …. I will say: he reached a dead end in his relationship with Tutsi fascism in power, after his sensitive, artistic senses, in premonition, foretold the historical dead end to which the insane regime of Kagame had charted course.
If all Hutus are evil forever, and they become sport and say, very well, the fire next time! No good people will be left in Rwanda! An artist with some imagination immediately conjures up a vision of hell. And the Tutsis in power, have to remain in power forever! Because they recognise, the fire next time.
So barring some strange event, meseems it has to be President Kagame for life, until he becomes corpse-like in power like the recently re-elected Boutaflika of Algeria, or half-dead like the eternal Robert Mugabe.
Kizito the artist recoils from the folly of official doctrine which he perceives is a dead-end for Tutsis in Rwanda. But to imagine a good Hutu, has officially become treason. He takes the plunge, and ends up in chains. He has no choice. This is not about individual fates.
Like the heavens reveal to wildebeests that the migration toward pasture must begin, and whatever happens on the Odyssey the beasts will move, so too do the sensitivities of the artists rush toward honest notes, once the bolt of enlightenment has struck their hearts, and shone their minds. Let the deep rivers swirling with 20 meter leviathan crocs come! Forded they shall be, even if carcasses pile up to form a dam! The future of Afrika is a Kingdom come!
Everybody knows there were good Hutus, otherwise no Tutsi would have survived. And as for the murders committed by Kagame’s forces and the tally? You may want to read all the Rwanda reports which the UN has classified
, or, as we say in code, Koffi Annan banned at the behest of the Clinton White House.