After Years of Walking

Vanagt's short documentary builds an askance criticism of the role of Belgian colonialists in setting the seeds of the trauma of present-day Rwanda. Italso provides a good context for Anne Aghion's film Gacaca, Living Together Again in Rwanda?, about the fraught, fragile post-1994 genocide reconciliation programme now in process. Fils d'Imana, a naive, inherently racist film produced by Belgian Roman Catholics in 1959, is screened to villagers to elicit their response. University historians discuss the pressing need and associated problems of writing 'a new scientific history' of their country, where there has been no teaching of Rwandan history in schools in recent years. Students talk of the difficulties in the present circumstances of even referring to the names of the Tutsi/Hutu/Twa ethnic groupings.