Beyond Hollywood’s Rwanda

__Paul Rusesabagina being presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom
(photo by Paul Morse)

Tuesday night, Emory University hosts the event Beyond Hollywood’s Rwanda: Truth and Justice, Security and Development to counter Paul Rusesabagina’s (the supposed hero of Hotel Rwanda fame) controversial visit last month.

When it comes to conflict in post-colonial Africa, the issues of military intervention and humanitarian efforts are always many-sided. African conflicts do not exist isolated from external forces; African history is too inextricably tied to external actors for that to ever be the case. The issue then isn’t whether or not outsiders intervene, but how intervention should be handled.

When Hollywood takes on violence in Africa, what begin as honestly good intentions often lead to overly simplistic and even blatantly wrong portrayals of the situation. Movies such as Darfur Now and Hotel Rwanda want to bring American attention to the long-ignored atrocities committed in Rwanda during the ’90s and in Darfur today — parts of the world many Americans know nothing about.__