Now a commonwealth member despite its French colonial past, Rwanda is embracing English – and UK MPs are helping, writes JODY CLARKEin Kigali
THE FAMILIAR sounds of Swing Low, Sweet Chariotare bouncing around the walls of the Efotec secondary school in Kanombe, 15 minutes from Kigali.
It is an odd song to hear in a supposedly francophone nation. But no stranger than watching a British MP giving English lessons inside one of the classrooms.
“Have you five pairs of words that sound similar?” asks Stephen Crabb, the Conservative MP for Preseli Pembrokeshire in Wales.
“Clement, can you come up here and write one?” “Arrive” and “Alive” are scribbled on the board, but the class of primary school teachers can’t enunciate them separately.
"I'm hearing the same thing!" says Crabb, exasperated but laughing. "Ls and Rs, there's a difference. We're having the same problem we had with "Pray" and "Play"!" Crabb is part of a four-year Conservative Party project called Umubanoor "friendship", which has helped deliver English language courses to 3,000 primary school teachers.
“We’re here in partnership with the Rwandan government,” says Crabb, who brushes away suggestions that his Welsh-speaking constituents might be put off by his foray into English teaching. They’ll leave tomorrow, he says, if that’s what the Rwandan authorities want. “But so far, we’ve been extremely well received.”
Although French now ranks as an official language alongside Kinyarwanda and English, the Rwandan government is switching the country’s education system away from French to English. Hence the need for English language courses for primary school teachers.
Officially, the change is aimed at integrating the once francophone nation into the five-nation English-speaking East African Community, which launched on July 7th. However, the decision is regarded as just another move in repositioning the country away from France, regarded by many in the country as an unhelpful influence in recent decades.
Nowhere sums up this deterioration in relations as well as the Centre D’Echanges Culturels Franco-Rwandais, 200 metres downhill from the real-life Hotel Rwanda, the Mille Collines in Kigali. The grass is overgrown, and a shoddy piece of boarding rests up against the front entrance. There are no more plays or films in its small theatre and the library has been shut since November 2006, when France and Rwanda broke off diplomatic ties over a controversial court case. Relations between the countries had already been sour, because Kigali alleged French forces trained Hutu militias that carried out the killings of 800,000 people in 1994.
France has always denied this, but matters came to a head when a French judge accused Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame and several of his top aides of shooting down the aircraft carrying Juvénal Habyarimana, the former president of Rwanda. This is regarded as the incident that started the 1994 genocide.
Diplomatic relations were renewed in February, when Nicolas Sarkozy became the first French president in 25 years to visit the east African nation. But Rwanda has made no secret about where it believes the future lies.
Last November, it became the 53rd member of the British commonwealth, even though it never came under the sphere of British colonial influence.
Meetings with officials are no longer in French and outside of the French- and Belgian-run hotels, there are no more pommes fritesor entrecoteson restaurant menus. There are a few Chez Roberts and Charles restaurants here and there but for the most part, the country is making a swift move towards the language of Shakespeare and away from that of Voltaire.
However, the move has not been without its difficulties.
“Pronunciation is the big problem, especially Ls and Rs,” says Joshua Owino Opar, a Kenyan recruited to give English language lessons to the Rwandan teachers. “But they are very enthusiastic about learning, especially the younger ones. They see it as the future.”