Help me Rwanda

Rating: 9/10 (30 April 2005)

I just finished watching Hotel Rwanda moments ago. It certainly didn't bore me. And I suppose I should say it was a good movie. But it's really just all part of that greater genre, the misery revolutions do to regular folks. It's something of a Doctor Zhivago in black skin.
Still, it had it's contemporary twists. Like when the main character, an hotelier, informs the Hutu five-star general that although the Americans and Europeans may have left for now, they certainly have his name on their list as a war criminal for judgment later. "That's how these people operate," he says. True enough.
You should probably give it a squint. But I don't get the premise that the whites are somehow responsible for not stopping the bloodshed. Didn't colonization end a long time ago? Aren't these people responsible for managing their own fate now? And if not, then are we obligated morally to renew occupation? These questions, of course, are not explored.
But the end titles do tell us that the hotelier is now happilly living with his extended family in Brussells. When the colonizers leave the colonized want to go with them. And who could blame them. Sub-Saharan Africa, as ever it has, sucks.