The eruption of conflict and civil war in the 1990s, in both Rwanda and eastern Zaire, had its origin in modern struggles for power and wealth. The world, however, easily overlooked this modern origin, since the confrontations it witnessed appeared to have taken on strongly ethnicised, seemingly ‘tribal’ overtones and justification. The Rwandan 1994 genocide in particular, more than the fighting in eastern Zaire (1996 onwards), was for too long and at too great a cost portrayed by the media as rooted in tribalism. Rwanda's bloodbath was not tribal. Rather it was a distinctly modern tragedy, a degenerated class conflict minutely prepared and callously executed. Most of the world failed to see it that way, and continued to think of the conflict – this after all was Africa – in terms of ‘centuries-old tribal warfare’.

The power of shamelessly twisted ethnic argument for the sake of class privilege was demonstrated most shockingly in the blatant imaginings about history that galvanised Rwanda's ‘Hutu Power’ extremists. These extremists killed Rwanda's Tutsi and sent their bodies ‘back to Ethiopia’ via the Nyabarongo and Akagera rivers. The imagined origin of ‘the Tutsi’, along with their (poorly understood) migrations and conquest of Rwanda, were evoked by power-crazed Hutu politicians to instil ‘ethnic hatred’ in the very people they themselves oppressed: the victims of class oppression were spurred on to kill a minority group which the oppressors had labelled ‘the real enemy’.