RWANDA, after blaming France for the 1994 genocide, has decided that French is off the agenda and that all education will be in English.
The wholesale adoption of English is the latest deliberate kick in the teeth to France, following such decisions as that by Paul Kagame, the president, to make Rwanda adopt cricket as the national sport.
For many decades, Rwanda was one of ne
arly 30 Francophone countries where the language of business, power and civilisation was French. The elite saw their ties to Paris as an essential link to the civilised world. Top bureaucrats and scientists graduated from France's top universities and often served terms as functionaries in the French government. All that began to change after the 1994 100-day genocide, when Rwanda's then ruling Hutu majority massacred some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Mr Kagame, who headed the Tutsi-dominated Rwandese Patriotic Front guerrilla army which invaded to end the genocide, accused France of collaboration with the Hutu killers.
Rwanda is also adopting English because it has applied to join the Commonwealth and recently joined the five-member English-speaking East African Community.
The French embassy has closed, as have the French international school and cultural centre, and the offices of French companies in Kigali, the capital, despite efforts by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, to mend relations.
The full article contains 229 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
