Major-General Henry Kwami Anyidoho on Rwanda

The 1994 Rwandan Genocide remains a dark chapter in Africa’s modern history. More than 800,000 men, women and children perished in less than 4 months, their fates sealed by decades of carefully-nurtured colonial divisions. The United Nations (UN) had sent a peacekeeping mission to the country the previous year, but pulled out as soon as the killings began, having reportedly ignored all the early warning signs. It had also reportedly ordered troops to prioritize non-Africans in their evacuation efforts.

In this excerpt from a 2025 interview with journalist Kafui Dey, retired Ghanaian Major-General Henry Kwami Anyidoho recounts his defiant decision, as commanding officer of the Ghanaian contingent of the peacekeeping mission, to stay behind and protect lives during the genocide, even as the non-African contingents on the same mission - which included Belgium and Bangladesh - pulled out almost immediately.

Major-General Anyidoho and his platoon are credited with saving the lives of over 30,000 Rwandans at the country's darkest hour. This was by some distance the single most powerful external intervention in the course of this dark chapter of Rwandan history. This story, which has been systematically ignored and suppressed in most global media coverage of the Rwandan genocide, is a powerful reminder that the most potent and powerful positive interventions in Africa come from Africans themselves - not from foreign saviors