Molotov

Profile on the "PGMA"

Few news have reach the outside world from the Belgian colony of Ruanda. Among those few titbits are several communiques announcing the "Provisional Government of Middle Africa". Below are presented what little official details exist about this self-proclaimed rebel state.

Capital: Astrida, a southern town established by the Belgians in the 1920s and one of their main colonial headquarters. The colony's intellectual capital.

President: M. Joseph Gitera (b. 1919), a Ruandan Hutu ex-seminary student and businessman (see profile attached below).

Flag: A tricolour of three bands of red, yellow, and green. Seemingly inspired by the banner of Ethiopia, the last free African state. Easy and cheap to produce.

Currency: No official currency has been declared, but the PGMA appear to be counter-stamping Congolese francs, the regional colonial currency.

Profile on Joseph Gitera

Due to the lack of reliable information coming out of Ruanda-Urundi, the exact nature of Joseph Gitera remains vague for now. Some allege that he is a left-wing demagogue intent on the overthrow of the ruling monarchies and upper classes by a pan-ethnic worker-peasant coalition, others that he is a Hutu supremacist calling for full cleansing of the Tutsi race, and yet others that he is a mystic Christian who seeks to proclaim himself King of the Hutus. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in-between.

Even less clear is what exactly is going on in Ruanda. The King, mwami Mutara III Rudahigwa, is most certainly dead. Rumour has it that Gitera lead the assault on the royal palace at Nyanza himself, and after murdering the King personally burned the kalinga, a sacred royal war drum decorated with the testicles of vanquished Hutu princes. That seems like hyperbole, and it is more likely that Gitera was recruited to the "revolution" after the fact, as his civilian status hardly lent itself to cavorting with the colonial militiamen.

What is known, according to Belgian colonial sources, is that Joseph Gitera is now one of the world's youngest (self-proclaimed, his rebel government not being recognized by any legitimate sovereign) heads of state, at only age 27. He was born in 1919, just as German East Africa was being divided by the victors of the First World War, in the southern Astrida Province. A former student of the Groupe Scolaire d'Astrida and, notably, the Catholic clerical Grand Séminaire de Nyakibanda, records indicate that he left the path to priesthood to found a small brickworks in his home town, becoming a successful if young minor businessman.