RWANDA wants your money. This much was made apparent when I landed at Kigali International Airport two weeks ago. Billboards and posters all over the airport, and all over Kigali, encourage visitors to invest in a newly stable Rwanda. It’s clear who their audience is. Rwanda is a former (French-speaking) Belgian colony and French is an official language, but most of these signs are in English.

It isn't strange that a country seeking more foreign investment is turning to English. What’s notable about Rwanda’s policy shift from French to English is its speed. Rwanda once had close ties to France and Belgium, strengthened by its membership in La Francophonie, the international union of French-speaking countries. But the 1994 genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus devastated Rwanda’s people and economy. Nearly a fifth of the population was killed. A dramatic reorganisation of the country’s government and financial institutions followed, and the legacy of Belgian colonialism and the military and financial support of the French government were quickly implicated in the genocide. A Rwandan commission formally alleged that French officials, including then-president François Mitterrand, were directly involved in the genocide. Relations with France naturally soured.

This deterioration had linguistic consequences. The Rwandan government, now led by Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, was tasked with rebuilding a broken country.  There is a language uniting both Hutus and TutsisKinyarwanda, spoken natively by over four-fifths of Rwandans. And yes, the earliest stages of public education are still conducted in Kinyarwanda. But later education had been provided in French for many decades.

Things changed quickly. In 2006, Rwanda suspended diplomatic relations with France. In 2008, the Rwandan government ordered education to be provided in English. In 2009, Rwanda joined the Commonwealth of Nations, the international union of mostly English-speaking former British colonies. Adieu, Francophonie; hello, Anglosphere. These were calculated moves. Rwanda opened itself not only to Western Anglophone economies but also to economically stable geographic neighbours like Tanzania and Uganda. It symbolically closed itself to mainland Europe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda's war-torn Francophone neighbour.

Language policy, of course, is never so simple. Relatively wealthy former refugees returning from Anglophone Uganda, including Mr Kagame, have clung to power in a newly English system. Some have questioned the quality of English education, partly because there aren’t enough good teachers. Last year, the Rwandan government conceded that an abrupt shift to English hurt the youngest students, so it reintroduced Kinyarwanda as a medium.

But is Rwanda's English really lagging? I expected to use French in Kigali, but English took me further. Billboards are in English or Kinyarwanda. On the street or at the market, my Frenchcertainly intelligible across the border in Congowas met with blank stares more often than my English. Of course, my experience has been limited to a slice of the country: Kigali is extraordinarily developed and clean and Anglophone, but cities are so often unrepresentative.

If the language politics are messy, it's at least clear that Rwanda is consciously changing its outlook. The Kigali Memorial Centre, a museum and memorial dedicated to the genocide, is vocal about continental Europe's role in the genocide. One exhibit details Belgian colonialism’s influence in the development of genocidal ideology and another focuses on the modern French government’s support in the 1990s. The centretrilingual in Kinyarwanda, English, and French, always in that orderwas designed in Britain.