We are all Rwandans.


Advertisement
Rwanda's flag
Africa » Rwanda » Province de L'Ouest
March 22nd 2008
Published: September 9th 2008
Edit Blog Post

We’ve set off from Kigali on the smooth tarmac south, bearing west at Gitarama toward Lake Kivu and the Congolese border. Just reaching Kibuye - a pretty lakeside town on Kivu’s wooded shores - takes you through some of Rwanda’s most dramatic scenery, the green folds of hills stretching in an endless procession. The road is a bold feat of modern engineering - blasted through solid rock, hugging the hills’ edges, with bridges vaulting across brown sluggish rivers where village women stoop to wash their laundry. On the side of the road, barefoot boys lounge in the tall grass; farmers swing their hoes and spades; women balance bundles of manioc on their colorfully wrapped heads, stopping to adjust the infants on their backs. Centuries collide on these terraced hills, cultivated by Rwandan villagers and paved by the Chinese. Which is, I suspect, the story of modern Africa in a nutshell.

When we arrive in Kibuye I hitch up my backpack and take a moto along the lake’s shore. The coastline is long and irregular, finger-like peninsulas jutting into the water. We pass a few fishermen chipping away at their boats, women selling vegetables from the backs of rusted shipping containers. My hotel is on a pretty perch on the waterfront, down a long, rocky path from the road ringing the town. It’s a tidy compound of flowery walkways and tiled roofs; doubling as a religious and conference center, it’s filled at the lunch hour by boisterous guys in neckties and women in skirt suits. I order tilapia (trucked in from Lake Victoria) and a couple of cold Mützigs and watch the clouds blowing across the hillsides. After lunch the conference-goers pile into a covered launch and putter off for a tour of the lake, their bright orange and yellow life preservers bobbing on the sun-crested waves, their voices carrying as they disappear between two wooded islands in the distance.

There’s little to do in Kibuye apart from staring at the waves, nodding appreciatively at the waves, and occasionally squinting past the waves toward some indiscernible point in the middle distance. But I’ve come less for stress release - after an admittedly stress-free week - than for the chance to see Hillywood, once more, playing out before a pack of giddy villagers. The festival rolls into town on Friday, and I’ve given myself an extra day to enjoy the lakeside setting - and, more importantly, to avoid the dread that comes with packing myself into the back of a minivan two days running.

On Friday I’m joined by Mai and Ben, who have made the trip down from Kabale. They arrive, sweating and flustered, with daypacks bulging from their backs, having spent most of the past six hours crammed into a succession of taxis-voitures. It is good, after all these weeks, to see some familiar faces. Though just a 20-minute taxi from the border in Kabale, Mai’s only made the trip to Rwanda once before, when she came to track gorillas with her ex. Ben, after all these months, is seeing the country for the first time - a shock, with its tidy roads and orderly traffic, compared to the vehicular Armageddon of Uganda.

With their own town packing all the appeal of a pile of sweaty gym socks, I’m surprised they don’t make the trip more often. Kampala, after all, is a good eight hours to the north, making Kigali - a brisk, scenic, two-hour drive south - the nearest outpost of something approaching civilization. For a giddy gourmand like Mai, the Rwandan capital offers the best curries in a 500-mile radius. And I’ll soon begin to suspect that this weekend trip has less to do with Hillywood and catching up with old friends than gorging on fine Indian food and rubbing their big, contented bellies.

I’m glad they’re here all the same, and we have a lazy lunch on the hotel deck, watching the fishermen paddling across the lake. There are hours to kill before tonight’s screening, and after polishing off a few Primuses, Mai and Ben sneak off for a catnap. A few birds thread their songs through the flame trees, piping high and tunelessly, and a fat drowsy stupor settles over me. By the time Mai and Ben reappear, ruddy and showered and scrubbed, the Primus has gotten to my head, and a dull throb pulses my temples as we make our way into town.

It’s a short walk, but the day is warm, and I’m mopping my brow by the time we reach the crowds outside the stadium. It’s late in the afternoon, and the place is filling: girls in dusty smocks, and women with their heads colorfully swaddled, and small boys with even smaller boys on their backs; men in track pants and blue jeans and frayed dress slacks; men with collared shirts and baseball caps and second-hand sports jerseys (the Detroit Red Wings, the Oakland Raiders, the New York Jets); bent old men with wrinkled faces; stout matrons watching me warily; children with inquisitive eyes. A woman with a great gnarled walking stick poles her way across the muddy field, like a gondolier. A man in a fedora arrives on a motorbike, hitches his pants up, adjusts his crotch, and disappears into the crowd.

The grandstand is packed, row after row, with guys crowded together on the steps and little kids dangling their legs off the edge. The Hillywood crew is busy running cables through the mud and adjusting the projector in the back of the van; a young guard - wielding his baton with disturbing deftness - thwacks at curious kids when they get too close. On a stage festooned with bright yellow MTN banners, the pre-film entertainment is hitting full stride - a gaudy cocktail of gyrating hips and stand-up comedy that seems to rely heavily on scatological humor. The emcee, talking rapidly in Kinyarwanda, brings the microphone to his raised rear and makes a few farting noises. The crowd is in stitches. Later, when the night’s loudest laughs come during a short film about domestic violence, I’ll begin to wonder how much of the local humor is getting lost in translation.

It’s my second run through the Hillywood program, and I already feel a familial bond with the films. With all their rough charm, with the earnest hopes behind each production, I find myself pulling for them like a proud pop in the stands at a Little League game. I’m gratified when the crowd laughs on cue, disappointed when a solemn note strikes the wrong chord. I try not to play favorites, finding something to like in each, hoping they’ll stand on their own modest merits. Children Beware of Sugar Daddies, an animated short about a young girl hounded by an old admirer, draws appreciative howls for its faithful cartoon depiction of village life. Alphonse’s Bicycle, directed by the festival organizer, Eric Kabera, is oddly touching as it follows a push-bike driver whose customized wheels - festooned with reflectors and outfitted with a battery-powered radio - makes him the envy of his competitors. Better In Than Out, a rough short about genocide prisoners freed by the presidential amnesty, plumbs the depths of the country’s moral ambiguities with surprising candor.

It’s this last film, directed by a young Rwandan, Richmond Runanira, which makes the strongest impression of the amateur features. Set in a prison on the outskirts of Kigali, it begins with the news that President Kagame has issued a pardon freeing low-level offenders convicted of genocide crimes. The action follows a group of convicts on the eve of their release, making joyful plans for their reentry into society.

“I will sell a cow…buy some land…marry…buy a mobile phone,” says one prisoner, staring dreamily into the middle distance.

Only one man among them seems so haunted by his conscience that a return to normal life is impossible.

“You want to be released,” he tells the others, “but your hearts have not confessed.”

It is impossible not to hear the voice of Runanira here, flinging accusations at his countrymen and into the crowd. The next day there are tearful reconciliations in the prison yard: wives clutching husbands, fathers lifting sons, with the soaring chords and slow-motion close-ups you’d come to expect from a joyful cinematic reunion. It takes an awkward beat for you to remind yourself that these are men convicted of genocide crimes - men who, worse still, feel no remorse for their actions. Only later do we see the solitary prisoner - writhing on his cot in sheer, melodramatic agony - so tormented by his past that he’s decided his life is “better in than out.”

“He is the only honest man we have here,” says a prison guard, as the camera lifts to pan across the haunted hills of Kigali.

The implications being made by Runanira, about Rwanda’s path to reconciliation stray from the official narrative. For President Kagame, after all, questions of remorse and repentance - of honesty, on a certain level - are less important than the business of moving on. But what Runanira asks isn’t simply how Rwandans can move on, but how they can move on at such a cost.

It’s a question that resonates here in Kibuye, in a region which saw some of the worst atrocities against Tutsis during the genocide. Tens of thousands were killed - by some estimates, more than 90%!o(MISSING)f the Tutsi population in the province. Even in the years after the genocide, armed groups - many of them finding sanctuary across the Congolese border - staged attacks in Gisenyi province, hoping to undermine the government and destabilize the country. Much of today’s audience is likely to have played some role in the events of those brutal years. The accusations made in films like Better In Than Out are utterly, bitterly personal.

It is against this tense backdrop that the night’s final film, We Are All Rwandans, is screened. Based on events in a rural town not far from Lake Kivu, the film depicts the 1997 attack on a boarding school by a small group of Hutu militiamen. The gunmen entered the school compound after dark, ordering the students to separate into ethnic groups. Many refused, the Hutu students defiantly proclaiming “We are all Rwandans!” Six students were killed by gunshots and grenade blasts; many more were injured. Though the story was barely reported in Western media at the time, it became a source of hope for many Rwandans - an example of how a younger generation, unmoved by the bitterness of the country’s ethnic divide, might be able to create a new identity - a purely national identity - among Hutus and Tutsis alike.

The product of an English director and a foreign film crew, the movie is undeniably polished. Even the actors - young Rwandans with no formal training - perform at a high level. It is perhaps that studious feel of the film, the undeniable seriousness of its intent, that has such a disquieting effect on the crowd. There’s uncomfortable shifting in the grandstand; a few men, bitterly shaking their heads, wave their hands in disgust and make for the exit. I wonder, as the chorus of grumbles and angry commentary grows, whether We Are All Rwandans is too slick for its own good: if the villagers don’t suspect that this foreign-made flick is just another example of white people telling them how they should behave, how they should feel. (Debs Eugene-Gardner, the director, will later explain how upsetting the night was for her. Despite her best efforts to employ Rwandan actors and technicians, and to be sensitive to the feelings of a rural crowd, she “felt we failed to make a Rwandan film.”)

It’s impossible to tell, though, if it’s just the movie that prompts the sudden, mass exodus from the stadium: lightning has been flashing over the hills, illuminating the tree line’s sharp silhouette, and a gust of wind threatens to tear the screen from its moorings. A storm is blowing in, and by the time I reach the road and flag down a moto, the rain has already arrived in cold, hard drops. We weave cautiously through the gathering storm. Hundreds of people crowd the road, bags over their heads, jackets and shawls turned up to shield themselves from the rain. In the bike’s headlight, the raindrops are like fat, silver coins. We drive slowly, waiting for the crowd to part. There’s a strange, cinematic quality to our progress, bodies tramping through the light in awkward, herky-jerk strides, almost as if they’re moving in slow motion. It’s an arresting sight to see this massive crowd surging along the road. The villagers are hunched and stumbling through the rain, now and then glancing back over their shoulders, as if the ghosts were at their heels.


Advertisement



12th September 2008

Exemplary piece of writing and reporting
This is the kind of article that justifies travel writing and turns it into something more important than a canned travelogue in written form. Articles like this are why I still look to the travel section for literature and enlightenment in the news format. Articles like this are also a strong argument against the syndication of travel writing, which tends to move the discipline towards a too-safe, McTraveler outlook on the world. Travel and travel writing, because its premise is that the traveling author has a different and broadly-informed perspective, offers us a real opportunity to re-view how we live. But to get back to you particular experience. Have your views on the opposing motives -- moving the rwandan nation forward vs. facing and resolving its racial strife -- develop further over the course of your stay? I, for one, would welcome any further writing on this subject.
14th April 2009

on the move!
wow, i was just suprised to see what this was on this site, im mean it's impressive just to see the titles and read the titles, well i don't whose initiative it was but that was a good outlook on Rwanda, which leaves me eager to know what could be happening elsewhere in the world,anyway it's a travelling site i hope something new is also coming.

Tot: 0.123s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 10; qc: 38; dbt: 0.0729s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.2mb