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Published: October 21st 2007
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Kigali pool posse go laarge....
Me and Aussie Tom take some local scalps.... Mzungu is the Swahili word for "white person" which East African urchins joyfully shout whenever they catch sight of a western traveller, hence I've felt like a minor celebrity ever since setting foot in the "Pearl of Africa", Winston Churchill's moniker for Uganda. Uganda is just how I'd invisaged 'Africa' since childhood: lush green vegetation everywhere, brown roads that disintegrate into quagmires after torrential downpours, people carrying a multitude of goods on their heads (no hands) and big toothy grins on the locals' faces. Ugandans and Rwandans are perhaps the friendliest people I've met in the last year - very refreshing after entountering swindlers at every street corner in Egypt - and distinctly polite in the pestering stakes; they tend to go about their business and leave you in peace, no hard sales techniques here....
After kicking my heels in Kampala for a couple of days, it was time for a white-water-rafting adrenaline rush at the source of the Nile, grade 5 rapids galore; naturally the boat flipped a few times - some of the falls are monsterous when you're peering over them - and one does start to panic (read: soil your knickers) after five or six seconds of
Who are you calling babyface??
I'll give you a fat lip before you've got time to blink mzungu.... 'downtime', with your head banging off the underside of the raft and gory thoughts flooding your mind....still, it's certainly whetted my appetite for another go, according to connoisseurs the Zambezi is just as good, if not better....
Following a hairy burst through the rush hour Kampala traffic on a
boda-boda (motorbike taxi) with my 15kg backpack nearly somersaulting me off the back on a couple of occasions, I caught the Post Bus down to Lake Bunyoni in the very far south of Uganda, where I stayed in my first ever eco-resort: it was compost toilets, candles in the dorm, gas stoves and warm beers (nae fridge!) all the way, fine for a couple of days....unless the Manager is a complete tadger who hogs the internet
all day and only accedes control if you grovel like a errant schoolboy in front of the Headmistress....not quite my signature style but I did refrain from clouding up and raining all over him....and it's amazing how quickly one can develop a taste for warm beer, weird. Still, the highlight of my brief spell on the island was whipping a poor English bloke (Adrian) at backgammon, after not having played since Turkey - how
Was Bananaman from Uganda?? I thought he came from the Moon??
To be fair, I was always more of a Beezer reader than a Dandy fan... are you Andreas? - schweeeet.
And then it was time to head south to the Rwanda,
Le Pays des Milles Collines (Land of a Thousand Hills) with an Aussie geezer called Tom - another Lake Bunyoni boy - for a couple of big nights out in Kigali, taking local scalps on the pool table whilst supping 720ml Primus beers and feasting on brochettes (kebabs), mmm....
Of course, Rwanda is more infamous for its gruesome genocide in 1994 when between 800,000 and one million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutu sympathizers were brutally hacked/clubbed/stabbed to death during one hundred days - April 6 through mid-July - of national insanity. The principal perpetrators of the mass murder were members of an extremist Hutu militia group called the
Interahamwe - meaning "Those who stand/fight/kill together" in Kinyarwanda - who secretly compiled extensive death lists naming neighbours/colleagues/acquaintances and waited for the green light to run amok. Some of the stories from the genocide are truly horrific: up to 500,000 Tutsi women were deliberately raped by HIV-positive Hutu men, mothers were forced to kill their children before being murdered themselves and Catholic priests betrayed the congregations who thought they would be safe in the
Mr Primus was to become a good friend....
I even managed a blag a Primus cap from a brewery worker in Gisenyi, nice.... sanctuary of their church, nasty.
In a shelled nut, the origin of the ethnic conflict dates back over a century and differences between the two groups were deliberately exacerbated by Rwanda's colonial masters, first Germany and then Belgium. Back in the day, Tutsis were the minority group who were largely herders, whilst Hutus (the majority) worked the fields. However, when Belgium assumed control of the country after Germany's defeat in WWI, things changed significantly; the Belgians favoured the Tutsis claiming they were the superior upper class and treated the Hutus as peasants, thus precipitating a Hutu rebellion and inadvertently triggering the formation of the Interahamwe. The Roman Catholic church, the primary educators in the country, was also complicit in creating emnity between the two groups by establishing separate educational systems for each, never a good idea for long-term integration as all Scottish folks well know. In order to differentiate between Tutsis and Hutus, the Belgians used an somewhat arbitrary method of classification based on the number of cattle a person owned; anyone with ten or more cattle was considered a member of the aristocratic Tutsi class! Ethnicity was then indicated on identity cards - from 1935 onwards - which
the Interahamwe happily used seventy years later during the genocide to decide who was 'up for the chop'....
In the wake of the Rwandan Genocide, the international community, and the United Nations in particular, drew severe criticism for its inaction. Despite international news coverage of the violence as it unfolded, most countries, including France, Belgium, and the United States, declined to prevent or stop the massacres. Canada continued to lead the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). Despite specific warnings and requests from UNAMIR's commanding officers in Rwanda, before and during the genocide, the UN Security Council refused to send additional support, declined UNAMIR's request for authorization to intervene, and even scaled back UNAMIR's forces and authority. But then, if the world hardly batted an eyelid when when our European brothers in the former Yugoslavia decided to go berserk and invent 'ethnic cleansing', what was the likelihood that they would choose to intervene in a poor, obscure country right in the middle of Africa?? Exactly, zero. Darfur anyone??
Anyways, a gang of us did the obligatory happy-hour-drinks-thing by the pool in the Hotel Des Milles Collines (aka
Hotel Rwanda) which was more
than a tad surreal given the history of the place. The movie was actually shot in South Africa but the reality is far more disturbing; rather than the out-of-town country club setting portrayed in the film, the Hotel is plonked right in the middle of Kigali, surrounded by roads with little to no protection from the menacing hordes who gathered outside baying for Tutsi blood, it must have been turbo scary and then some.
So, after experiencing the harrowing tales of the Genocide, what better pick-me-up than to go trekking with mountain gorillas? I'll buy that. There are only 700 mountain gorillas remaining in the wild, concentrated in just three countries, namely Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I was lucky enough to see them in the Volcanoes National Park - home to pioneering researcher Diane Fossey (aka Sigourney Weaver of 'Gorillas in the Mist' fame) for nearly twenty years before she was murdered in 1985 - and it was abso-blinking-tootley marvellous, the best experience in twelve months of world travel, well worth the $500 fee for a measley one-hour visit. The group we trekked to had 16 members with one silverback - 'The Daddy' -
Kigali suffers a minor earthquake....
Spot our new pal 'Tiger' on the far right, that boy's got style.... rulling the roost with a big stick and King-Kong-style chest beating, a rather formidable chap. I was almost within touching distance on several occasions and was quasi-charged a couple of times but the tracker just gave the gorilla a wee 'slap' and he pulled a handbrake turn....or perhaps he'd heard about the Glasgow Kiss and bottled it??! We'll never ever know....
Next up was was a jaunt to Lake Khivu - right at the border with the DRC - for a few days with Adrian (we bumped into each other again when gorilla spotting), for muchos pool and not much else (lazy barstewards), before I headed back to Kigali and flew out to Arusha in Tanzania to hook up with Jules, Dos n rupes for a spot of safari, it's all gravy....
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