Advertisement
Published: April 16th 2008
It’s a short, easy crossing at the border - the guards, grinning and bashful, pump my hand and welcome me to Rwanda - and the drive to Kigali is long, cramped, scenic. The road winds along a lush valley carved by tea plantations and lined by eucalyptus trees. Villagers stoop in the afternoon heat, plucking tea leaves from the low branches. Women with colorful headscarves walk single-file down dirt paths, propping bright parasols against their shoulders. We pass through small, scruffy villages and fields being worked by bare-chested men with spades. The country is intensely cultivated; even the steep hillsides are neatly terraced, and it’s hard to imagine how this crowded little country manages to sustain itself. There’s a congenial din in the back of the minibus, filled mostly with Ugandans visiting family across the border. Someone buys a few passion fruits from a boy selling them on the side of the road, and he offers me one, splitting a seam with his thumbs and telling me to tip it back and suck out all the juice.
When we reach Kigali, I’m helped to a taxi by one of the other passengers: he hoists my backpack onto his shoulder
and then, seconds later, straining with the effort, thinks better of it. I heave my things into the trunk as he negotiates with the driver, narrowing his eyes as he translates, haggling for a fair price. Later that day, after I’ve settled in at my hotel, he’ll arrive, slightly drunk, and sit with me on the terrace. Emmanuel explains that he’s a businessman based in Kampala, in town to peddle some of his products to other businessmen. When I ask what sort of business - and what sort of products - he waves his hand ambiguously in the air.
“It is, you know, business,” he explains.
Tidy, bustling, frightfully efficient, Kigali itself is all business. Comparing it to the congested, oft-seedy clamor of Kampala in neighboring Uganda, you can’t help but be impressed. The streets are pathologically clean, the traffic is orderly, the air is smogless. Even the
motos - the Rwandan equivalent of Uganda’s
boda-bodas - seem to reflect an unnatural faithfulness to the rule of law. While motorbikes in Kampala were often burdened with two, three, even four fully grown adults - many carrying furniture and poultry in tow - Kigali’s
motos carry one
passenger at a time. Drivers wear vests with their ID numbers neatly emblazoned on the back; each bike comes with a spare helmet for passengers, chin strap and all. It is, I’m forced to admit, eerie at first glance - a strange, parallel world to the unbridled chaos of Uganda.
Of course, it’s hard to look past the circumstances that brought Rwanda here today. This is a country that, just fourteen years ago, had seen more than 10% of its population killed during the genocide, and hundreds of thousands more uprooted and fleeing to neighboring countries. The task for Rwandans in the years that followed wasn’t simply to rebuild what was left of their shattered country: it was more like starting from scratch. There are stories of ex-pats returning to the country in the summer of ’94, staking their claims to the first house or plot of land they came across. (Who would protest?) And when the ex-RPF installed itself in government house, promising to pull the country back together again, it took a collective act of faith to even believe that such a thing as a “country” could still exist.
Since taking office in 2003 as
the country’s first democratically elected president, Paul Kagame has earned a reputation for heavy-handedness - a leader whose emphasis on order underscores a belief that, without a strong government keeping the country together, Rwanda would fall apart at the seams. It’s impossible to say, standing here today, how much truth lies in that; considering the booming economy, the flood of foreign investment, and the miraculous fact that Rwanda has avoided the sorry fate of its war-torn neighbors, Burundi and the Congo, you certainly have to give Kagame credit for engineering this modern miracle. Still, there’s something unsettling in the zealous attempts to keep the country squeaky clean (the last Saturday of every month is an
official day of community clean-up). One can’t help but be reminded of Lady Macbeth, haunted and pacing the halls of Inverness, rubbing at her hands - “Out, damn’d spot!” - while the ghosts gathered at the castle door.
It’s the start of the rainy season in Rwanda, and after the hot, hazy weather that greeted me on Monday, the skies have opened up over Kigali. The clouds blow in one evening - low, brooding, churning with distant thunder - and soon the storms
follow. Broad curtains of rain drape across the hills; they batter the awning while I have a coffee on the terrace, watching the lightning flicker across the city. It rains through the night and again the next afternoon. Walking around the center of town - pretty, leafy, full of bougainvillea and frangipani and hibiscus - I duck into a fast-food restaurant for lunch. My pants are soaked and stuck to my legs, and the owner - a dignified old Pakistani - clears some space for me at his table. He barks at one of the waiters to wipe down my book with a dishrag, and then urges me to help myself to the buffet. I pile rice and potatoes and beans and beef onto my plate - I’m growing more African by the minute - and we sit outside on the terrace, watching the lunch crowds scramble for cover.
Motos screech and skid on the wet blacktop. The owner nibbles at the edge of a samosa, crumbs gathering in the hair on his lip.
After a few minutes we’re joined by a friend of his, John - a stocky thirty-something with a thick, bull-dog’s head and a healthy
bit of paunch. He orders a coffee and leans back in his chair and asks where I’m from. We talk a bit about New York - “I have good friends in Texas, and the Bronx,” he insists - and about my time in Africa. He wonders why I didn’t visit Rwanda last week, when President Bush spent a day during his whirlwind African tour. When I ask his opinion of our beleaguered Commander-in-Chief, he’s non-committal. He points to the aid that’s poured into Rwanda under the current administration, and the trade deal penned by Presidents Bush and Kagame last week. I ask what Rwandans think of former President Clinton: did they feel betrayed by his failure to stop the genocide? John scratches his bald head and folds his hands on the table.
“When Mr. Clinton apologized for not doing more, that meant a lot,” he says. “I have read his book. He says he regrets the mistakes he made in ’94. It is important to us that he is sorry.
“The French,” he adds, “have never apologized.”
Perhaps most important to Rwanda, though, is maintaining cordial relations with the powers-that-be. Much of the country’s
booming economy is tied to foreign investment, and in the scramble for American dollars - however deflated they might be - no country wants to be left out in the cold.
“We Africans do not care so much for one president or another,” says John. “We just want to be friends with America.”
It’s a common African tale, and John has lived - by the region’s strange standards - a typical East African life. Born in Burundi, after his family left Rwanda in 1960, he spent much of his young life around the Great Lakes Region. It was a time, after all, when many Rwandans were fleeing ethnic violence, finding new homes in Burundi and Congo, in Uganda and Tanzania. John came back to Rwanda in 1994. He says the year and it sits between us, gathering silence. I ask, with strained innocence, what made him come back. Did he have family in the country? He leans forward and shakes his head.
“It is very complicated,” he says, and laughs nervously. He looks quickly over his shoulder and says, “You see…,” his voice briefly trailing off. He begins again. “You people, it is very hard to
understand how it was for thirty years, before ’94.” He says it without malice, almost warmly - the way a father might sigh over the questions of a naïve son, knowing there are years of hard-earned knowledge between them.
He folds his hands on the table and starts with the Belgian colonists, then the rising tide of anti-Tutsi sentiment, the violence - ’59, ’63 - and then the panicked flight. Suddenly he skips ahead: it’s 1994, and a tentative truce after three years of civil war is broken when President Habyarimana’s plane mysteriously crashes one April night. Hutu Power officials blame the RPF; the RPF, in turn, suspects a Hutu plot to eliminate the president - his pursuit of peace was widely opposed by militant Hutus - and blame them for his death. Within hours Tutsis and Hutu moderates are targeted. For 100 days, the slaughter is relentless and widespread. John raps his knuckles softly on the table.
“We came from Uganda,” he says, again jumping ahead, not giving any clues as to who “we” are or when “we” came. It’s only as he describes his movement south into the country that it becomes clear the “we” is the RPF. I interrupt his story.
“So you were a soldier with the RPF?”
“I was sort of like a teacher,” he says. “No, that’s not the word. I was telling people about the RPF, what we were doing.”
“You were a propagandist,” I offer.
“Yes,” he says. “That is the word.”
He jumps forward again, to the months after the genocide. Exiles who left Rwanda in the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s - some, the sons and daughters of exiles, have lived their whole lives abroad - come pouring into the country from across the region. Rwanda is devastated. Houses, businesses are vacant.
“If you came here in 1994,” John says, gesturing to the restaurant, “and the door is open and no one is here…” He chuckles, shaking his head. “Now it becomes your restaurant. And this happened all across the country. People came and took the first house they found."
We sit and watch the sky begin to clear, patches of blue shining through the clouds. It’s impossible, in the short time since we met, to ask John most of the questions I have. More than a decade has passed since the genocide, but for Rwandans, what does that mean? What sort of grief do the victims still carry? Can wounds so deep ever really heal?
John, as if following the trail of my thoughts, leans across the table. His eyes are bitter, but his voice sounds sorrowful, resigned.
“These people you see here,” he says, gesturing to the traffic on the sidewalk, “most of them have killed. It was everyone, so many people involved.” He shrugs his shoulders and places his hands on the table, palms up. “What can you do now?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s an earnest entreaty lying just below the surface. I ask John how, after all these years, survivors have learned to deal with their trauma.
“People are forgetting, they are getting on with their lives,” he says. “Now you are living next to someone, you are working with someone - maybe they killed your parents, your friends.” He laughs a short, startled laugh. Then he adds, “You need a strong government here. Otherwise it is very easy to get guns, to go after people for revenge.”
Considering the scale of the slaughter in ‘94, you can’t help but wonder how many Rwandans have those same thoughts on their minds. Reminders of the genocide are everywhere: just down the hill from where we say our goodbyes, I pay a visit to Sainte Famille. During the genocide, when dozens of religious figures were implicated in the bloodshed, the church achieved a special degree of notoriety. It was here that Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, clad in a military-issue flak jacket, preached the gospel with a crucifix in one hand and a pistol in the other. While thousands of refugees huddled inside his church, Munyeshyaka drew up lists of Tutsis and Hutu collaborators to hand over to the militias. They were given free rein to enter the church and pick out their victims. Munyeshyaka himself was accused of raping some of the refugees, or offering sanctuary in exchange for sexual favors.
The church is formidable, a fortress of weathered brick looking across a congested valley. The windows are dusty, webbed, splintered; terra cotta tiles, missing in places, slope down from the roof. None of the gaudy splendor of the Spanish cathedrals, none of the simple, white-steepled piety of my Vermont college town. Sainte Famille looks more like a textile mill in Victorian England than a place of worship: a dusty storehouse for prayers to be bundled and stacked and ticked off a checklist as the foreman makes his rounds. The wind blows dirt across the parking lot; a few women with infants bundled to their backs sit beneath a flowering tree. Two men, squatting in the shade, look up to watch me circle the building. Their faces are tight, shrunken, wary; but when I wave they break into mischievous grins, wagging their hands in the air.
It’s early in the afternoon, and the pews inside the church are almost empty. A few women in loose, colorful dresses shuffle across the polished floor, touching their fingertips to their heads. The room is bright and airy, a place where prayers can spread their wings and take flight. But from the entrance there’s a sadness in all those empty spaces. On another day in Rwanda, these pews might have been filled by pious bodies dipping their heads in prayer. A man sits at the end of an empty row, leaning heavily on his knees. There are scars on the back of his head - a spider web of wounds healed over - and he sits there, his face resting in the palm of his hand, his fingers clicking the beads of a rosary. Crude oil paintings are hung from the walls: a pink Roman arm lifting the whip; a stiff-figured Christ hunched beneath each blow. I wonder if there’s a good Christian moral in that story of suffering, or if it might just be a bloody parable of human cruelty, and the harm that one man can do another.
An old man enters through the side door, tall and lean with an umbrella propped on his shoulder. He bows stiffly at the waist and dips his finger into a bowl of holy water, performing the sign of the cross with a rigid, formal grandeur. Hobbling across the room, he stops in the center aisle to again touch his fingers to his forehead. A cloth sack is tucked beneath his arm - a bright red bundle that he carefully unpacks, stacking prayer books one by one on the bench in front of him. He creaks to his knees and sits with his back upright. Outside I can hear children playing; a few come skipping inside, their strides brisk, their prayers a model of religious thrift. They drop to their knees and then dart for the exit, stopping just long enough to splash their hands into the holy water. And the old man moves his lips over his prayers, palms turned to the rafters, asking for hope or forgiveness.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.509s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 27; qc: 142; dbt: 0.3153s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.5mb
deleted_45905
deleted_45905
John Nanchang China
Outstanding blog entry; very well written indeed. In 1999, VSO (a British government funded development agency) offered me a place in either Rwanda or China to teach English, but as you can see I chose China, although, a volunteer who choose Rwanda, despite being advised to the contrary, travelled along an unsafe route and was killed. I have remained in China since I was a volunteer here. Excellent blog entry.