from Bujumbura, Burundi
Le francais: la langue d’amour, la langue du Burundi et du Rwanda. It’s been, by turns, very rewarding and completely embarassing to relearn French in Rwanda and Burundi. My accent has been commended numerous times, but my tongue freezes up whenever I hit a hole in my patchy vocabulary. And then I get all flustered and end up bungling all the long words and utterly confusing the target of this barrage of nonsense.
To sum up the past few weeks, I left Moshi, Tanzania on a 24 hour bus ride through Kenya to Kampala, Uganda. There, I spent a week and a half exploring the city on foot and spending altogether too much time in the internet cafe, trying to get some things sorted for university in September. I’ll need to make a final decision on that soon, after hearing about one last fellowship competition. Kampala was by far my favourite African city thus far. It was fairly clean, bustling, sunny and, after Moshi, very friendly. Since the economy is far less dependent on tourism than that of northern Tanzania, I was relieved not to be hassled at every corner. In Moshi, I had to be careful at whom I glanced, since they would immediately assume that they’d been given an opening through which to slip a ‘mister’ or a ‘mzungu’ or a ‘please’ or a ‘just one look’ or a ‘no pressure to buy’ or a ‘looking is free’ or a ‘give me money’.
My main form of transportation in Kampala was the motorbike taxi. It’s an exhilerating way to get around, if a bit harrowing. Some of the drivers seemed to think that I’d give them a tip for a wild ride or were trying to impress the mzungu. Either way, sidewalks, narrow alleys, oncoming traffic, and median barriers presented no problem in the all-out effort to get end-to-end as quickly as possible over the shortest distance necessary. Unfortunately, there’s not much to do in Kampala aside from watching the constant wheeling and drifting of massive Marabou storks on thermals high above the city. I was distraught to wake up and realize that I’d been there for a week and a half, my time in Africa slipping through my fingers. When one of my fellow travellers mentioned that she was heading to Kigali the next morning, I leapt at the opportunity, got up at 5:30am, bought my ticket, withdrew cash, and got to the bus, only to find out that her ticket had been sold to someone else (me?) and she had to scramble to find another bus down.
Nevertheless, we both made it to Kigali safely. The change in scenery was abrupt when crossing the border. Although the vegetation was much the same (banana trees, tea and coffee plantations, some eucalyptus), Rwanda, Pays des Milles Collines, is incredibly landscaped. Every inch of ground has been transformed into a vast garden, every hill perfectly rounded and terraced over decades of careful cultivation. Tea (?) plantations cover the flat valley floors between a multitude of verdant hills. Where there may have previously been rivers and streams, ordered networks of irrigation ditches and canals lace through the valleys, drawing all runoff into productive agricultural use. In my week and a half in Rwanda, I saw only two real rivers, both of which had been constrained and channeled by human endeavor. All other water runs through the irrigation system and is absorbed into the soil.
The Kigali bus and taxi park was bustling as we arrived in fading twilight. I made my first Rwandan friend on the bus, Faustin, a Congolese-born Rwandan who returned to Rwanda in 1995 during the re-integration of forty years of refugees. When my new travelling buddy, Amber, arrived on the later bus, we trudged over to a nearby hotel to set our minds to deciphering the French-African menu and crash for the night.
Early the next morning, Faustin and his ‘uncle’, Fidèle, came around to take us to the main genocide memorial centre and then to memorial services at the National Stadium. April 7th marks the day that the President’s plane was shot down while landing at Kigali, sparking the gruesome atrocities of 1994. The entire week is a national holiday dedicated to ceremonies and remembrances. The main ceremony at the National Stadium began just as the last light of day faded away. A candlelit procession of politicians and dignitaries filed around the track as ten thousand stood still in the stands. Songs were sung, speeches were made; sombre, mournful, looking to the past to learn for the future by the light of a bonfire. As survivors gave testimony of their experiences, wails and shrieks rose up from the crowd, women in hysterics having to be carried away by friends and medics to the counsellors standing by. Fidèle translated some of the more chilling cries: “They’re killing me! They’re killing me!”. Roméo Dallaire, Canadian commander of the UN mission in Rwanda during the genocide, was prominent in the interviews and footage projected on an inflatable screen at centrefield. As the crowd began to drift out, we decided it was best to leave ourselves. Testimonies continued on into the night.
The next few days were spent searching for food, hanging out at the lavish Western-style coffee shop in downtown Kigali, and sleeping at St. Paul’s mission hostel. The hostel was warm, welcoming, and sunny. We awoke Easter Sunday to joyous song radiating from the nearby chapel as well as the cathedral up the road; in striking but welcome contrast to the harrowing cries of the previous night.
Downtown Kigali was a shock after travelling through the rest of East Africa. Where Kampala was a bustling, organic, African metropolis, central Kigali was new, shiny, and sterile; the tsunami of guilt-driven development aid following the world’s criminal neglect was in great evidence; the beggars and street hawkers, such an integral thread in the African backdrop, pushed out of the city centre under Paul Kagame’s leadership.
A few days in Kigali was more than enough, so we hopped on a bus down to Butare in the south. Based out of another mission hostel, we visited the National Museum, purported to be the best in East Africa (much competition?), before cramming into a shared taxi for the short journey to Gikongoro, home of perhaps the most remarkable genocide memorial. What had formerly been a technical college, some distance out of town, sheltered thousands of Tutsis fleeing the carnage of 1994 before militants arrived to slaughter them all. Long and narrow buildings run in parallel lines along the edge of a hill, each door opening onto a frozen scene: bodies preserved with lime, shruken and white, frozen into poses of horror and terrifying death. Half-decayed, the stench is suffocating. As with all memorials in Rwanda, this one serves as a chilling reminder of the depths of human depravity when driven by suffering, paranoia, and propaganda. It is meant as a plea to visitors to never forget; to speak out against such horrors and take what action is within their power.
Ragged and dirty clothes gathered from the victims are stuffed into shelves in a big empty room. Signs mark the spots where French soldiers erected their flag mere weeks after the massacre, and where they played volleyball on the lumpy ground covering a mass grave. To say that the French have a bad name in Rwanda is a serious understatement. Rumours abound that Paul Kagame and his government are even considering a move to change the official national languages to Kinyarwanda and English, rather than French. The French army arrived towards the end of the genocide, during “Operation Turquoise”, ostensibly to protect refugees fleeing south, but by all official (and undoubtedly biased) accounts, acted to protect génocidaires and shore up the government in the face of the RPF’s advance from the north, led by Kagame.
Shaken, we wandered back along the road to the taxi rank, the memorial having fulfilled it’s purpose, sparking discussions about human motivation to kill, group pressures, and what kind of terrible mix of circumstance and opportunity may have driven the worst mass murder in world history. And why most of us are still oblivious to current crises, Darfur being the obvious example.
Feeling the need for a tiny bit of escapism, we grabbed a bus up to Kibuye, on the shores of beautiful, calm, and mist-enshrouded Lake Kivu. The lake forms a good part of the border between Rwanda and neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and is a popular spot in Rwanda’s young and sparse tourist industry. Two rain-sprinkled days spent wandering up into the sleepy town, swimming in the lake, and drinking a few beers while contemplating serenity, peace, tranquility, possibility.
DRC, the Congo, gets a bad rap on the world stage, and not without reason: it’s been engulphed in civil war for much of the past 50 years. Goma, just over the border from Rwanda, has been a haven of relative calm in the past few years, thanks in most part to the large UN and NGO presence. The major UN mission in DRC is based in Goma, along with large numbers of Congolese national army troops.
Amber’s Canadian friend works for the UN in Goma, and we had heard spectacular things about the volcano national park nearby, so we made a plan to cross over and convinced two fellow travellers that we’d met in Kibuye to come with. Goma, on the Congolese side, and Gisenyi, on the Rwandan side, are practically one city, but the crossing the border, the differences are marked. In 2002, Nyiragongo erupted, sending rivers of lava flowing 50 kilometres, killing several dozen and devastating large parts of Goma.
Amber’s friend drove to the border and picked us up in a UN truck, smoothing things over with the border guards. The city itself was bustling, but dreary and depressed. Five-year-old lava rock fills the streets near the border, and the government threw some crushed rock on top to create a terribly rough and potted driving surface. On one side street near the edge of the lava, some shopkeepers have opted to dig their storefronts out below the new ground level, while others have simply built new storefronts on the second floor. Everything is a dirty black and grey. The traffic police stand out in stark contrast with bright yellow uniforms and big yellow helmets emblazoned with a blue star.
After a meal of grilled fish, we arranged our permit for the volcano hike, had a rest, and headed to an NGO party. One of the stalwarts of the Goma NGO scene had taken a job in another strife-riven part of the world and was being given a big sendoff at the Goal compound, an Irish NGO with a bunch of different development objectives. NGO workers working in difficult places have a reputation for working very hard and letting loose in outrageous fashion when given the opportunity. Seems like a crazy life.
In the morning, Amber’s friend drove us an hour out of town to the ranger’s post at the base of the volcano. Our guard, armed with an automatic rifle, and three porters led us up the mountain, first through close, wet, lush jungle, and then along the frozen lava flow, which had crumbled as it cooled, turning to loose rock. Half-charred trees stood or lay in the scree, molten rock frozen in all sorts of swirls and flowing patterns. A thunderstorm closed in after a few hours, just as we were approaching an exposed ridge, lighting striking not far, dead trees falling in heavy wind and rain. We rested for a moment, the storm passing, before climbing another few hours.
We emerged above the clouds just as the last trees and shrubs disappeared, revealing an incredible view in every direction: Lake Kivu stretching out to the south, the dense jungle landscape of Congo to the west, the softly rounded hills of Rwanda to the east, and the northwest Rwandan volcanic mountains ringed with cloud.
As I reached the edge of the crater, I held my breath subconsciously. Standing on the bare and broken rock of the crater’s rim, I gaped down into the massive bowl. At least a hundred metres deep and several hundred across, a barren rock landscape immense and raw. Several distinct subcraters were evident, stepping down to a seething, boiling, powerful, glowing lake of lava tens of metres across. It was one of the most incredible things that I have ever seen, defying any description of which I am capable. We camped just below the crater rim on the side of the volcano, tents hugging close on a little shelf. In the dark of night, lighting storms played on the horizon in Rwanda and the Congo, while overhead the stars shone bright, competing with the red glow lighting up the thick column of smoke that poured from the volcano’s fiery mouth. John and I sat up by the charcoal fire, exchanging exclamations about the depth of feeling invoked while gazing into the maw of the brooding beast beneath us. The night was surreal, everything seemed magnified: every emotion, sound, light.
Descending the next day, renewed in spirit by what we had experienced, we sped down through the jungle. After showering and eating, we caught a bus and crossed back into Rwanda for the three hour journey to Kigali. The following day, I parted ways with my new friends (forged of fire?) and flew to neighbouring Burundi, a country that has experienced many of the same circumstances as Rwanda, and plenty of upheaval.
I will write again soon of Bujumbura and Burundi, but for the moment must go and eat something! I fly to South Africa on Sunday, April 22nd, heading to Cape Town for a few days before returning to Pretoria on the 28th and saying a final farewell to my former colleagues. I will return to Canada, hopefully, in the first week of May.
I will post photos as soon as possible, likely from Pretoria.