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| CONTENTS |
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| Map of Rwanda |
| Foreword |
| The roots of evil |
| CHAPTER ONE | CHAPTER TWO |
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| Guilty conscience | The diaspora |
| In the besieged bazaar | Le complexe de Fachoda |
| In a golden cage | The pearl of bichupuli | Travel jitters |
On the sixth of April 1994, I was preparing to go to bed, when I received a telephone call from my brother Joseph in Toronto; "President Juvenal Habyarimana has been killed in a plane crash," he said.
And from that moment, Rwanda, which had hitherto lurked in the background of my life like a distant memory, became everything and my life would never be the same again, never!
As the tragic events which followed the president's death begun to unfold, I lost interest in everything else. My days consisted of hourly radio news bulletins. I could not stand the indulgences and the small superfluous talk of Parisian society life. I felt useless and helpless. In the ghastly newspaper photographs, I fancied seeing mutilated corpses of relatives I had never met. The television imagery served to aggravate my already troubled sleep. I found myself drifting through the days in a trance. The attempts at writing fiction which had previously defined my day to day life now seemed irrelevant. But my ambition of becoming a writer was now focused. Rwanda was to be my subject matter.
Yet until then, the only tangible link I had had with Rwanda and indeed my entire past, was an old blurred, and yellowed family photograph, taken sometime in 1961. In the photograph, my parents are sitting stoically side by side-her on the left. I am only a few months old, and seem to be struggling out of my mother's hold, while my brother Joseph looks on with what seems like the envy of any older brother yearning for more attention.
For many years this faded black and white instant immobilised on paper, would constitute my whole past. A glimpse of a forgotten world. It was the hook upon which hang my very identity, a portable Rwanda that I carried around with me from one country of exile to another, it was a memento which gave the semblance of continuity to the uncertainty of exile.
However, while in Rwanda in 1994, I suddenly realised that when we fled into exile in 1964, a part of Rwanda had followed us into exile. At home we spoke Kinyarwanda, we almost exclusively received Rwandese visitors, ate Rwandese food, employed only Rwandese servants. Rwanda lay about the house in the royal shield crossed with spears, the woven or beaded artifacts hanging in the sitting room.
Everything outside our house retained a substance of difference. You saw it in the appearance of our neighbours, their language, in their dress, and their food. At home our neighbours were categorically referred to as Hutus, because they were short, stocky, with flat noses, the typical Hutu physique. At school, disparaging jokes were made about our appearances and height. This, as I now realise was a latent infantile form of ethnic antagonism. And we had to lie about our origins in order to gain entry to government funded secondary schools reserved for Ugandans only.
I remembered very little of Rwanda, although it persistently haunted my imagination. Indeed Rwanda loomed large in the background of my life, lingered on in the customs, gestures and vocabulary of my relatives. It was the country of my birth, a country where my mother( she died in 1989) and little sister still lived, the only country in the world for which my United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Travel Document was not valid. Like all exiles, I was haunted by a sense of loss, an existential void, an urge to reclaim. As Caryl Phillips says in The European Tribe, "I felt like a transplanted tree that had failed to take root in foreign soil." Exile is a break with the past, family histories are fragmented into voids and myths. Things are forgotten. My parents, let alone grandparents are a mystery; who were they, where did they come from? The exile is an orphan who has lost his motherland, and his life is defined by a ceaseless quest for parentage, his homeland.
2
In my childhood, Rwanda was a distant, indistinct place and time in my memory, the obscure object of nostalgia, a forgotten country illustrated by the travel agent's myth of an "African Switzerland" whose rolling hills were graced with neat grass huts, lyre horned cattle and affable peasants. A place I remembered through the usual frosty glass window of retrospection, with a view too demanding for memory's shortsighted eye, and consequently my attention would falter, then recover and I would reach out to wipe away the mist with an index finger, a large drop of water would accumulate in the finger's wake, snake down the window pane, stop as if it had remembered something, and finally resume its brisk sinuous course down my cheek.
But the Rwanda which I visited in July 1994 was not the country of my private fantasy. It was one of ransacked towns, gutted houses scattered with shards of glass, torn paper and wrecked furniture. A Rwanda whose gentle rolling hills were shrouded in the acrid smell of rotting dead bodies, of churches piled high with dead parishioners hacked to death by fellow parishioners because of their height, or the shape of their nose. It was a Rwanda of deserted terraced hills, of stray dogs against the thunder of artillery fire. The gentle hills were a staircase into hell!
3
It was during my stay in Rwanda that I suddenly realised the inevitability of ethnicity, and family loyalties for the Rwandese. That to be a Rwandese is a full time occupation. It is to constantly categorise and be categorised and classed at each and every encounter. At the mention of my father's name people knew who I was, where I came from, of what clan I was. It was eerie. In a tiny, densely populated country like Rwanda with a common language and a common culture there is an absurd need to classify and define each and every individual. People find stability in smaller groupings of region, ethnic group, clan and family. The shape of one's nose, his height, his father's name, the place of his birth, are proof of his identity, his worth, the distinction and separation of oneself, the proof of one's position and function. One is never Rwandese, he is either Tutsi, Hutu or Twa. Although Rwanda is one of Africa's oldest nation states, ethnicity, not nationality is what defines the individual.
From the day of my arrival in Rwanda, I saw how deep the country was tangled up in the ethnic trap, by the importance of physical appearance: the badge of ethnicity. I had felt myself at once a local and an alien. Lacking the conventional labels of ethnicity, and ethnic allegiances I found myself alienated; my snub nose was not that of a Tutsi and yet my height was not that of a Hutu either.
"You are Rwandese!" a lady exclaimed when I spoke to her in Kinyarwanda at a bar in Kigali.
"Yes," I said, "why?"
"You don't look like one," she added. But what she really meant was that I neither looked like a Tutsi nor a Hutu. In Rwanda the question, 'are you a Rwandese?', is only a paraphrase for 'are you a Tutsi or Hutu?'
My progressive ideas and aspirations were alien, threatened social order; chaos. I lacked ethnic sense. And having grown up in an unothordox family, I was almost entirely ignorant of Tutsi traditions and rituals. The Tutsi food prejudices and restrictions are baffling. An avid taste for solid food is looked down upon and associated with the agrarian Hutu. While milk and its various products are fastidiously consumed. This I understood as a conviction derived from a society divided into pastoralists and cultivators. But why one had to guard against eating fish, mutton, and pork. No one seemed to know. Was it a forgotten ancestral rejection of the unclean? Remnants of a ritualistic past? "Even in the case of so called clean meat," notes J. M. Coetzee in his essay about Texas entitled Meat Country, "like beef, the same people who eat the muscle flesh of cattle are revolted at the thought of eating their eyes, their brains, their testicles, their lungs. They would vomit if they had to drink blood. Why? The question is pointless: distaste for certain body parts, and particulary for body fluids in their fluid state belongs to the penumbra of taboo, well outside the realm of rational explanation."
I shared a common language and social background with the people I met in the Kigali bars and homes; the walkie talkie wielding apparatchiks known as abakada (cadres), the military officers, but they were strangers I could not relate to. Their jackets and ties were just a parody of modernity, which barely disguised the herdsmen with a recent superstitious and rural past. Their frivolous and facetious conversations often eluded me. And yet only a decade and a half in Europe and Canada lay between us.
In Rwanda the conventional distinctions of language, customs and territory that distinguish one ethnic group from another in most of Africa, do not apply. But it would be deceitful and irresponsible to deny that there are differences between Tutsis and Hutus, the way the present authorities in Kigali do. It is not through negation that Rwanda's ethnical problem shall be solved, for differences do indeed exist. Subtle and complex, these differences are defined by a combination of physical stature, family and lineage. Certainly, appearence, probably due to different diets-illustred by the Tutsi disdain for solid food, or to endogamy, is not sufficient proof after centuries of intermarriage But Rwanda, has indeed fallen into the ethnic trap; first set by nineteenth century European ethnologists and missionaries still in the throes of Darwinism, before being adopted and sustained by Hutu ideologists when they took power in what would be termed the 'social revolution' in 1959, followed by thirty five years of ethnic tyrany culminating in the 1994 genocide of Tutsis.
A Guilty conscience
The idea of travelling to Rwanda came to me one evening while I was watching television news. It was at the height of the genocide, and there was a fat bespectacled man, apparently an expert of some sort on Africa, who kept going on about an ancestral hatred and tribal rivalry between the Hutu and Tutsi being the cause of the killings in Rwanda. "The Tutsi came probably from present day Ethiopia," he said, "then subjugated the Hutu whom they dominated for several centuries; until the social revolution of 1959." The man seemed very proud of repeating this popular myth used frequently to explain and justify the recent tragic history of Rwanda. Was it because he was addressing a French audience without the slightest knowledge about Rwanda, that he had to present a simple, logical explanation to the conflict? And the interviewer, who probably knew nothing of Rwanda prior to the conflict, did not ask the expert why the Tutsi and Hutu spoke the same language, or shared the same culture. Nor did he ask him why northern Hutu were killing southern Hutu. His next question was not why there was no record of ethnic massacres before 1959, but what the world could do for Rwanda. His ignorance became my guilt. I begun to think of a journey to Rwanda. Everything that was being said and written about the war and massacres in Rwanda, was being done by western journalists, western ethnologists, foreign humanitarian organisations whose knowledge and understanding of the conflict was only superficial at best given the european erronous interpretations of rwandese society ever since the begining of colonisation.
Europe was discovering Rwanda, exactly one hundred years after the first European, Count von Götzen set foot in the country. Friends for whom I had once pointed out Rwanda on the map(with difficulty) , now came asking me whether I was Tutsi or Hutu. And every day they sent me newspaper clippings of the latest horrors. For the European boudoir political pundits, Rwanda replaced the former Yugoslavia, as a synonym for the horror of ethnic strife that lay in store for the post-Cold War world: the "new world order" described as the "ideological hang-over" by french writer Rony Brauman. They did not or prefered not to see a genocide carried out by an army and militias armed and trained by France.
2
The rwandese was the first televised genocide: the murderers gave prime time interviews with impunity, and carried out their grisly pursuit before helpless western journalists and aid workers. Colonel Theonest Bagosora head of the Hutu militias gave interviews on French television.
In his book Civil War, the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes: "If these [television] images of terror don't make terrorists out of us, they turn us at least into voyeurs, and subject each one of us to an enduring moral blackmail. Once we have become eyewitnesses, we are open to accusations: now that we know the situation, what are we going to do about it? Television the most corrupt of all media, is transformed into a paragon of morality."
The "new World Order" in Africa was chaos, the death of the state. There were civil wars in Somalia, in Liberia, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Algeria, or in a latent state of civil war as in Egypt, Burundi, Mozambique, Niger, Zaire, Congo, Nigeria. The sheer number of conflicts made any kind of intervention impossible, with astronomical political costs. The United Nations peace mission in Rwanda, the U.N. Military intervention in Rwanda (UNAMIR) constrained by a contradictory United Nations mandate, looked on helplessly as Hutu militias and Rwanda government (FAR) soldiers killed unarmed Tutsi civilians. Then on the 7th of April ten soldiers, from the Belgian contingent in UNAMIR, guarding the Prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana were disarmed tortured and assassinated by soldiers of the Presidential guard. The Belgian government, horrified by the torture and killings of their soldiers decide to withdraw the rest their soldiers from UNAMIR. On the 9th of April, Belgium and France sent troops to evacuate theirs and other western nationals.
Stunned by this sudden withdrawal other nations followed suit because they believed , Belgium the former colonial power, knew the region best. And on the 27th of April the U.N. security council in New York, still haunted by the peacekeeping fiasco in Somalia, instead of voting to increase its peacekeeping contingent in Rwanda, voted to reduce it from 2,700 to 450 men, in the midst of the massacres. The protracted civil war in Bosnia and the peacekeeping fiasco in Somalia had buried any notions that peace and stability can be imposed from outside by major powers in the post-Cold War world order. So for several weeks the world stood back, and shamelessly looked on as unarmed civilians, women and children were cut into pieces by machette. As the death toll continued to rise the international community was still undecided whether to define what was happening in Rwanda as genocide. And finally when the UN Security Council decided to do something, it refused to qualify the massacres as genocide as this would have obliged them to intervene under international law. However, there was no doubt about it that the mass killings in Rwanda were genocide. For two or three year, persitent rumours of omnius preparations, a death list of prominant Tutsis and nocturnal training camps kept reaching even the Tutsi diaspora.
In june 1994 the french press, in a deliberate excercise of disinformation, described the tragic events in Rwanda as "tribal strife", "inter-ethnic war", giving the impression that machete wielding Hutu and Tutsi were hacking each other to pieces in a national gladiatorial match, with western journalists keeping the score. I felt helpless and useless knowing the truth, that innocent people, women and children and the old, the relatives I had never met, were being hacked to death for no other reason than that of being Tutsi, for their height, the shape of their nose. Finally I decided to go to Rwanda because I had to see for myself, to witness the tragedy of my people in the hope that this time around the massacres would not pass in impunity as they had done in 1959-63, 1973, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993.
This was in June 1994, two months after president Habyarimana's plane was shot down, already an estimated half a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were believed to have been massacred, and everyday brought news of more massacres. Hundreds of bloated dead bodies floated down the Nyabarongo and Akagera river towards Lake Victoria, at the rate of two dead bodies per minute, along what Hutu propaganda called "the shortest way back to Ethiopia". The third genocide of this century was almost accomplished; soldiers of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) were holding Kigali under siege and the United Nations security council had voted the redeployment of peace keeping troops, far too late for hundreds and thousands of Tutsi.
On the 16th of June as the then French foreign affairs minister Alain Juppe announced the imminence of a French military intervention in Rwanda in order to rescue their Hutu allies, I was packing my luggage for a flight the following day.
I was going to Rwanda through Uganda and had made arrangements over the telephone with my niece P. Her husband, whom I had never met, had some vague affiliation to the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF). He sounded interested in my book project and promised to arrange my passage into Rwanda.
At the time there were still very few direct flights from Europe to Entebbe in Uganda. So, I left on an Air France flight from Paris to Cairo, from where I would catch a connecting flight to Entebbe. The transit through Egypt lent a new dimension to my journey. It was as if I was to ascend the Nile valley from Egypt, through Sudan, Uganda, and on to the true source of the Nile in Rwanda. Thus retracing the alleged initial journey to Rwanda made by my Tutsi ancestors.
In the plane a corpulent Lebanese businessman sat next to me, and with him I could already feel Europe dwindling beneath the plane. In his crumpled and slack shiny grey suit I could already see a sort of oriental precursor to the African chaos and negligence awaiting me; his spontaneous familiarity, his ostentatious conversation were reminders of a promiscuous way of life I had almost forgotten.
Cairo airport had the hysterical, chaotic rush and noise of a bazaar. Suddenly everyone was dressed in a djellaba, shouting and rushing in all directions. And they all carried bulky shopping plastic bags. I was surprised and shocked by the aggressive sound of spoken Arabic. It was hard to associate the noisy, vulgar crowd in shabby djellabas with Pharaonic Egypt; with one of mankind's finest civilisations. It was hard to believe that these were the descendants of the fine masons and artists of Karnak, Luxor or Abu Simbel. The noisy crowd, someone later told me, were migrant workers returning from the Gulf States. Egypt like many other African countries lived by the export of its labour, by the glories of its past or the splendour of its fauna and flora.
We had landed on the African continent, and the change from the air-conditioned, efficient and orderly European airport to the stifling, chaotic, noisy, corrupt and insecure African airport was sudden. Overwhelming. Heavily armed soldiers wielding ominous looking machine guns lined the arrivals hall like a reminder to the European traveller, that authority had gone from being an authority imposed by the will of the people, to an autocratic authority imposed on the people by brutal force. That here authority was derived not from the depth of the ballot box, but from the barrel of a gun. There were armed men every four meters. Authority in Egypt, as in most of Africa, was under siege. However, in Egypt authority was not being contested by some democratic movement but by Muslim fundamentalists seeking to replace the existing secular and autocratic regime with a theocratic dictatorship.
In the arrivals hall at Entebbe international airport, there was a large framed photograph of a smiling president Yoweri Museveni. In the past Museveni used to be photographed in guerrilla uniform, now he was dressed in jacket, shirt and tie. He was no longer the unpredictable revolutionary, the Marxist freedom fighter, but was now a dignified head of state with whom the International monetary fund dealt.
Most of the passengers on my flight were Ugandans, and unlike the Egyptian passengers at the Cairo airport, they looked and acted in a subdued chaos, like people with something to reproach themselves with. And not without reason, for they were, coming from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, from where they had done a lot of duty free shopping. They were bringing back cardboard boxes of Japanese electronic goods, and enormous suitcases full of new clothes and shoes. And this was tying up the queues at the customs.
Outside P and her husband, James, were waiting for me. It was only three years since I had last seen her; then a tall, slender aspiring model in Paris, but the three years were enough to have changed her, for her to have given birth twice. With motherhood her bosom and waist had spread out. She looked much older than her twenty five years.
I had never met James, and on the telephone he had sounded much older. He was in his early thirties, small, handsome, with tutsi fine features. He was casually dressed in a striped tee-shirt and blue jeans. He was forever distracted and seemed to be doing mental arithmetic even as you talked to him. I liked him.
It was seven in the morning. P and James had left home without having breakfast. So we squeezed into their compact Japanese sports car and drove to the Lake Victoria hotel for breakfast. The Lake Vic, as it is popularly known, was in better condition than I had imagined, and there were even many cars parked in the driveway. The last time I had seen it, during Idi Amin's decadent days, it was in a chronic state of decrepitude, with dusty, stained carpets, dry water taps, and the swiming pool green with algae. Presently, everything looked impeccable, new. A liveried bellboy was too eager to park our sports car. This was the Lake Vic of the pre-Idi Amin days; of my childhood. It brought back memories of family outings in constricting Sunday clothes and generous buffets, followed with a visit to the airport(to watch planes land and take off from the waving bay) and the Entebbe zoological gardens in that order.
Incidentally that morning there was a breakfast buffet. As you served yourself, a thick blue fly proceeded you buzzing from one platter to another: trail blazing. Solemn waiters in dark green uniforms offered tea and refused to speak anything but English. The African tea I asked for had nothing African in particular, except that it took ages to come, and when it did, was just a gruel of water, milk, tea and ginger boiled together. Over breakfast it emerged that James was the son of a wealthy Rwandese businessman, with four wives and twenty children. James was the oldest son, and managed his father's import and export business. We groped around for common acquaintances. And indeed it turned out that James had attended Makerere university with a few of my secondary school classmates. The genocide in Rwanda loomed large in the perimeters of our conversation. Two of James's cousins had sought refuge in Uganda after their home had been attacked by the notorious Interahamwe Hutu militia. They were the only survivors, and all the other family members had been hacked to death, the house razed to the ground. Then we assessed the contradictions of the imminent French military intervention in Rwanda when the genocide was over.
As we drove the car radio played Black American rap music from one of Kampala's two new private radio stations. With its commercial radio jingles and roadside advertising hoardings, Uganda gave the impression of a booming, dynamic country. There were signs of newly acquired wealth everywhere; it could be seen in those new Japanese cars and mini-bus taxis, it could be seen in the large cement-brick villas under construction, in the air-conditioned glamour of the new international hotels, in the well stocked shops displaying expensive imported goods.
P and James lived in Makindye, one of Kampala's teeming residential areas, made up of big cement-brick houses with big gardens hiding behind high walls, crested with barbed wire, in the midst of a slum. Their garden was being landscaped and enlarged, a reed enclosure erected and a gate with a gateman's lodge was being built. Like most Ugandan houses, theirs was a clumsy, unplanned constructions, with a flagstone facade, an asbestos roof and a row of servants quarters on the side. Its several rooms, were more than it suggested from the outside. The ceiling was so low, that I hit my head against the low door frames more than once . The door to the room I was given did not close, and at night I had to wedge it with one of my notebooks. Bats, or was it rats, in the ceiling kept me awake at night, while early sunrise and bird song denied me the blissful last few minutes of sleep.
By European standards P and James were well to do, but by African standards they were wealthy. In their golden cage behind their high reed enclosure, amidst their blend of African handicraft( little drums, carved figurines, connical baskets of all sizes, and wooden combs), their upholstered furniture, their two refrigerators, their electric cooker, their flush water toilets, their two Japanese motorcars, and their retinue of servants, they lived and moved in a world so near yet so removed from that of their tin shack dwelling neighbours.
For lunch, a silent thick lipped houseboy, called John, served green salad, matoke (mashed plantains), sweet potatoes, beef stew, and beans. I was offered home made passion fruit juice. I was suspicious of its suspension in the jar (it had to be stirred before being served). For this and the notoriety of Kampala's water supply, I should have refused, but I did not wish to appear ungrateful for the hospitality. Later that afternoon, just as I had feared, I would come down with the trots. And I was to remain with them for several embarrassing days.
The diaspora
One afternoon there was a Rwandese cultural show and an RPF fund raising. P thought I should attend it, that it would prepare me for Rwanda. It took place at the Lugogo indoor stadium on the outskirts of Kampala. Tickets were expensive. At the gate, there was RPF paraphernalia on sale; T-shirts of Fred Rwigema the charismatic hero fallen in battle, and traditional rwandese music cassettes. Most of Kampala's large and prosperous Rwandese diaspora was present. The stadium had a large side gallery and it was already crowded. The seats on the floor were reserved for the notables. There was a well known Rwandese owner of a soft drink bottling plant, and another of an industrial bakery, a junior minister representing the Uganda government, a few white diplomats. The men looked stifled in their jackets and ties. But a great number of women were dressed in the Rwandese national dress; an abridged version of the Indian sari. It is a combination comprising of a long skirt and a long piece of cloth draped around the shoulders.
Standing on a dais at the end of the floor, was a female choir with three male drummers in the front row. The men wore a white, tonga-like male version of the Rwandese national dress. And the women were in white and wore a beaded headband. They sang melancholic Kinyarwanda songs in praise of the Inkotanyi (RPF soldiers), songs in praise of cows whose milk was sweet as honey. A troupe of traditional dancers or Intore (the chosen), walked onto the floor in single file to the applause of the audience clapping to the rhythm of the drum. Dressed with a mane of sisal fiber around the head, beaded bandoleers across the chest and an animal skin around the waist, each danser carried a staff in his right hand, and a small wooden shield painted with geometrical motifs. The drums along with the choirs hand clappings opened the the dancing with a frenetic rythm. I had read somewhere that in the past, the Intore used to be attached to Rwanda's royal court, not as artists but as an elite corps of warriors in a special royal guard, with dance as a discipline in their rigorous training. And their recruitment used to exclusively be among the best of the nobility, thus the name the chosen. Indeed the wooden staff the dancers carried in the right hand and the diminutive shield in the left, were memories of the spear and shield from another age. And now as I watched the dancers, I begun to see that their movements mimed combat.
With the european's arrival in Rwanda, the kings stopped waging expansionist wars which became impossible with the newly demarcated colonial borders, and the intore were dismantled. Their dances became mere simulations, the ballets became folkloric performances for the occassional royal ceremonie. The one's I was watching were being encouraged on by acclamations and clappings from the audience. They performed several dances, all culminating in the umuhamirizo, where all the dancers swung their sisal manes together in imitation of a loin.
The singing and dancing ended. The master of ceremonies a tall bearded man in a dark suit, got up and in a breathtaking feat, spoke to the audience simultaneously in Kinyarwanda and English. He then called for a minute of silence in memory of all the victims of the genocide. An invited speaker-a South African freedom fighter- went on the podium and started lambasting the French intervention in Rwanda, and the audience cheered. At that moment I noticed the white diplomats probably french, make a discreet exist.
Then the choir resumed and baskets for the collection were passed up and down the audience. This was the diaspora that, with such fund raising and cultural shows, had financed the RPF and its four year guerrilla war effort. Although a vast majority of the audience were destitute and lived in Kampala's sprawling slums they all gave a contribution. As notes the belgian journalist Colette Breackman; "It is for certain that the rwandese diaspora largely contributed to finance the Patriotic Front "boys": many rwandese adimitted to dedicating a least 5% of their salaries to the "patriotic tax", but that during a crisis, like the one following the RPF defeat in 1990, it could go up to 50% of their income.
Dignity, close to defiance reigned in that stadium. I understood and shared all those people's feelings. Heirs of one of Africa's oldest cultures, and often from the nobility, they were aristocrats without a Kingdom, pastoralists without their cattle, without a country and trapped in cities that held no future for them. Somehow, it was what I had always been made to feel at home and what I still feel living in Europe or Canada.
They were indifferent to their present material circumstances mainly because they placed aspirations in another world, the world of yesterday. They drew their inspiration from a real or imagined past greatness. Their piety had remained with Rwanda. They lived their exile as a debt to the past.
The ceremony's formality was impressive. It was like a collective act of faith, a religious service; the audience in its Sunday best was like a congregation, the choir, the bearded master of ceremony calling for a minute of silence like a priest for prayer, the collection basket passing up and down the audience. The religion's creed being: identity, a longing for a homeland. Its emblems; the costumes, the spear and shield wielding mock royal guard, were the emblems of this nostalgic nationalism. It brought to mind the joke I heard, in Nakasero market. In Uganda hostility to the Rwandese refugee was never far from the surface, it was in the letters to the editor of the local paper, in the recurring derogatory joke, even in Rwandese's stubborn desire to remain a Rwandese, as someone had said. Was it resentment that explained this strong desire for a homeland?
Catherine Watson, in her paper Exile from Rwanda'. Background to an Invasion, a study for the US Committee for Refugies(1991) wrote that: "Most Banyarwanda(rwandese) refugees in Uganda, even the most prosperous and seemingly well-intergrated, are overwhelmed by feelings of rootlessness and loss. They say they long to be in Rwanda and speak with misery about how they have had to disguise their origins in order to survive reasonably,' wrote. In his rejection the Rwandese refugee in Uganda had cultivated a religion of nostalgia for a lost homeland, and this become a fondamental aspect of his identity. Did he suffer from "the exile sickness" a syndrome popular with ethnopsychiatrists. An inability to overcome ones origins(family, ethnic, or cultural) due to guilty or hate for them. Hate of the inability to liberate oneself from the past, or simply the confension of a love turned sour? Parhaps,. after all withdrawing into one's identity to fill the other's rejection indicates a certain jelousy towards that "other" for his full identity.
The tutsi refugee's obstinate desire to remain a Rwandese, was more to vindicate his difference in a society (Uganda) that has failed to integrate him, than it was a misplaced pride, or an identity flaw. The difficulty to distance himself from his origins, would drive the Tutsi exile into a dead end, with only one exist: a return to Rwanda.
For the first time in twelve years, of life in Europe and North America, I was back in Uganda. But memories do not measure up to reality. At first sight, I was surprised not only by the purity of light, the vivid colours or the general squalor, but also by the diminutive size of everything. Everything looked shrunken. The Kampala of my recollections had been one of wide flower lined streets, sprawling gardens, and spacious bungalows. The city I found, was one of narrow potholed, dusty streets, tiny shabby concrete buildings, and small decrepit bungalows with rusty iron roofs. Kampala looked like a toytown left in the dust by a forgetful child. Even the people looked physically diminished, they looked shorter, thinner even the pot bellies hand shrunk, and every one was darker.
With the passing years, monumental North American proportions,the pale northern skin and grey light had tempered with my memory. The light, the vivid colours, the filth, the stench, everything required getting used to. The slightest inconvenience was simply unbearable ; the invisible mosquito whizzing through the dark which gave me sleepless nights, or the abrupt nightfall cutting short an interesting walk through the slams.
My day in Kampala begun with early morning news bulletins on the BBC World service, followed with a quick shower and a cup of tea. Since I neither had a car nor the courage to take one of those crowded mini bus taxis, the rest of my day was determined by the rhythm of P's activities; forays to the hair saloon, a dash to her travel agency to make sure everything was running smoothly, the shopping, the dress trials. Saturday was market day for P. And one Saturday I offered to accompany her. We went down the unpaved road leading from the house, her sports car rocking in and out of the deep gullies. A cow and calf tethered to a tree grazed under the sizzling sun, and kite-hawks drifted motionlessly across a clear sky. We drove past kiosk shacks selling groceries, colourful plastic basins, aluminium saucepans, and other trinkets. Idle young men stood around the kiosks, listening to loud Zairean music. We went past the furniture maker, the open air barber, on to the potholed tarmac road to the city.
Traffic was heavy. There were many crowded mini-bus taxis going to and from the city to distant surburbs. Cars were slowed down further as they bumped in and out of enormous potholes. We bumped past the rusty corrugated iron shacks of the sprawling Katwe slum. The shabby concrete skyscrapers and trees in the city centre were all coated with red dust. Idle men lingered around shops. Pavement hawkers selling plastic knick knacks, wheel chair ridden cripples and boys selling local newspapers plus international weekly magazines, accosted motorists at intersections or at traffic lights. THE FRENCH HAVE LANDED, screamed a local paper. Foreign exchange bureaux, guarded by policemen armed with bulky looking Kalashnikov rifles, announced the latest dollar and sterling pound rates.
At Nakasero market, street kids helped us find parking and offered to carry the basket for us in the hope of a tip, but P had her regular carrier; a short dark boy of maybe thirteen or fourteen, with a running nose. From behind mounds of fresh fruits, vegetables and tubers, vendors beckoned to us, vaunting their merchandise and cracking jokes at our expense.
"Lelo tulide Mututsi !" they yelled out to each other in Luganda. 'Today we shall eat a Tutsi.' Our height and P's features marked us Tutsi; so they were making macabre allusions to the hundreds of bloated corpses that were still floating down the Akagera river from Rwanda, into lake Victoria. Now eating fish was cynically referred to as eating Tutsi. It was not hard to feel the subdued ethnic animosity underlying that joke.
Kampala was busy, hectic. Since Yoweri Museveni's advent to power in 1986, Uganda had known peace and stability. His National Resistance Movement(NRM) government had launched a programme to build a self-sustaining economy; price and exchange controls were lifted, the judiciary, the tax system restructured and a new disciplined police force created. With this had come a vibrant booming economy after so many years of mismanagement and civil war. And the country that had reverted to bush was reclaimed. Roads were being repaired, taps were running and although there still the occasional black out, there was electricity.
In the ugandan capital, there was a great deal of apprehension and hysteria about the imminent French military intervention in Rwanda. The local press dedicated entire sections to a debate on France's hidden intentions, which were the saviour of it's Hutu allies. The television pictures of French troops unloading heavy weaponry from huge military transport planes in Goma, Zaire, did nothing to reassure the Tutsi exiles of the purported humanitarian nature of the intervention when the genocide was almost over. And their anxiety was understandable, most of these exiles had not only lost friends and relatives in the genocide, they also had sons and relatives in the RPF. A French-RPF confrontation looked inevitable.
When president Mitterrand chose that the very controversial french military intervention code-named 'Operation Turquoise' passes though Goma, in Mobutu's Zaire, it became clear that he was sending a message to his African client states protected by french defense pacts: that whatever they did, Paris would always come to their rescue.. But the French government had not expected the the unanimous international opposition to the intervention. It was even being contested by humanitarian organisations such as M?dicin du Monde, Pharmaciens sans fronti?res, Handicap International, and M?dicin sans fronti?res. And the Ecumenical council of churches had announced that it did not consider France a neutral party to the conflict in Rwanda, and was therefore unsuited for a humanitarian intervention. And French attempts to enlist other European Union countries in the military intervention had failed.
For the British, the independence of its former African colonies was the signal for a clean break. But for the French, blinded by that particular gallic arrogance, derived from memories of the French revolution, Napoleonic despotic grandeur and their alleged "mission civilatrice", independence was a humiliation, the ingratitude of populations upon whom she had conferred French citizenship and la civilisation Française. Hers was "a mission civilatrice," not a commercial adventure. Its rejection was a rejection of her civilisation.
Independence was just an excuse for France to revise her relationship with Africa, where she has remained commercially and politically engaged ever since. The French have been quick to intervene militarily to prop up African despots like Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and Omar Bongo in the Gabon. Or to overthrow dictators out of its favour like Badel Bokasa in the Central African republic.. Several former African French colonies share an artificially overvalued common currency, the CFA (communaut? financi?re africaine) franc, controlled by the Banque de France in Paris. French car manufacturers, oil companies, and construction companies retain a virtual monopoly in Francophone Africa. Kickbacks skimmed from economic aid to Africa, are used to fund French political parties.
This french neo-colonial edifice, appropriately named Francafrique by Francois-Xavier Vershave, was built by Jacques Foccart, éminence grise of Gaullist diplomacy, and in whose control it would remain up to his death in 1997.. With the secret services and the army at its disposal, Gaullist African policy, like the french atomic bomb, served to maintain France's "rank" among super powers. Post-war french demands for a multipolar world and not one split between two big powers were all attempts at salvaging the remains of the past imperial grandeur of a nation weakened and humiliated by defeat and occupation at the hands of the German "boche" before being liberated by the lifelong "Anglo-saxon" enemy. Without this neo-colonial empire, De Gaulle and all his succesors feared and still fear, that France might not have a "History" in the comming millenium.
Foccart had two goals: one to ensure a stable transition of the French colonial empire by confinding it to a network of France's local allies; and second in order to eventually use them to obtain funding for french political parties. As writes Francois-Xavier Vershave: "When France addresses herself to an African president, it is not one state talking to another, it is a friend appealing to another. To colonial domination, Jacques Foccart substituted a link which has, with time, come to reveal it's neo-colonial nature. This system worked so much more because the installation of dictatorships was encouraged as well as generalised corruption. Therefore facilitating the sharing out of misappropriated developement aid, oil and other raw material dividends."
Economic aid funds embezzeled by African heads of states winds up in the french political party tresuries. Erik Orsenna, Francois Mitterrand?s former ghost-writer, and perhaps the author of the 1990 speech at La Baule, would write that: "Everyone knows that political parties are funded by laundered money via Africa. Africa serves to launder political party funds. It is scandalous, because, by perverting the elites, African developement is all chucked up. I maintain that transparency in monetary circulation is a minimum. The President(Mitterrand) is totally and fierciely against that."
Inspite of a prolifiration of Françafrican networks and lobbies, with often conflicting interests, François Mitterrand, on becoming president he would maintain them, even accentuating the informal family aspect of these relations by the appointement of a privilaged contact within the "cellule africaine" at the Elysée in the person of his own son. Nicknamed 'Papamadit' (daddy told me), Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, a former second rate journalist in Togo-of all places-span an intricate wave of relations with most African dictators and their families, with the likes of Mobutu sese seko's son or Jean-Pierre Habyarimana the rwandese president's son.
Although Rwanda was never a French colony, it had the misfortune of being a french speaking country on the fringes of Francophone Africa, on the imperial faultline that Cecil Rhodes wanted to trace from the Cape to Cairo, the front line with perfidious Albion. So behind an armed struggle by tutsi refugees, fuelled by a genuine desire to return home, France saw an Anglo-American intrusion in its sphere of influence, because the RPF was almost exclusively made up of Rwandese exiles brought up and educated in Uganda, therefore English speaking. They had proved very efficient allies of ugandan president Yoweri Museven in his struggle against Idi Amin Dada and Milton Obote. And Museveni was seen by the French as the anglo-american trojan horse in central Africa. In an interview to Le Figaro of 19th may 1994, then RPF military chief Paul Kagame would try to explain french hostility to the RPF: by "There seems to be a blocage somewhere. However much we insist on our attachement to the francophonie and french cooperation, your leaders keep on supporting president Habyarimana, who was yet responsible for reducing french from an official language."
The french phobia of imperialistic designs by "anglo-saxon interests" refered to by french historians as "le complexe de Fachoda" revives 19th century Anglo-french colonial rivelary which culminated in the showdown at Fachoda. On the 10th july 1898, a french expedition force led by captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, left the French Congo in an attempt to establish an outpost in southern Sudan linking french African possessions from Dakar on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the red sea. It set up camp at Fachoda(now Kodok). In september, lord Kitchener's british troops while going up the Nile in order to crush the mahdist uprising, and trying to effect a Cape to Cairo junction came face to face with the french expedition. Under Kitchener's ultimatum, Marchand recieved orders from Paris to evacuate. In France, the defeat was a national humiliation and to this day remains engrained in the french psyche, even after the Entente cordiale(8 april 1904).
The defeat of the Habyarimana regime was to be lived in Paris, as the fall of an outpost, as the loss of an african stronghold, a repeat of Fachoda. France would try to punish the former RPF rebelles, now in power, as general de Gaulle had decided to punish Sekou Toure who as head of Guinée had dared say no to the french at independence. The Francafrique did not content itself with just watching the total dismantling of Rwanda up to the last bolt by its marauding hutus allies on the run, but the french troops came to their rescue under the humanitarian pretext of "Operation Turquoise". By deploying troops in south-west Rwanda to create a "humanitarian zone", french troops allowed the mass escape of the Hutu extremists, who easly set up camp in Goma, Zaire in preparation for revenge.
But like all imperialistic ventures, the Françafrique is slowly cracking under the wieght of its shadowy activities: Rwanda was the first brick to break off the edifice due to François Mitterrand's unconditional support to the instigators and executors of the rwandese genocide. The Françafrique is a decaying empire, whose ultimate attempt to save Mobutu Sese Seko besieged by a small rebellion supported by tiny Rwanda-France would go to the extent of hiring Serbian mercenaries responsible for ethnic cleanising in Bosnia-demonstrates the inexorable collapse of this secret organisation which had proved so efficient in the past. We are even tempted to compare it to the soviet empire which in its twilight would obstinately defend their puppet regime of Mohammad Nadjibollah against the moudjahidin in Afghanistan. More so, given that the Francafrique is built on the same rotten pillars of imperialisme of corruption, cronyism and domination under the guise of Francophonie(which replaces the soviet "friendship among peoples"). Rwanda was Françafrique's Achille's tendon, the way Afghanistan was to the USSR.
After a week in Kampala, I felt an urgent need to flee, an urgency to move on. The tragic events in Rwanda were evolving at lightning speed. My numbered, budgeted days were running out, and Kampala was terribly expensive. But James had not returned from a trip to Rwanda, where he was also going to secure me passage and make arrangements for me.
I felt trapped behind the high reed enclosure. In idleness, the heat and dust were overwhelming, you actually tested the dust in your saliva. And there was nothing to do in Kampala: the only cinema was a weekly outdoor projection of blood-and-guts movies (Rambo types) at a club for American marines ofcourse. The museum was a dusty little joke of tiny clay models under glass cases, the local theatre is not even worth mentioning. The bookshops sold third or forth hand cheap thrillers by James Hardly Chase and vernacular translations of the bible. The hypnotic music in the local discotheques was deafening, one had to scream to order drinks or engage in the semblance of conversation. How irritating to have people scream and sputter into your ear all night. The other accepted thing was to lounge outside one of Kampala?s popular bars known as Kafunda in places like Kabaragara seeping lukewarm beer while chewing leathery roasted meat directly off the skewer. If you were not careful on the pili pili(hot pepper), you soon saw the pretty banyarwanda waitresses, or the geckos hanging motionlessly on the cieling through the prisme of teary, beery eyes.
In Uganda, the well-to-do live sequestered lives. Behind their high concrete walls, they are under siege. They live in a concrete bubble, occasionally emerging in their air conditioned Japanese four wheel drive cars to go to the air conditioned office, to the air conditioned bar at an international hotel. Their lives are at once barren and repetitive. They are like foreigners in their own country.
They look to Europe for inspiration. They worship their foreign registered cars, punctuate their afternoons with a cup of tea, dress like Englishmen without the attributes of the dreadful English weather. They profess to revere their country but despise their village relatives for superstition and countryside manners, and send their English speaking children overseas for studies. Uganda has remained very provincial, it produces almost nothing and imports almost everything with proceeds from coffee, tea and cotton grown by the very peasantry so despise by the elite.
At the Rhino pub in the Kampala Sheraton hotel, I was constantly reminded by a dark suited successful businessman I went to school with, of how in the span of eight years, Uganda had gone from being a war torn country to an economic success with a 7% growth rate that some major European countries could be jealous of. And of how it was safer at night on Kampala streets than in New York or Chicago. Meanwhile other people advised me against driving into certain areas after dark, especially into my childhood neighbourhoods like Ndeeba or Kibuye. The armed policeman escorting a loaded lorry is a common sight in Kampala. And most people know someone whose home has been robbed by armed robbers. Almost everyday brings spectacular news of highway robbers posing as policemen to rob motorists.
In Uganda law and order was an approximation of something else, like the false sense of security created by high concrete walls around houses, the fake English blazer, the milky gruel which passes for tea, the shoddy reproduction furniture, acrylic fibre imitation carpets, and English style boarding schools. Even Uganda's lauded economic boom was an approximation arrived at by "Magendo"(trafficking), cutting corners through tax evasion and smuggling. Crime was exalted. One of Uganda's most successful businessmen is wanted by British police for drug trafficking and Kampala's then mayor would later serve a jail sentence in the USA for trying to cash forged checks. In Kampala there were more than one lauded rags to riches stories as result of bank fraud or drug smuggling. And the gilt-edged youth in Kampala had a dubious tendency of idolising the mafia. Such that in their vocabulary any rich and powerful man was called a Capo (mafia boss). Uganda whose promotional tag is a quaint quotation by Winston Churchhill: "the pearl of Africa", could have been changed to "the pearl of bichupuli" (bichupuli means forged checks in luganda).
Everything was a deception. The Japanese cars masquerading as new were, in reality second hand reconditioned cars, some still bearing Japanese ideogram signs on their doors. To the man from outside, the numerous cars bearing foreign registration, can seem like an invasion of foreign tourists on vacation or foreigners on a business trip to Kampala, but in reality they are Ugandans evading local registration fees and customs duty. You never know what some people do for a living in Kampala. Appearing prosperous, you bump into them wherever you go. All dressed up with nowhere to go, they loiter from office to office, shop to shop, home to home, hanging around. At first you think they are simply visting friends, until the day one discretly takes you aside and cadges you for five dollars or offers to help you prolong your almost expired visa for a little more. At the airport the subdued passengers from Dubai were not simple shoppers returning from a weekend shopping trip abroad, they were smugglers carrying suitcasefuls of clothes, cosmetics and jewelery. These were the goods that found their way into the well stocked Kampala shops.
The pair of sandals I wanted to buy could not be sold to me because their 'owner' or 'seller' had stepped out of the shop for a few minutes. I would have to wait till he came back. There were at least five other 'sellers' in the shop. Couldn't someone else sell them to me on his behalf? No. No one knew his asking price. Approximative shopkeeping by people who did not seem to know why they were doing what they did.
Underpaid clerks supplemented their incomes by indulging in graft as I was to learn. I had almost run out of money, so I attempted to withdraw some money at the Barclays bank using my credit card. But as I had half expected, something went wrong. The sum I was asking for was more than the authorised maximum of 200 US dollars, said the fat woman teller with a shiny nose. The main office in London had to be telexed for authorisation. The telex which cost 20 dollars, was at the customer's expense, and the reply was to come after two hours. After two hours of escape to the airconditioned oasis of an international hotel, I was told by the shiny nosed teller that my request had been refused. Just like that. London had said no, but had it really? Had she actually telexed London or had she just pocketed the 20 dollars. There was neither copy, nor receipt of the telex. I walked straight out of the bank, uncertain of keeping my cool.
It was in the 'Operation Turquoise' hysteria that I finally secured passage to Rwanda. James had at last come back from Rwanda. He sounded optimistic about the situation there inspite of the looming French military intervention. The RPF had secured most of the country and had stopped the slaughter by the Interahamwe militias in the secured areas. He had talked to officials in the RPF information department on my behalf, and they were expecting me.
The following day we made arrangements for my trip. A date was fixed, expenses were assessed. There was the car fuel; there was the canned food, the mineral water. There would have to be something for the RPF officials, something to grease a few palms preferably bottles of Uganda Waragi ( a potent Ugandan version of rhum).
As my day of departure drew near, I felt more than the usual panic preceding a journey. In Africa keeping to a schedule is impossible and I dreaded the invetible unforseen delay. In the ensuing hysteria, doubt had given way to the fear of being unable to write anything, of being unable to meet anyone. I felt I had reached some kind of threshold, some kind of imaginary boundary beyond which lay an unpredictable chaos.
My travel to Rwanda involved two journeys. In the first, I was going back into the past, back to the Rwanda of my birth. I was going in search of my roots, to find out who I was. I was going to fill the existential void, to fill in the voids of a lost past, family voids. In the second, I was going to look over the edge into Rwanda's darkest hours. I was travelling to the edge of darkness. I was hoping that an illumination, an answer, an explanation for the mindless carnage that had gripped Rwanda from April to June, lurked in that darkness. Perhaps an explanation for the obscure reasons I owe thirty three years of exile. But now suddenly I was afraid of recognising myself in that darkness, I was afraid that being a Tutsi I would get caught up in the ethnic trap layed out by the genocide. And I was not sure of being emotionally prepared for the trauma of what I was about to witness. I was no longer certain of staying objective in face of so much hatred. Nor did I see any utility in my journey.
As a traveller leaves Kampala, the suburban roads run between green hedges and cement-brick walls, but suddenly the bougainvilliers and flower beds along the curb give way to an unpaved and dusty roadside. Concrete villas yield to mud-brick houses and corrugated iron shacks. Skeletons of scavenged broken down cars lie rusting on the roadside. Then the houses slowly disintegrate into a countryside of green rolling hills, bisected by an undulating black road. This is Buganda district, the richest most fertile region in Uganda. Banana plantations and green empty spaces are intermittently punctuated by dusty little trading centres teeming with villagers indifferent to the blaring motorcar horn. Speeding lorries and minibus taxis packed with passengers rush along, raising clouds of red dust from the unpaved roadside. Like rivulets flowing into a river, dirt roads joined the main tarmac road from places in the interior announced by washed-out road-signs. A stop at one of the trading centres and nimble women and little boys come along the car to sell you skewers of roasted meat, trays of fresh fruit, cassava, sweet potatoes, bananas.
As we left Buganda for Ankole district, the green rolling hills levelled out into unkempt scrubland; long dry grass, the occasional stunted gnarled thornbush. This is the traditional grazing land for the nomad Hima cattle keepers. You saw them standing on one leg while leaning on a staff, tending herds of long horned cattle sitting amidst the stubble, staring at passing cars, or ambling across the road indifferent to the car horn. And Alfred, my driver, seemed to derive a certain pleasure in blowing the car horn at the cattle or as we approached trading centres. The ground was grey and looked barren. Sometimes the grass was on fire, a slow moving black stain spreading over the countryside like an oil slick. The scrub stretched in every direction into distant hazy mountains. The melancholic Kinyarwanda songs Alfred was playing in the car, went very well with the pastoral scenery.
Once or twice truckloads of Tutsi refugees returning to Rwanda from camps in Uganda rumbled past us.
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