African Diaries XI
Rwanda: where clouds constantly hung over the country but everything looked so pretty under the sun
4 July, 2019, London.
It’s sunny out. It’s going to be a warm day. These days, when the sun caresses my skin, I teleport straight back to Africa, as if the final few weeks of past Winter and all of last Spring never existed, which is unfair to places travelled and friends visited over the past months, but there is a distinct memory of the way my skin begins to crust to the sun’s warming rays that takes me straight back to the straw hats of the sub-tropical Summer.
Today is the 243rd Independence Day of the United States of America, but it is also the 25th Liberation Day of Rwanda. The former is well-known and celebrated worldwide. Presidents of Botswana, Central African Republic, Namibia, Sierra Leona, Somalia, Togo, Zimbabwe will attend the official ceremonies of the latter. 25 years after President Kagame’s RPF took control of Kigali and five and a half months after I bought the book, I have finally just finished reading “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families”.
In it, Gourevitch delicately stitches together the events of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, tracing this dark history back to the foundations of the nation, from the Englishman John Hanning Speke’s Hamitic hypotheses on Tutsis’ descendance from an alleged superior Abyssinian race coming down the Nile to these lands, just like the route I had so far followed through Ethiopia and Uganda to the methodical and homogeneously disciplined one nation, one language structure of its society that systematically paved the way for the atrocities, but also what helped the country (or at least, parts thereof) to re-build itself to the levels of infrastructure that I was so surprised to experience after Addis Ababa and Kampala.
I engaged with a limited number of Rwandans during these four days apart from those I had met at MASS Design, the occasional hospitality service workers or my cheerful guide to Akagera National Park, and I never brought about the subject of the genocide or ask anyone whether they were a Hutu or a Tutsi. It felt inappropriate and intrusive but it was not difficult to observe how different Rwandans felt as people, particularly after having just arrived from Uganda, a country I had labelled as the friendliest of East Africa. They were all evidently reserved, respectably carrying a collective burden.
There are so many hills in Kigali, it’s hard to keep count. All almost perfectly shaped as wide cones, streets and roads encircle them, like contour lines on a topographical map. Forming crescents or full circles, the names follow the street lines.
Where I was staying in, in Kimihurura, KG 28 Avenue makes an exception as it bends westwards towards the bottom of the hill instead of continuing in its rotational path before the that becomes KG 670 Street. Where KG 28 Avenue meets KN 10 Street at the bottom of the hill, the asphalt suddenly gives way to dirt road, as if the municipal funding had abruptly dried up during construction of this part of the city.
“That’s Africa Street” A. describes it as.
Along with KK 1 Avenue just to the east of it, it is the only other street in this side of Kimihurura hilltop that is not paved. To little surprise, the homes squeezed between these two avenues are in, density, much greater density, and, in amenities, much lesser. It’s an unapologetic representation of inequality within such close proximity.
On my second day, my destination is the Nyabugogo Market by way of scenic Caplaki Craft Village, where I walk my way out of touristic shopping, Impact Hub Kigali, which to my misfortune was closed, a delicious Indian lunch at Khana Khazana Kiyovu (the convenient Kigali branch of the restaurant where I had an excellent dinner on my last day in Kampala), the Azizi Boutiqe Store at Heaven Hotel where I buy my mom a colourful bag and Hôtel des Mille Collines, also known as Hotel Rwanda.
As I start a long and steep descent on KN 88 Street, bifurcating from KN 2 Avenue, the chilly late afternoon breeze finally turns the thick moisture in the air into rain drizzle. As I carefully hop on the damp earth on either side of an open sewer wide and deep enough to drown me, I am the only non-black person in sight and this is to be the first and only time in Kigali others would take notice at me — in fact, it ends up being the only time in East Africa I heard being called “mzungu” over and over.
The market itself was one of the most intense I experienced. Much smaller than that I would go on to traverse in Kumasi, Ghana, or much less eerie than Mercato in Addis Ababa, it still felt much more terrifying than any others including Kigali’s own Kimironko Market that I would visit the next day.
And that’s perhaps exactly because I was just getting accustomed to this seemingly quite, easy, “Western” lifestyle that I was not at all expecting. Naturally, of course, for a nation with a $750 GDP/capita, this manicured city must have had its fair share of the “authentic African” and aside from those two unique avenues in Kimihurura that seemed to have blended the “informal” into the “formal”, the poverty seemed to have been carefully extracted away from the developed. In fact, this has been a recurring and biting criticism against some of President Kagame’s policies to “hide the ‘undesirable’ people from view” in Kigali.
After visiting the Kimironko Market on my third day, I took a break from my long walk at the excellent Question Coffee Gishushu, which doubles as an institution that supports female coffee growers, before I had one of the best and spiciest Korean foods at the Monmartsé Korean Restaurant. Being the only other customer on a rainy, late afternoon, I witnessed a conversation between what appeared to be the restaurant’s Korean owner and a Rwandan woman about the arrangements they were trying to finalise to wed the woman to the owner’s son. The owner had proudly claimed “my son is ready and will soon need to get married, you know”!
Soon after, I visited the Genocide Memorial Museum, sharing the sorrowed experiences while observing local Rwandans weep during the introductory video with interviews with survivors and sensibly walk through dimly lit rooms filled with smell of oak, anti-propaganda boards and a display of skulls.
A third and a final evening ended at A.’s house before I was to wake up early in the morning for my safari day trip to Akagera National Park.
When asked, trying to sum up my feelings for Kigali and Rwanda over the past three days, I found myself thinking of Beirut. What appeared to be this spatial and social patchwork of sadness and glimmer of optimism, a carefully choreographed dichotomy of development and poverty revived visions of bullet holes on buildings in the Lebanese capital that constantly reminded its residents of its painful past.
“Don’t expect to see lions” warned my driver and guide, D.
I knew I would be over the moon if we were that lucky, but to be honest, I was going to equally settle for the sight of an elephant… of which we saw one, trying to feed itself in the wooded, southern section of the park, before we did an uninterrupted 2-hour drive through to see scores of monkeys, impalas, hippos, a crocodile, rhinos, zebras and my favourite — giraffes!
“We did have lions here, of course, but after the Genocide was over, some of the resettled Tutsis were given land around here and the park was diminished in half by size. Where Tutsis tended their cattle, lions roamed and started attacking them, so, they had to poison them and we lost all our lions. See, that’s like a genocide that they had to commit after the one they had suffered”, explained D.
Then Rwanda acquired lions from South Africa in 2015 and they are well-settled and visible to the very lucky few who visit the park these days. Alas, I wasn’t to be nearly as lucky, but I enjoyed every bit of my final day in Rwanda.
4 July, 2019, London.
It is sunny outside and it is almost ironic that after a 6-month break I should go back to writing about Africa, picking up from where I left off, Rwanda, where, over the four days I spent in the country, I saw the sun for about a total of an hour — in a country that put the sun on its flag, where I have a friend who works on installing solar panels.
When D. suggested we take the longer route back to Kigali from the northern end of Akagera National Park, I didn’t hesitate to accept — I prefer not to go back on the same route I’ve travelled if there’s an alternative. And as we started to descend on the RN5 towards Lake Muhazi, the sun creeped out from the clouds, showering its light onto the clear, blue waters, while we passed village after village, school boys on their bikes heading home, roadside merchants and motorbike riders dutifully transporting passengers.
“Beatiful, no?” asked D. The sun, the rolling hills, the thick orange soil taking hold of the edges of the asphalt road, long green grass near the lake were all sights I had been accustomed to. But, D. was right. In this briefest of moments the sun showed itself, it was purely beautiful.
Gourevitch puts forward the following little, intense story at the end of his book to those who asked him in 1995–1998 if there was hope for the future of Rwanda:
A man confesses at a court to brutal killings he carried out two days prior at a school. During the attack, he asks kids to separate themselves as Hutus and Tutsis — when the Hutu kids refuse to identify themselves and simply call themselves Rwandans, all kids, collectively face the same fate.
I saw very little of the sun and smiles during my time in Rwanda. Of what I have seen, it was genuine and beautiful. Kigali, and this small, mountainous country took me by such great surprise, appreciation, hope and caring.
Happy Kwibohora / Liberation Day to all Rwandans!
