Facing the school we’d been housed in, at the other end of the courtyard from the women’s makeshift kitchens, stood an old colonial building with high white walls. We called it Tripolo’s house, maybe from the nickname given to a Belgian administrator. The food they gave out to us was stored inside.
One evening, not long after we arrived, while the women were busy making the meal, while my mother, whose side I never left, was trying to shoo me away for fear I might be burned, we saw gigantic shadows appear on the big white wall of Tripolo’s house, and those shadows spoke and they looked like people. Everyone stood glued to the spot, fascinated by those images, which seemed to be alive on the white wall, speaking words we understood. It was in Kirundi, but we understood. There was a mother and her child. And the child said, “Umutsima uratakaye ma – I knocked my paste over, Mama.” And the mother answered, “Hora ndawucumbe ndaguha undi – It doesn’t matter, I’ll make another batch and give you some more.” That was the only scene I can remember from the only movie I ever saw in Rwanda. For a few days, when night fell, we sat down in front of the big white wall and waited for the moving pictures to come back, but the mysterious projectionist never returned.
At first, it was the soldiers who distributed the food. Every morning the refugees would line up for their pocho, their ration. That job fell to the men. Not even widows went to pick up their rations. They always found some kindly soul to go in their place. But these distributions didn’t go well. The soldiers hurried the line along with blows from their rifle butts. There were scuffles and shouts. The Tutsis prized their dignity above all. They couldn’t tolerate humiliation and disorder. A delegation of important men, my father among them, negotiated an agreement by which the refugees themselves would hand out the rations, and from then on everything went smoothly.
The food they gave us seemed very strange. There was a white powder you were supposed to dissolve in water, and we were expected to drink that nameless liquid. It surely wasn’t milk, because it didn’t come from a cow, and besides, tradition dictates that milk is drunk not from metal containers but from jugs carved from the wood of certain trees, and treated with deep respect. The adults indignantly refused to drink, but the children were dying of hunger, so the mothers had a taste and then gave that powdered milk to the children.
Then there were the tomatoes. We were familiar with tomatoes, of course, but little ones, cherry-sized, used for making sauce and cooking bananas. The tomatoes they gave us were huge. We didn’t know what to do with them. My parents refused to eat them raw. But since there was nothing else, they forced them on the children. I wept as I ate my first tomatoes.
Nyamata’s displaced people hoped they would be able to go home once the troubles were over. The families had abandoned the classrooms and built huts in the courtyard and around the school. There was no lack of grass in the savannah. But everything was meant to be temporary; there was no question of settling here. We would go home again very soon, back to Rwanda, because nobody thought of Nyamata as Rwanda.
Early one morning, trucks came rolling in again. They had us gather in the schoolyard. Everyone was thinking, “They’ve come for us at last, now the exile is over, we’re going home.” They did a roll call, all this for the sake of a few Hutu families who’d been taken away by mistake. They would be going “back to Rwanda,” as we said. Among them was the family of Yosefu, whose wife Nyirabasesa was a Hutu. They were friends of ours: Nyirabasesa and my mother liked to confer on what to do with the yellow flour and other unknown ingredients we were given. I played with the children. We ate together. They went away in almost empty trucks.
Despair fell over everyone left behind. They understood: they would never go home again. Because they were Tutsis, they were condemned to live like pariahs or plague-carriers, on a reservation with no hope of escape. But that despair was the cement of a solidarity far stronger than any supposed ethnic spirit had ever created. The huts I mentioned earlier were built by the whole community, in order of need. Since my mother was pregnant, my family was among the first to move out of the classroom. Latrines were dug. Water-fetching duties were assigned. The governing committee appointed Rugereka, the son of the sculptor Kagango, to keep order at Rwakibirizi spring. Rugereka was a very young man, with a remarkable hairstyle imitated by all the other young men, even my brother Antoine. I don’t know if it was his beautiful hair that allowed him to impose his authority, but in any case everyone quietly waited their turn to fill up the few containers we’d been given on our arrival.
We children, and there were many of us, wandered like lost souls in search of somewhere to play. The schoolyard was taken up by the families’ huts and the soldiers’ camp: no room to play with the balls and marbles the boys made from old sacks once used for flour or powdered milk, and no room for the girls’ hopscotch course either. For that reason we wandered off into the wilderness, where it was tempting to taste the unknown fruit the bushes seemed to be offering us. “Whatever you do, don’t touch those,” our parents were forever warning us, “they’re poison!” We looked longingly at the bushes and their forbidden fruit, but we never dared touch them.
And so opening a school was an urgent priority. There was no point hoping for anything from the authorities, but the schoolteachers among the displaced got help from the missionaries and set up classrooms under the trees. They even managed to administer the national exam that lets some students go on to secondary school. My brother André passed. He went off to middle school in Zaza, in the east, near the border with what is now Tanzania. Despite my fierce opposition, my father enrolled me in primary school. I found one thing to like about that: for lunch they gave us rice, furnished by the mission. In enormous pots, Rutabana did the cooking for the school: generously salted rice with milk. Needless to say, the rice stuck to the bottom of the pot and tasted burned. But for me, Rutabana’s rice was the best, much better than the rice that was very occasionally included in our rations and cooked by my mother.
It was in fact precisely for the sake of that rice that my father had sent me to school despite my young age. The authorities and the priests were pressuring us to go off and settle into villages that they claimed had been built specially for us. No one would move. Leaving our temporary camp meant accepting our terrible fate, giving up on going back to Rwanda, on going home, and no one wanted any part of that. But soon there was no choice: in hopes of forcing us out, they cancelled the daily rations – the only food we had. Only children enrolled in the schools still got rice from the mission. Every family was given a machete for clearing brush, a mattock for working the soil, some seeds, and found themselves, sick at heart, assigned to one of those bush villages we were assured would be waiting for us to move in. The one we were sent to was called Gitwe.
Bugesera: Surviving in the bush
Gitwe was a very straight dirt road through the brush, leading nowhere. On either side of that long strip of red clay, in spaces more or less cleared but for the most part taken over by brambles, a number of little sheds had been built, sheet-metal roof resting on wooden beams, with no walls or rooms. What were those shelters there for? I’ve always wondered. Were they meant for us, or was this one of those agricultural settlement projects so dear to the hearts of the colonial authorities? I suspect the latter. Some hitch must have made them give up on the project, or else there weren’t enough volunteer immigrants. Displaced by force, the Tutsis were there to be used, perfect guinea pigs who didn’t have to give their consent.
Dropped like so many Robinson Crusoes into the middle of the savannah, the families had to put walls on the houses, clear the thick brush for their plantings, and find some way to feed themselves while they awaited the first harvest. The tradition in Rwanda is that all the neighbors lend a hand with the work. To repay them, the person being helped passes around generous jugs of sorghum beer, and the hard work ends in dancing and songs. In Gitwe, though, no one was in the mood to make beer, and it was impossible anyway. Like it or not, everyone had to try t
o get by on their own. But everyone was convinced Gitwe was a temporary encampment: one day or another, we’d go home again, we would go back to Rwanda.
Each family divided up the work among themselves. The men – which in our case meant my father and my big brother Antoine – saw to making the house livable and to clearing the field for our crops. Until that presumed harvest came, it was up to the women to somehow feed the family.
It very soon became clear that the only way to get hold of a little food was to go and work for the locals, the Bagesera. While Alexia stayed home to do the housekeeping, my mother went off every morning at first light, with my little sister Julienne on her back and me following after, clinging to her pagne. The area was sparsely populated, the houses widely scattered, and since it was all new to us we didn’t know which way to set off at first. We climbed to the top of a hill to look for smoke, the sign of an enclosure. Then we set off across the savannah, listening intently for noises from the bush. We held our breath. It wasn’t so much the elephants or the leopards that frightened us. It was the buffalo. “A buffalo never gives you warning,” my mother said. “It just charges.”
The Bagesera were welcoming, but they were poor. Many of them were worn down by sleeping sickness. Very few had anything to spare. Those who agreed to hire us gave us a few sweet potatoes for a day’s work; you could get a little bunch of bananas if you spent two days working in the fields with no payment the first day. But we were living from hand to mouth, and my mother couldn’t take the risk of going home with nothing, so most often she settled for sweet potatoes.
As I remember, we often worked for one particular family who proved especially hospitable. The mother’s name was Kabihogo. I’ve forgotten the father’s. They only had one child, a girl near my age, so they were happy for the help. While my mother worked in the fields, I swept the yard. The little girl wanted to play with me. That gave me an excuse for a break. Sometimes they even let me eat with her. In the evening we went home with a little basket of sweet potatoes. Kabihogo had taken to me, and often she set a few aside just for me, carefully packed in straw – the best ones, gahungezi, with bright red skin but very white flesh. Back home, I was proud to show my brother Antoine and my sisters how much I’d earned in a day.
As I say, Bugesera was a backwater. There weren’t many schools, and although there was a mission at Nyamata, Christianity never took hold, so the traditional rites were still widely practiced. One morning my mother, who was raised by nuns with a horror of what they called “pagan superstitions,” came face-to-face with one of those rites.
We were paid by the chore, so we always got to the house of someone with work for us as early as we could. One morning, in an enclosure we often went to – Sakagabo’s house – no one answered the call we shouted out, as politeness requires, before we entered the yard. Everything was silent, and we were wondering what had become of them when all at once we heard a commotion in the banana grove. A crowd appeared through the trees, men and women completely naked, their faces rubbed with white dirt. Beneath those frightening masks, I hardly recognized the family we often worked for. But it was them – the father, the mother, the children – along with others I didn’t know, maybe neighbors. My mother immediately made the sign of the cross, took me by the hand, and off we ran. We hurried through the brush, never turning around. My mother didn’t say a word. She was running like a madwoman. Once we were home, she washed me with all the medicinal plants she could gather, invoking the Virgin Mary all the while. We had to be purified, as did everything that might have come into contact with those people who celebrated the Kubandwa cult, who were Imandwa, possessed by evil spirits whose chief was the devil himself, Ryangombe! She was sure it would bring us misfortune, that everything they’d given us to eat was the food of the devil. Five years old, I looked uncomprehendingly at my mother as she trembled in terror of beliefs that were the beliefs of her parents.
The men had a terrible time clearing the brush and digging out the roots; the stubborn brambles resisted the machetes we’d been given, our only tools. To protect themselves from the thorns, they’d made themselves crude, oversize sandals from old tires they’d picked up at the mission. As soon as a patch of land was cleared, my father randomly sowed all the seeds he’d been given in Nyamata. The soil had never been farmed, and at first it was very fertile: soon we saw carrots coming up, but also lettuce and radishes, which we immediately pulled out, thinking they must be weeds. The carrots were particularly plentiful. My father roasted them in a big fire in the middle of the field and forced us to eat them, despite our mistrust of alien vegetables. He himself wouldn’t touch them, for the sake of his dignity.
My mother was impatient for the “real” harvest to come: the sorghum harvest. When it did, we gathered only the heads, dried them, and beat them with a big spatula – an umwuko – to loosen the seeds, which we sieved and crushed with the grinding stone. Every evening my mother made sorghum paste with the flour. That was the only food that really filled you up, she thought. I hated sorghum paste, so I always made sure to sit in the shadows, far from the fire, where I could discreetly slip the balls of sorghum through the holes and cracks in the hut’s clay wall. My parents would find them the next morning, at the base of the wall. It wasn’t hard to collar the culprit.
You don’t sleep well on an empty stomach. I spent much of the night moaning and waking my mother: I was afraid I might die of hunger. It’s also true that the makeshift beds we used in our early days at Gitwe were not exactly conducive to restful sleep. We’d had neither the time nor the means to weave the mats Rwandans use as bedding. We lay down right on the straw, which was soon infested with bedbugs and chigoe fleas. Changing the straw did no good: the parasites were still there. Sometimes we also came under attack from a column of ants attracted by a scrap of food. I was always relieved to hear my mother’s footsteps, which meant that the fears and torments of the night would soon be at an end.
One of the greatest difficulties the refugees in Gitwe faced was water. Rwanda is a high-altitude country, somewhere around 6500 feet, so there’s plenty of rainfall, but it’s different in Bugesera: as the geography textbooks say, it’s a dry savannah, at medium altitude (4000 to 4250 feet) – little rain, and even fewer sources of water. The main spring is close to Nyamata. Its name is Rwakibirizi. Tradition says that it sprang up under the spear of Ruganzu Ndori, one of the heroic founders of Rwanda, so he could give water to his dogs, which were dying of thirst. But Rwakibirizi was a long way from Gitwe. It took a full day to go there and fetch water. That was my brother Antoine’s job. He would come back with a two-day supply in jugs we’d got from the Batwa in exchange for a few sweet potatoes – a temporary solution, because soon our gourd plants would give us calabashes to use. We also tried to save up the water from the occasional rainfall, with gutters built from pieces of sheet metal gathered in the village of Nyamata. We also went off to search for puddles that might still be left at the bottom of a valley or in the hollow of a rock, an ibinamba. But those quickly dried up. There was a spring closer to Gitwe, but it gave only a tiny trickle. It took time to fill a calabash, so there was always someone there fetching water and others waiting their turn. Antoine preferred to go in the middle of the night, not wanting to waste the daylight hours, and hoping he’d find no one there. My mother wanted me to go with him. She was afraid he might fall asleep from exhaustion by the spring and be eaten by a wild animal. I stayed close by his side, refusing to hear the rustlings, the howls, the sound of galloping hooves from the bush.
Living in Gitwe, maybe even more than in the rest of Bugesera, meant living on the turf of big, wild animals. The lions and buffalo soon left us in peace, but the elephants were drawn to the banana grove as soon as it was planted, and they feasted all night long. The leopards were forever prowling among the houses. They were like cats: every family had its own. It would come inside in the night. Lying in the bed we shared, Julienne and I could hear it rattling the piece of sheet metal that served as o
ur front door. We knew it was there: we lay waiting for the rustling sound that meant it was close by. My father had put up partitions to separate the children from the parents’ room. We slept in the communal room, where the hearth was, where cooking was done, where the family gathered in the evening. Before everyone went to bed, a few embers were pushed under the ash, and logs piled on top to get the fire going the next morning. Suddenly we heard the pile of wood collapsing. Looking out through the holes in the mat that served as our blanket, we saw the leopard’s eyes, even brighter than the flying sparks, and our blood ran cold. Julienne and I lay there completely still. Mama had told us not to move, no matter what. “If you do,” she would say, “he’ll think you’re showing a lack of respect.”
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