There was much to be done before we went off to school: fetch water, sweep the house and the yard. Alexia and I shared the chores. In the early days, we also shared my mother’s pagne: it was the only one we had in the house. Then my mother, who knew how to sew, made us a dress – but Alexia and I still only had one dress between us. And so one day it was Alexia who went to school with the dress, and the next day it was me. I happily gave up my turn with it, because I vastly preferred staying home with my mother. Meanwhile, my father had tied on his little white pagne: he was off to Mass. He went to Mass every day.
My mother always set aside a few sweet potatoes for my lunch; she wrapped them up in banana leaves, and I ran off. Starting from the third year of primary school, we went to the big school in Nyamata. I ran all the way there. As I ran, I said hello to the women sweeping the little paths in front of their houses. As I ran, I called out to my friends to see if they’d already set off. Candida would be waiting for me beside the dirt road. I ran all the way to the school, put my little cache of sweet potatoes at the back of the classroom, and hurried around behind the school buildings where the girls were playing hopscotch. The boys had taken over the playground, juggling a banana-leaf soccer ball with their feet. That was off-limits to us.
The start to the schoolday seemed to me a grandiose and elaborate ceremony. The drumbeat sounded. All the pupils gathered on the playground in neat rows, by class. We sang the national anthem as the flag was raised. The drum sounded again, and we all headed off toward our classrooms and lined up, the smallest ones in front, the bigger ones behind, one line of boys, one line of girls. The teacher stood watching over us from the doorway, his stick behind his back. The drum gave the signal to enter the classrooms. We stayed on our feet as the teacher walked through the room, stick in hand. In chorus, we called out: “Good morning, teacher!” Once he reached the blackboard, he signaled his pet to say the prayer, and the whole class prayed along. At last we could sit down, and the lessons began. Woe unto any straggler who still dared to come in – the teacher’s stick recognized no excuse!
There was one excuse, though, that was accepted by teachers and parents alike: an encounter with elephants. Elephants often walked through the villages on their way from one remaining patch of wilderness to another. Sometimes, it’s not clear why, one of them followed the road. Our parents had told us: “Whatever you do, stay behind the elephant, never pass him, never get in front of him.” We thus followed behind as the animal majestically walked along, as if out for a stroll. Rwandans have always admired the elephant’s walk, which they consider graceful and elegant; when women dance, they’re paying homage to the noble pachyderm. We scrupulously followed our parents’ instructions, keeping our distance from the animal, imitating its pauses and detours. Sometimes a whole morning went by before the elephants decided to turn away. There was no point going to school now; better to go looking for amabungo to pick. We knew our parents wouldn’t say anything, since we’d been following an elephant.
Still, elephants weren’t the greatest danger schoolchildren could meet with on the road to Nyamata. There was also the cruelty of men … But I’ll save that for later.
Later, too, we saw the elephants again. They were on trucks. I think they were being moved to Akagera National Park.
It was at school that I learned there were other books than the Bible. My father’s Bible was the only book we had in our house. Every morning he laid it on the shelf that should have been taken up by milk jugs, a household’s most precious possession – but we had no cows, and so no milk. Next to the Bible sat a bottle of Benedictine, empty of course. That was also an object to be treated with reverence. My father said Benedictine was the drink of the king. The king drank the white people’s nectar. I secretly thought that might have brought him misfortune. But my father was proud of his bottle.
At school, the teacher had a neat stack of books on his desk, and sometimes he handed them out, one for every two or three of us. The book was called African Mornings. But the Africa we read about there wasn’t our Africa. Not the Africa where Rwanda was, at least. There were so many strange things: baobabs, oxbow lakes … The children were named Mamadou, Fatoumata. “Fatoumata?” we would say. “There’s no such thing as Fatoumata, it’s Fortunata. That’s a real girl’s name.” That would make the teacher angry: “Fatoumata!” he would say. “Repeat after me: Fatoumata!” And, although we still had our doubts, we repeated after him: “Fatoumata! Fatoumata!” Nonetheless, thanks to that book, we sensed that the world was far bigger than we could imagine. And there were such wonderful stories: Sinbad the sailor, Hiawatha and the wild ducks, Monsieur Seguin and his goat, the tortoise and the hare … Sometimes I dreamed of an impossible thing: having a book all to myself.
Of course, our work wasn’t done when school let out. You might even say it was only beginning. Often, if we hadn’t had a chance to go to the lake in the morning, we had to stop by the Rwakibirizi spring to draw water, and then as soon as we got home we had to hurry off and join our parents, who worked in the fields until nightfall. For the girls, there was also the cooking to do, and when the moon was full we swept the yard to save time the next morning.
But those jobs weren’t always a chore. When there was no school, we set out in a group to do the washing on the shores of Lake Cyohoha. The lakeshore became a meeting place for all the local girls. We went in the hottest hours of the day, when no one came to fetch water. We settled down on the shore, in the grass, which was always very green, like a lawn in a garden. We sorted the laundry, washed it in the lakewater, singing all the while, and then laid it out on the grass. While we were waiting for it to dry, we bathed, washed our hair. Some even tried to swim, but we never ventured into the papyrus, for fear of running into a crocodile. Then the hairdressing session began on the grass.
The laundry was soon dry, so we went off before people started coming again to fetch water. We folded the clothes and wrapped them in a pagne. The little band of girls set off again, carrying the bundled clothes on their heads.
Alas! the lakeshore, which was like a garden for our innocent games, soon became a place of the most horrible nightmares.
On Wednesday afternoons, to prepare for first communion or confirmation, we studied the catechism with Kenderesire, a spinster who lived with her mother not far from the mission. Now and then that lesson ended with clothes being given out, second-hand clothes that supposedly came from America. That always drew a crowd. I never understood how people knew about the free clothes when they hadn’t been at the lesson. In any case, they came to the mission in droves on those days. The priest stood at the top of the front steps – Father Ligi, an Italian, with his white gown and his fat stomach, as fat as the bag full of clothes that he set down beside him. Everyone looked at the bag, ready to pounce. The father didn’t make a move, he made us wait. Then, all of a sudden, he reached into the bag and flung out an armload of clothes, and everyone rushed forward. The fastest ones got hold of the clothes, but the stronger and more ruthless ones ripped them from their hands. Soon it was an out-and-out brawl, kicking up a cloud of red dust. Then the good father called for his serving boy: “Nyabugigira! Nyabugigira!” Nyabugigira came with a bucket of water and handed it to the priest, who threw it over us to break up the melee. On those days we usually came home with our ragged clothes dripping wet and caked with red mud, and we hadn’t snagged even one of those coveted garments. Christian charity was not without its humiliations.
My father was a very pious man. Every evening he gathered the family around him for a group prayer. He picked up his glasses, given to him by the fathers – he was the only one in the village who wore them – and opened the Bible to read us a passage. I don’t know how he chose his readings. Often we walked in circles around the banana grove to say the rosary or follow the way of the cross. Woe unto anyone who shirked these devotional exercises: the paternal stick quickly set him back on the straight and narrow.
My father was proud to be the local head
of the Legion of Mary. He obviously had no idea that one of that movement’s first leaders was Grégoire Kayibanda, who, with the support of Monsignor Perraudin, made of it the embryo of the future MDR-Parmehutu ethnic party.
Sunday Mass at the Nyamata mission was the great event of the week. There were three masses, and every family sent a few of their number to each one, leaving someone at home to chase off the monkeys, always lying in wait to ravage our fields. My father went to all three. That was his big day. We saved our most respectable clothes for Mass. My mother went to the first mass, because she was always up early, but also so that she could lend me the beautiful white blouse Judith had brought her from Kigali, a blouse that on me became a white dress, in which I went proudly off to Mass. The women and children sat on one side of the church, the men on the other. The priest said Mass in Latin. At the foot of the altar, the choir assembled by Casimir, the fourth-year teacher at the primary school, sang hymns, and the assembly sang along, but no one clapped their hands: back then, clapping or dancing was unthinkable in a church. Using enormous pictures, the priest explained all the terrible punishments that awaited sinners. I trembled at the sight of the flames of Hell, with a multitude of damned souls swarming in the middle like terrified ants. I counted up my sins. There was no end to them. After confession, I always had a feeling I’d forgotten one. The biggest one of all. I went back to the good father, repeated the litany of my faults. In the end, weary of my scruples, he forbade me to come back.
The soldiers demanded that President Kayibanda’s portrait be hung in every house. The missionaries made sure the image of Mary was put up beside him. We lived our lives under the twin portraits of the President who’d vowed to exterminate us and Mary who was waiting for us in heaven.
But on some days there was no question of prayers and processions, even for my father. Those were the days when we made banana beer, urwarwa. Making urwarwa was a major undertaking, requiring a great deal of time and the participation of the whole family, and even the neighbors. Those were festival days.
As everyone knows, the bananas used to make urwarwa aren’t left to ripen on the tree: they ripen in broad ditches dug in the banana grove. At the bottom of the ditch you make a bed of very dry banana leaves, which you then set on fire. Dry leaves, and nothing else: you don’t want coals, only ashes. Once the leaves have burned and the hole is hot, but not too hot – the bananas aren’t supposed to cook – it’s lined with big green banana leaves, big enough to overlap the edges. Then, when the leaves have been carefully laid out and the temperature is just right, the hole is filled with bananas and the green leaves are folded over to make a hermetic seal. Then you cover the whole thing with dirt and tamp it down with the back of a shovel.
Now there’s nothing to do but wait. Everyone is excited. The children can’t keep still. They dance as they wait for the big day to come.
At dawn on the fourth day, my father says to me: “Mukasonga! Mukasonga! Go see if the bananas are ripe.” I run fast as I can to the banana grove. I very gently scrape away the dirt covering the ditch, I carefully fold back the leaves, I delicately reach in, taking care not to crush the bananas, I feel one of them: it’s ripe! Everyone has been waiting for the signal. There’s no question of going to school now. We have to hurry off and fetch water, ask a neighbor to lend us the canoe-shaped trough we’ll use to crush the bananas with the ishinge grass my little sisters have gone to pick. You then take the bananas from the ditch and load them into baskets. You go back and forth between the banana hole and the trough, which is set up beneath the banana trees closest to the house, since they provide the shade required for this work, which will go on all day. My father and mother peel the bananas and put them in the trough. Lost in his task, my father never sees the bananas discreetly dropped along the way, with my mother’s complicity, which we promise ourselves to come back and eat later.
You don’t fill the trough all the way to the rim, because then the foam might overflow. This is when you press out their juice, using the handfuls of grass. You kneel down before the trough, you press the bananas, the juice comes out, the foam – urofuro – rises. As it rises, the children are allowed to eat it. The parents say it’s good for you. It makes you strong. My mother gives us each a calabash full of foam. We dig in, we get it all over our faces, in our eyes, in our hair. There’s no point trying to hide from the neighbors that we’re making urwarwa, they’ll soon notice the children adorned with a makeup of red-tinged foam.
Now you have the juice – umutobe indakamirwa. Next it has to be strained. As much water as juice will be poured into the trough, over the bed of ishinge impregnated with crushed-banana concentrate. You strain it, you wring it out – gukamura. That’s how you make good urwarwa. Some people cheat, of course, stretching the juice by putting in more water, but the recipe for good urwarwa is one jug of water for every jug of juice.
Nothing is wasted. The ishinge grasses that were used to press the bananas, now impregnated with juice, are dropped into a jug, and water is poured over them. This infusion is called amaganura, drunk mostly by women and children, as a sign of friendship. The ladies’ straws will drain the jug to the bottom, leaving only a little swamp of ishinge, with mosquitoes and gnats floating on top.
The jugs full of umutobe are wrapped in green leaves and put back into the hole, which has been heated to the proper temperature. By way of yeast, a little juice made from grilled and ground sorghum has been added to the umutobe. You then have to wait for two days. At nightfall on the second day, my father says to me: “Mukasonga! Mukasonga! Take a straw and go see if it’s fermented.” I run to one of the jugs, stick the straw down into it, suck at it, taste the delicious flavor. My father cries: “Mukasonga liked what she tasted! It must be good. The urwarwa is ready!”
Then you have to strain it again and divide it up into smaller jugs, some of which will be sold, others drunk with the neighbors. All of this goes on by night, and the sight of the hurricane lanterns coming and going soon alerts the neighbors, who come running to offer their expert opinion on the results. Staggering from too much drink, my father is proud of his work: the best urwarwa in the village!
But the truly happy days, the only ones I knew in my childhood, were the ones I spent with my mother. I’ve always loved working at home and in the fields. That might be why I chose social work as my trade – so I could stay close to the earth, to the peasants. How could I have known then that I would be exercising that profession not in Rwanda but in France?
So my mother picked up her mattock, and I picked up mine. We each had our own mattock, a big one for my mother – isuka – and for me a little one, an ifuni, matched to my size. As we walked to the fields, just after sunup, my mother would tell stories. She told of the great King Ruganzu Ndori, his exile in the land of his paternal aunt, the traps laid by the aunt’s husband, the disclosure of the secrets of the kingdom, his return to Rwanda. It was a long story, it went on and on. I drowsed a little on my feet; sometimes, in the distance, I thought I could see Ruganzu with his spear, Ruganzu Cyambarantama cyi’Rwanda, crossing over the hills dressed in his sheepskin. My mother had shown me his footprints: behind the church, Ruganzu’s feet had left their mark in the rock – there was even a hollow made by his dog’s little bottom. My mother believed you could find traces of Ruganzu everywhere in Rwanda. All of a sudden, I snapped out of my half-sleep and said to Mama: “More! More!”
My mother told of the coming of the white people, in her own way. “Digidigi came along,” she said, “and everyone died.” My mother was an orphan. Her parents had died in an epidemic of mugiga – perhaps meningitis. She was raised by her brother. The nuns of a nearby mission took the orphans in; my mother never learned to read or write, she was only taught to pray. Around her, the world was crumbling. The white people had locked the king away in a stone house. They’d violated the secrets of the kingdom. Karinga, the royal drum, was hidden in the swamps with the umwiru, its keeper …
At home, my mother taught me w
hat every Rwandan girl needs to know: how to braid mats, how to weave elegant geometric baskets, how to recognize medicinal plants, make decoctions. Thanks to her, I knew how to make the best beer, choose the cuttings that would produce the finest sweet potatoes …
My mother carefully – piously would be a better word – farmed the old plants. She gave them a patch of land to themselves, nearby the house. She planted almost forgotten varieties of beans – ububenga, kajemunkangara – and sweet potatoes – gahungezi, nyirabusegenya – and gourds – imyungu, nyirankuba. There was also eleusine, an ancient African cereal whose grains are like mustard seeds, and inkori, which is a sort of little lentil. Many of those seeds came from Magi: she’d saved them in the knot of her pagne like the most precious of all treasures. She was always looking for rare rootstocks on the Bagesera properties, and she did extra work so she could take them. Sometimes she spent a whole afternoon on the little patch of land she set aside for the plants no one grew anymore. For her they were like the survivors of a happier time, and she seemed to draw a new energy from them. She grew them not for daily consumption but as a way of bearing witness to what was in danger of disappearing, what did indeed disappear in the cataclysm of the genocide. When Mama cooked with them, I thought I was tasting the magical food people eat in stories.
Late in the evening, the time for storytelling, my mother once again picked up the tireless thread of her tales: “When I was little,” she would say, “Rwandans all lived in big grass huts, and people told their children, ‘Whatever you do, don’t go into the back of the hut, where it’s always dark, where we put the big jugs we always keep our backs turned to, because you might run into the ingegera.’ ” And then Mama described the ingegera: a little creature, very black and very thin, whose eyes glowed like red coals. He’s always stark naked, or else he wears dried banana leaf tatters, and if you hear the sound of rustling leaves from behind the jugs, that means he’s there. But, Mama would tell us, the most amazing thing about the ingegera is his hair, a tangled mop that can’t be combed out (because he has no one to comb it for him or to shave his head), stiff with dirt and ash, like a clump of grass fronds and roots on the top of his head. After the evening meal, people often leave a few beans and sweet potatoes in the bottom of the kettle. But if you get up in the morning and find the kettle empty, that’s because the ingegera is there behind the big jugs, and if you move the jugs you might well plunge your hand into a mane of filthy, matted hair and see his disheveled silhouette against the ceiling of the hut, and his long, hooked fingernails. My mother didn’t know if every hut had its own ingegera, or if there was only one ingegera that went from one house to another.
Cockroaches Page 4