As said earlier, education is the issue that came up most in conversations. For Burundians, clearly, it is the best if not the only way out of farming (a trend in much of Africa; Hyden 2006: 149). The juxtaposition between education and agriculture – and more broadly between education and the rural life – came through in hundreds of conversations. A smattering of quotes will illustrate this:
People with education have more job opportunities, especially if they have high school degree. So they can have a job and live independently of the life in the collines. (Twenty-year-old farmer, five years of schooling, Busiga)
If you don’t study, the only opportunity is to cultivate ten hours a day under a hot sun, every day of the year. (Twenty-eight-year-old civil servant, one year of university, Ruhororo)
I admire people who have studied and have a degree. They do not have to pass their entire days cultivating, they earn money and help their families escape poverty. I regret not having continued my studies. (Thirty-year-old widow, finished primary school)
It will come as no surprise that many people told us that the prime determinant for quality of life of young people is whether they have done further studies. This held for both men and women (out of fifty-six times education was mentioned in this context, for example, it applied twenty-seven times to men and twenty-nine times to women).
Education means you are not stuck anymore in the prison that rural life represents for many people. This means that for people the investment in education is mainly worth it if one gets to the end of the process. The economic benefits of education are much more of an all-or-nothing nature – not a gradual process – than is usually acknowledged. It is not as if each year of additional schooling makes Burundians one thirteenth better off. Rather, once one passes the level at which one can read and write there is a long plateau of few increased personal quality-of-life gains, and then a dramatic increase after tenth grade, and especially at completion of high school. This is why so many people talked to us about education ‘jusqu’au diplome’ – until the diploma – for that is where education pays off.
Burundians’ strong attachment to education may be due to political factors as well. One of the key ways in which social exclusion was produced and reproduced in pre-war Burundi was through highly unequal access to education, and especially the type of education that matters, namely secondary and tertiary (Jackson 2000). The most violent form thereof was what Lemar-chand (1996) has labeled the ‘selective genocide’ of 1972, which entailed the almost complete elimination of all educated Hutu in Burundi. For many years, Hutu parents feared sending their children to school, so intense was the trauma of those events. Unequal access to education was also reproduced through un-equal schooling infrastructures, with a heavy regional bias toward Bujumbura and Bururi province, the two places where the elite in power were most present. Nyanza-Lac, for example, while adjacent to Bururi and, until the late 1980s, part of Bururi province, had not a single secondary school until 1996, well into the civil war! In a country where all the desirable positions – in the state, the aid system, the small private enterprise sector, the superior echelons of the army – require higher education, this meant a de facto exclusion from opportunities for advancement. Even now, the majority of the 4,000 students enrolled in the national university are Tutsi (Economist Intelligence Unit 2006). Note that, for decades, the international development community invested massively in education in Burundi without ever addressing this dramatic social exclusion.
Under those circumstances, it comes as no surprise that the very first decision of President Nkurunziza was to announce universal free primary education. This was a smart political move, demonstrating that from now on ‘the system’ in Burundi has changed, and all Burundians will find their place in the country. It is possible that, in this political context, part of the massive adhesion to education we observed in our interviews is explained by a catch-up movement. This is confirmed by another observation: when we asked young people themselves for their own plans in life, we got by far the highest number of ‘education’ answers in Kamenge, Burundi’s radical Hutu neighborhood par excellence. On the other hand, this is emphatically not the only factor explaining the importance of education to Burundians, for it occurred pretty much equally among Hutu and Tutsi, rich and poor, born from highly educated parents or not, rural or urban, male or female.
All secondary school students we interviewed (often well into their twenties) felt enormous pressure to perform and identified deeply with being a student. For these youths, studying hard is the only shot they have at lifting themselves, and their families, out of a deeply uncertain future. As one nineteen-year-old ninth grade student in Ruhororo told us, ‘In the camp, I saw many young men who abandoned school because of lack of money, and that tormented me. I told myself that if this were to happen one day to me, I would become crazy.’ They study night after night by candlelight, until their eyes give up – we met many people who had to abandon their studies because their eyes couldn’t take it anymore.
Little do they know how hard it is for educated young people in the city, competing against thousands of others, to find a decent job, especially if they have no connections. Some of the unhappiest people I met were young men in Bujumbura, after all these years of sacrifice, desperately looking for a job, month after month after month. Some don’t even manage to find the money to print their final theses, and will thus never get their degrees. They worked so hard, got so close, and then they still find the door closed. It is my impression that these are not people who are inclined to violence and self-destruction: they are too serious for that, they have given too much, they want to belong to the system more than anything else. And so they doggedly keep on going, asking around, trying to ingratiate themselves with more powerful people (including any foreigners they can get to meet), waiting for the day they will get a job, any job, anywhere.
Education is a lottery, especially for the poor – and it is an expensive one at that. When harvests are bad, when people are sick, when assets are stolen, when families are forced to flee, education is interrupted if not ended altogether.5 And if poverty, sickness, or violence don’t cut short education, then the extremely tough schooling system will: pass rates of less than 25 percent are normal. In the rural world, less than 9 percent of children go on to secondary school; in the city of Bujumbura that is 37 percent (MINIPLAN 2006: 10).
Since the overwhelming majority of the rural youth never gets even close to finishing their education ‘jusqu’au diplome,’ the issue becomes: what to do next? The current answer for most Burundian youth is: nothing. There is essentially no ‘plan B.’ Thus, it comes as no surprise that this research uncovered a profound and widespread desire for vocational training, especially in the northern communes (Sommers 2006b: 15). Person after person, in our conversations in these two communes, spontaneously brought up vocational training, whether talking about their own lives or about what to do for youth in general.
Migration
The communal development plan of Musaga indicates that 40 percent of all households migrated there during the war … my sample has an even higher proportion. Yet we know almost nothing about migration in Burundi. We have no idea at all of actual numbers, and neither are there any social science studies on the matter. This is related to the image that prevails about Burundi as an exclusively rural country. A major 2007 GoB/UN document prepared for the Peace Building Commission, for example, starts with the statement that ‘95% of all Burundians live off agriculture.’ This is far from true but it is believed by all. Here is what we learned from listening to the people in both a major out-migration area (Ngozi province) and the country’s main in-migration area, Bujumbura city.
The rural world In our interviews in poor, overpopulated Ngozi province, young men and young women told us over and over that they would love to migrate to the city, for there is not enough land anymore, not enough to eat, no opportunities to earn money. A major reason young men migrate – or desire to do so
– is in the hope of saving enough money to build a house, pay bride wealth, and get married. Indeed, our interviews suggest that many rural men migrate to the city precisely to prepare for marriage. Married men who do not already work in the city rarely migrate there (it is different for those who live in towns surrounding cities).
After the death of my parents and oldest brother, I took care of the siblings. In 1997, I came to Bujumbura to do different jobs and then I managed to buy my own bike and I started doing taxi-vélo. I have done this job since 2002 and it allows me to have everything I need. I managed to build a house and I married because of my work. I also managed to buy three goats and five parcels of land to cultivate. I think that with God’s help I will manage the development I wished for when I came to the city. (Twenty-six-year-old migrant, Musaga)
I am saving some money to buy a couple of cows. After that, I will seek a wife. I am busy building a house with a tile roof in my colline to prepare my marriage. (Twenty-year-old male migrant, Musaga)
I want to build a house [in his colline] from next summer onwards, and afterwards I intend to marry. I think two people are better than one and we can unite our strengths to assure our projects. (Nineteen-year-old male migrant, Musaga)
The number of young people who told us they were not interested in migrating, for life was good as it was, was less than 10 percent of the total in both northern communes. As Ruhororo was deeply struck by the war whereas Busiga was mainly spared, this seems largely independent of the war.
I asked many young people in the countryside why they were staying there, rather than going to the city. Their main answer was economic in nature: the risk is too high, and they are too poor to make it in the city. While the city has the potential for a better life, that result is far from certain. Ultimately, the countryside is stable and predictable – you know what you have, even if it is not much. At home, you have food and a support network. Life is hard, but at least it is predictably hard and you are not alone. Listen to this nineteen-year-old returned former child soldier:
I am able to see friends in the centre de negoce, and they are able to give me a bit of money for breakfast, or let me unload merchandise for two hundred francs. Going to the city is not interesting, because few people know me there. Who could help me and give me money in times of need?
Other people argue that, sure, you can make more money in the city, but life is more expensive there as well, as you need to buy everything. Others still pointed out that to make it in the city you need to have start-up capital and know someone who can help you: in the absence of that, it is much too risky to go to the city. As this twenty-four-year-old man from Busiga said: ‘I stay here because there is more stability in the colline. Even though I am poor, I can go to friends or relatives to get food or money. This is not the case in the city, plus, in order to get there, I must start with some capital.’ Or this eighteen-year-old IDP in Ruhororo: ‘Going to the city is like a lottery, if you don’t know someone who supports you, and helps you find work.’ In short, for many people, it seems the risk–benefit or the cost–benefit ratio is too low.
A few young people told us they would love to go to the city but their responsibilities keep them home. Sick parents, too much work, the need to take care of younger siblings, the fact of being the oldest son – all these factors were invoked to explain why a person could not migrate even if he wanted to.
A larger group of people gave as reason for not migrating the fact that the city is a place of sin, of temptation, of danger. Many of them were older, talking about their attitude toward their children. This is how a fifty-one-year-old farmer saw it: ‘Girls here do fieldwork and household work. When they start to have bad behavior, they migrate to the city to find work there.’ Some young people copy the values of their elders. This twenty-nine-year-old-man, for example, said: ‘I think young people who go to the city are lazy people who flee from cultivating the land. They want to go to the city, thinking that life will be very easy.’ It is clear that part of the general atmosphere of the countryside is still opposed to urban migration. Many of the migrants do rather well – certainly no worse than had they stayed put. At the same time, an image persists in which those young people who leave for the city are the ones who don’t fit in, who are too lazy to work hard, who are tempted by the easy life and want glittery things. In short, they are cultural and social outcasts, not responsible, obedient, well-educated children.
This image is especially pronounced in the case of young women who go to the city. With the exception of those girls who pursue their studies, migrant women are generally described in terms of laziness, moral weakness, and, especially, sexual loss of innocence. Young people themselves subscribed to this image. A twenty-four-year-old woman told us: ‘Those who have bad behavior are the ones who migrate to the cities. Why? they don’t have the same esprit, they are not satisfied with their natural life, they look for other means to survive and this leads to bad behavior.’ This twenty-two-year-old displaced man presented the complete picture:
It is worse for girls than boys, because when they spend some time in the city they start to acculturate: they wear pants or miniskirts and use make-up. As a result, most of them start to forget themselves and maintain relations with boys in the city and fall pregnant. When they come back to the countryside, they are marginalized in every way: way of dressing, having an illegitimate child. They don’t even manage to feed their children the right way, and they die of malnutrition. When the child dies, it is very hard for the girl because people tell her that they cannot bury the child if they don’t know the father. Other girls prefer to abort their pregnancy, but when they are identified, they are caught and imprisoned. Those young women who did not find husbands in the city end up coming back to the countryside. But who would ask her hand in the countryside with her marginal behavior? People think that she has already forgotten the work in the field and she is considered lazy.
This ideology is not surprising. In all cultures, women are the embodiment of traditional values: home, community, the nation. Their chastity is prized above all, and fears about unbridled female sexuality abound – according to some scholars, this is all the more so in wartime (Rajasingham-Senanyake 2001; Giles and Hyndman 2004). I believe that the deep connection between migration and loss of female sexual innocence is not so much a statement of fact (although there are of course cases where it is factually correct) as the result of a double cultural dynamic. One aspect is that women who migrate move beyond the boundaries of social expectations about gender roles. Negative images about their sexuality are intended to prevent this from happening. Old people are the ones who presented these images most frequently and clearly. But the fact that a number of young people invoked these very images as their reason not to migrate as well demonstrates that there is a deeper and widespread ideological support basis for these images. But there is more. We should not forget that a similar aspersion existed about young men as well – while it did not focus on their sexuality, it did put into doubt their uprightness. At a deeper level, then, this whole imagery is a reflection of the fear that exists in the rural world about it losing its character, about the ongoing social change. These images reflect the resistance to change and decline of a centuries-old culture that centers on agriculture – the land, the animals, the seasons; the social relations, proverbs, and expectations associated with that. In short, what we see at work here is the resistance created by a combination of rural and gendered values.
The case of the Ruhororo IDP camp was especially interesting in that regard. It seemed that, every single time the issue of female migration came up, it was associated with the words ‘unwanted pregnancy.’ In almost the same words, everyone told us that ‘girls who go to the city will return pregnant and unmarried, and their children suffer from kwashiorkor [malnutrition caused by insufficient protein intake].’ No other path was possible or conceivable, it seems. It is our hypothesis that the extremely common attachment to the most rigid traditional image
is the result of the very high level of frustrations with their fate among men there.
Bujumbura city The migrants I interviewed in the city had come there for different reasons and by different paths. One can distinguish four groups. First are those who migrated before the war, often in pursuit of higher education. Many of them came from the south, principally Bururi. They are mostly the elite class of society. They are often Tutsi, male, well educated, and older. The other three groups I encountered are composed of younger people who migrated to Bujumbura during the war years. Three prime motivations drove them: to continue their studies, to look for work, or to escape the violence and the war.
The last group contains a number of people, Tutsi and Hutu, who suffered horribly from the war. They did not come to Bujumbura as part of a plan but simply had to flee; often their immediate family is dead and they depend on the kindness of remote family or strangers; they have little education and no capital to start a business. If they are women, they often have stories of sexual abuse behind them. They are among the people who suffered most of those we met during our months talking to ordinary Burundians. They are also among the poorest people we interviewed in the city. There are many of them in Kamenge (coming from Bujumbura rural) but also in Musaga.
Life After Violence Page 10