Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

  Deo suffered another bout of malaria and put off medical school for almost a year, during which he taught elementary school in a remote village. He had no idea which of his pupils were Hutu, which Tutsi. And he didn’t care, nor did anyone else in the village, so far as he could tell. He didn’t think about ubwoko, about “ethnicity.” To him, the pupils were simply poor, and already demoralized by poverty, especially the girls and the ones with physical handicaps, whom he tried to help. He spent a fair amount of his meager pay buying banana beer for their fathers so they would listen as he praised their children.

  When Deo finally arrived at medical school in Bujumbura, he began to learn what a rube he was, a country boy with mud between his toes. Some of his classmates also seemed to struggle financially, but everyone had better clothes. He owned only one shirt with a collar. He would wash it at night in his room and let it dry in his open window. He made one pair of pants last his entire first year, by sewing patches on them. “So many patches,” he later said, “it was impossible to tell which was the original.”

  He underwent the standard hazing from the older students. They ordered him to sit beneath a dining table, to put his plate full of rice on top of his head, then to feed himself by hand, grasping handfuls of rice from overhead. “So you think this is bad?” said one of the upperclassmen. “How often do you have rice at home?”

  This was a standard question. Deo got the answer wrong the first time it was asked. He said what was true, that his family grew some rice and did sometimes eat it at home. For this, he was kicked. The next time, he managed the exchange correctly.

  “How often do you eat rice at home?”

  “Only on Christmas Day.”

  Rice was often served in the dining hall. He understood the implication. He was being inducted into a superior group, which deserved special privileges.

  He had always made friends easily and was making many now, among them Jean, who had a Burundian mother but was a muzungu because his father was French. (Muzungu, which comes from Swahili, originally meant a person who moves from place to place, but it had come to signify a white European. And because, where Deo grew up at least, one assumed that anyone with white skin was rich, muzungu was often used to signify any wealthy Burundian—it was like calling that person white.) Jean had his own car and his own apartment near the campus. He was a good-looking, light-skinned young muzungu with money and a car, in a city of beautiful young women. He was often out on the town. This was the era of AIDS, and Deo felt more worried than disapproving, though he did disapprove. He didn’t remonstrate with his friend, though. He was a country boy who knew how to grow beans. Who was he to lecture a civilized boy?

  The medical school itself was a paradise to Deo. The principal building was practically brand-new. It had a well-stocked library, and a room full of microscopes and other gear for studying bacteriology. The buildings of the university hospital that surrounded the school weren’t as elegant, but a large staff kept them clean, and there were only two patients per room on the wards. Each class had about a hundred students, about as many of them young women as men. About a hundred and fifty professors worked full-time or part-time teaching them. Many of the professors were French, and they were like gods, not to be crossed. Just as in high school, if you asked a question, you got an answer. One never heard a professor say, “I don’t know.” Often the answer would be, in effect, “Shut up.” Early on, one of Deo’s classmates asked a question, and the professor wrinkled his nose and said, “First of all, learn to speak French properly.” Deo spoke impeccable French, but after that he didn’t often feel like raising his hand.

  He lived in a dorm and spent most of his time in class and in the library and on hospital rounds with professors. Grades were posted periodically for all to see, on a bulletin board. His name consistently appeared in the top five. He had a plan by this time: on the day of graduation he would marry—he didn’t yet know whom—then he would go to work helping the poor. He had dreamed of building clinics for the country ever since that abortive attempt to build one in Sangaza. In the present, medical school comprised a world all its own, both to him and, he thought, to most of his classmates. It claimed most of his time and energy. But by now even he couldn’t help paying some attention to politics, first of all to nearby international politics.

  There was war up north in Rwanda. Its roots lay in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when colonial rule had ended. In Burundi, Tutsi elites had claimed power. But in Rwanda the opposite had happened: Hutu elites had supplanted the former Tutsi aristocracy. In Rwanda, during the struggle for power, thousands of Tutsis had been killed, and hundreds of thousands had fled. Some had settled in Uganda. For decades, Rwanda’s governments had refused to repatriate those refugees, and like most countries where exiles tried to make new homes, Uganda didn’t want them either. Now a force made up mainly of descendants of the Tutsi exiles in Uganda was attempting what one scholar describes as “an armed repatriation.” The group called itself the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the RPF. Its largely Tutsi army, the Rwandan Patriotic Army, had invaded Rwanda in 1990. The RPF was supported quietly but effectively by Uganda’s government. Its army was much smaller initially than Rwanda’s, which was supported fecklessly by Zaire, to a greater degree by Belgium, and robustly by France. (The colonial language of Rwanda was French, that of Uganda English. A main tenet of French policy in Africa seems to have been the preservation of French-speaking governments at all costs. In French political circles, the RPF invasion was called “an Anglo-Saxon invasion.”) Even so, the RPF had grown and become formidable. It had taken territory and seemed certain to take more. Many Tutsis had been arrested in Rwanda in retaliation for the RPF‘s successes. Hundreds, at least, had been killed. The so-called international community had sponsored on-again, off-again peace talks.

  Deo followed the events, desultorily. Once in a while he listened to accounts on Rwandan radio stations. Several times he heard Rwandan officials or commentators say, “Slowly we will finish them.” But he assumed the Rwandan speakers were talking about defeating the RPF, not about Tutsis in general.

  These were unsettling times, but they only rarely frightened him. His first shock came on a day in the spring of 1991. He was waiting for a bus in front of the Coca-Cola stand across the street from the medical school. A fellow classmate, a casual friend, came up to him and said in a whisper, “Here, look at this.” He handed Deo a folded newspaper and quickly walked away.

  It was a tabloid-style paper, folded open to a page with this headline: “The Hutu Ten Commandments.” Deo had heard of this newspaper, the international edition of a Rwandan paper, sanctioned by the Rwandan government and called Kangura—the name meant “wake up.” The newspaper was distributed, Deo had heard, by a Burundian Hutu-power group, outlawed by Burundi’s Tutsi government and headquartered in refugee camps in Tanzania. The group called itself PALIPEHUTU, an acronym for, roughly, “Liberation of the Hutu People.” The Hutu Ten Commandments had circulated widely throughout Rwanda, but this was the first Deo knew of them. He read them surreptitiously on the bus and reread them several times back in his dorm.

  The first commandment stated: “Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, whoever she is, works for the interest of her Tutsi ethnic group. As a result we shall consider a traitor any Hutu who: marries a Tutsi woman, befriends a Tutsi woman, employs a Tutsi woman as a secretary or a concubine.” Other commandments laid out additional reasons that Tutsis should be feared, despised, and shunned. They didn’t actually suggest killing all Tutsis, but the eighth commandment declared, “The Hutu should stop having mercy on the Tutsi,” and the ninth read, in part, “The Hutu must be firm and vigilant against their common Tutsi enemy.” Other writings in the paper referred to Tutsis as “cockroaches,” an old epithet in Rwanda.

  Where was this coming from? Deo wondered. Was this sort of hatred going to burst out in the open here, in Burundi? Did some of his family’s neighbors believe this stuff? If he traveled back home, would he b
e in danger on the way? Who were his fellow students and where did they stand on all of this? He kept the paper hidden in his room for several days, then handed it quietly to another classmate, one he happened to know was a Tutsi.

  Some of his classmates openly discussed the ethnic issue. Several made no secret of the fact that they came from Tutsi families who had fled from Rwanda to Burundi during one or another pogrom. They worried openly, saying, “Is it going to happen here?” But Deo didn’t know the classification of most of the others at the school. If you were out on the street and you guessed that everyone you saw was Hutu, you would, after all, be right about 85 percent of the time. And he thought he could identify some classmates by stereotype. But most people’s looks fell, like his own, in a middle ground. He wasn’t even sure about every neighbor’s ethnicity back in Butanza. Here in Bujumbura, the only way to know for certain was to be told by the person in question, and he wasn’t about to go among his classmates asking, “Are you a Hutu or a Tutsi?” The worry he’d felt when he read the Hutu Ten Commandments didn’t pass entirely, but it abated.

  Deo began to notice what seemed like a new fad around the university and in the city. He would be out walking with student friends, often a mixture of Hutus and Tutsis, at least as far as he could tell, and they would encounter other friends or strangers who would raise one hand to the top of an ear, then make a fist and raise the hand higher, saying as they did this, “Inivo nu gutwi,” which to Deo meant “At the level of the ear.” And then they might say, “Oh, hi!” Deo and his friends would laugh and repeat the gesture. Once in a while he would be sitting with friends on the wall outside the medical school or on the grass outside his dorm, or he’d be standing with friends on the street, and strangers passing by would smile and say, “Susuruka,” “Warm them up.”

  Deo assumed this was just a new greeting to go with the fist-raising gesture. “Susuruka,” he’d reply, and then do the fist-raise.

  It was only much later that Deo was able to make some sense of what had been going on around him outside the medical school classrooms. He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don’t exist. “Everyone has a different story,” he’d come to think. “It’s not like for one team if you are playing football, one team here and one team there. No. It’s a chaos. And everyone says something depending on what they saw or lived or felt.” Most people probably understood “Inivo nu gutwi” and “Susuruka” as political slogans, or even as Deo did, as new and friendly greetings. It was only later that Deo came to think that “At the level of the ear” was code for a machete’s proper target, and “Warm them up” meant “Pour gasoline on Tutsis and light a match.”

  In Deo’s third year of medical school, a big moment in Burundi’s political history arrived. In the aftermath of 1988—the massacres of Burundian Tutsis and counter-massacres of Hutus—there had been international condemnation of Burundi’s military government. In Burundi, as in much of Africa, foreign aid had long been a principal source of wealth for the wealthy. Burundi’s unelected Tutsi leaders had responded to the pressure by creating a new interim government, led by a Hutu and composed of equal numbers of Hutus and Tutsis. A constitution providing for multiparty democracy had followed, and then a general amnesty, and finally, in early 1993, national elections.

  There was some trouble, of course. Hutu refugees were returning, some with their Ten Commandments memorized, many with bitter, horrifying memories of 1972 preserved. Ideologues of Tutsi rule attempted a coup to prevent the election. But the voting went on, and a Hutu named Melchior Ndadaye defeated his Tutsi opponent. Inevitably, ethnicity figured in the election campaign, but after Ndadaye had won 65 percent of the vote, he immediately began preaching peace. Thousands of Tutsi students and members of the losing party held a march in Bujumbura to protest Ndadaye’s election. A month later, a small group of Tutsi soldiers attempted another coup, which also failed. Ndadaye appointed a cabinet of seven Tutsis and fifteen Hutus, with a Tutsi as prime minister. On July 10, 1993, at his formal swearing-in, Ndadaye and the losing Tutsi candidate, a former unelected president, hugged in front of the cameras.

  Deo hadn’t joined the Tutsi protest. He didn’t have any special feeling for either candidate. But not everyone at the school was as indifferent.

  He had a classmate who liked to declare that he was a Hutu and would say, “We need to share the small cake.” Le petit gâteau. Deo had never eaten cake, but he understood: Burundi was poor, only a handful could be wealthy in Burundi. Right now Tutsi elites were enjoying almost all the scarce wealth and privileges. They needed to share the small cake, not with the Hutu people in general, but with Hutu elites.

  Many students in Deo’s class thought this fellow difficult—cold and haughty, always spouting off about the virtues of the rebel group PALIPEHUTU and taking it upon himself to discover his classmates’ ethnicities. Deo had the impression that most self-identified Hutus in the class disapproved of the young man. Deo had avoided him, but evidently he had his eye on Deo and knew Deo was a Tutsi. On a day soon after Ndadaye’s election, he came up to Deo in a hallway and, letting loose a burst of toneless laughter, said, “This is your end.”

  Deo knew he was talking about the election. He figured the guy just wanted to crow a little. “The end of what?” asked Deo. “In power, or what?”

  The young man laughed again. “You don’t get it,” he said. “You are like the tail of a beheaded snake.”

  Deo knew his snakes, the mambas and cobras and other venomous species, and he knew the proper response to an encounter with a snake, which was either to run or to chop off its head. Evidently, this Hutu classmate was a country boy, too. No doubt he was imagining the same thing as Deo at that moment—a decapitated snake with the tail still wriggling around, as if the tail didn’t know it was part of an animal already dead, as if it didn’t know there was no hope for it. “My God,” Deo thought, “are we Tutsis going to be wiped out? Struggling on the ground?” He had always tended to feel fear in his belly. He felt as if his stomach had filled all at once with acid. He felt like running away from this guy. He couldn’t think of a word to say. After that, whenever he saw his radical classmate he saw a beheaded snake in his mind.

  EIGHT

  New York City,

  1995–2000

  Improbable as it would have seemed to almost anyone else, the fall of 1995 found Deo entering his freshman year at Columbia University. It seemed improbable to at least one of his classmates, who asked Deo if he was the son of an African king. Deo said he wasn’t. Well, the classmate asked, how did he come to be at Columbia? Deo didn’t tell him that only a year ago he’d been delivering groceries and sleeping in Central Park, or that a combination of student loans, scholarships, and Nancy and Charlie’s money was paying his way. To explain would only have left his classmate more confused and more inquisitive. Deo simply smiled and said brightly, “I don’t know why I’m here, but I’m here!”

  Deo hadn’t known he’d accomplished anything special when Columbia had accepted him, not until he met a few people from other New York colleges and realized they were impressed—“Really? You’re going to Columbia?” Even then, the fact of being at college didn’t seem extraordinary to him. He had already gone through three years of what in the European system constituted both college and medical school. Starting college over again, as a freshman with at least four years between him and a return to medical training, didn’t seem like a big deal. It felt like a demotion. And because he was in a hurry to catch up, he got a little ahead of his abilities with English.

  A few days after his first chemistry test, the professor took him aside and told him he had answered almost every question wrong. When Deo said this was impossible, in an accent that was unmistakably French, the professor looked at him quizzically, then smiled and said, “Je parle français aussi.” In hi
s answers, Deo had written down the names of chemicals as he had learned to do in Burundi—he’d written “chloride hydrogen,” for instance, instead of “hydrogen chloride.” The professor regraded his test and his score went from a zero to an A minus, but the professor also advised him to defer advanced science courses and concentrate for now on his English. Deo thanked him, thinking there was no way he was going to slow down. At midterm, he was summoned by the dean, who told him he was on the verge of academic probation and gave him the same advice as the chemistry professor. Deo didn’t take it. He botched his physics final because every question had to do with the motion of a “carousel.” He didn’t know the word, and, out of old habit, didn’t dare ask the instructor for its meaning. At the end of the spring term, however, Deo had made the dean’s list.