avoid "Borat" like you would the plague...

ok, i am a HUGE Borat fan. i’ve been watching and recommending his comedy for years now. i first came across him (ok, sasha baron cohen as Borat as well as Bruno and Ali G) on the advice of an Irish friend in 2002. so i was pretty chuffed to learn that a movie was coming out. i even waited to see the movie with a friend who also enjoys Borat’s social critique of the U.S. and A as well as his uncanny ability to get Americans to reveal there not-very-well-hidden prejudices about other cultures. BUT THE MOVIE SUCKS. it’s simply not funny. it is a dumbed-downed version intended for american audiences. it was over-scripted. (lack of script, or straight-up ad libbing is one of Borat’s charms). i could go on and on but here’s the skinny: avoid “Borat” like you would the plague, unless of course you want to see him acting like Americans expect people from other cultures to act. there is nothing clever in this movie. sigh….

political theory daily review

this is an amazing website: http://www.politicaltheory.info/about.htm

this is a great website for anyone interested in the relationship between politics and philosophy. it is overflowing with information on
on political theory across a variety of approaches and on a multitude of subjects.

Enjoy!

hot library smut

for all you fellow book nerds out there, check out this website:

http://thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/hot_library_smut/

bed-time reading: on Wrong and Thomas

iving in rwanda for about 6 months gave me lots of free time to read NOVELS. i love to read but have always neglected novels because i read so much academic stuff that i usually prefer to watch Ab Fab or Seinfeld in my down-time.

i read some doozies. great books that i simply have to recommend. one that left a big impression is Michela Wrong’s I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation. This is a pithy, glorious novel written from the perspective of the Eritrean people, as well in the voice of Italian colonialists. The mix of historical, political and cultural analysis revealed from the perspective of both oppressed and oppressor offers new insight into colonial Eritera, and all that colonialism left in its wake. She highlights the damage wrought by the US during the Cold War and constrasts their looting with the work of a British activist, Sylvia Pankhurst. Pankhurst took on the machinery of both the US and Britain to show the use and abuse heaped on Eritera by its so-called allies. Pankhurst’s activism is woven throughout the book, and it is refreshing to see her work given priority. Surely many a (male) historian has overlooked the contribution of a woman dismissed as a nutter. Sylvia’s son, Richard, has taken up the mantle and Wrong also includes his voice in her analysis of modern Eritera.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in understanding and explaining the callousness of colonialism in Africa. It is also a useful primer on the Eritera-Ethiopian wars, which has great resonance today, particularly as Ethiopia is saber-rattling in Somalia and Sudan. It is one of the most beautifully written books I have encountered in a long, long time. Wrong is a first class writer, and her ability to uncover the good, the bad and the ugly within a country that holds a mystical spell for many Westerners is the book’s true strength.

I also read Abigail Thomas’s Three Dog Life in one sitting. A memoir, Thomas chronicles her life following a devastating accident that resulted in her husband’s traumatic brain injury. He was institutionalised with hallucinations and psychotic episodes. The injury erased any memories he had of their life together, and the story is about Thomas’s attempt to adjust to life without the man who was her husband and her coming to grips with the man he is now. She finds solace in her home, in her extended family, and in her dogs. She re-shaped her chaotic life into one of richness and beauty, facing her new reality with courage, mixed with bursts of anger, humility, patience and humour.

As I read Three Dog Life, the parallels with the women in my Rwanda research were hard to ignore (try as i did). Rwandan women, particularly those who identify as Tutsi survivors of the genocide (not all Tutsi choose the moniker of ’survivor’ although all have it thrust on them) have lost their ability to choose how they will cope with the changes brought by the loss of family, neighbours and other loved ones during the 1994 genocide. Instead, the government has decided to paint them with the broad brush strokes of victim. The victimhood of Tutsi survivors, particularly women, is the calling card of the government when it knocks on the doors of potential development partners. But these women have no agency, they exist only by virtue of their status as widows of genocide. Identity is thrust upon them, and the support they need, assuming they can even identify and articulate what it is they need to regain a sense of their pre-genocide lives, is lacking. Wrong’s novel also shows this. Just as Rwandans are nothing without the genocide, Eriterans are nothing without their colonial oppressors woven into their story.

A fun link is Columbia’s Africa 100 Best Books of the 20th Century: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/africa/cuvl/Afbks.html#list

post from 27 August: - shots fired across the street

So it finally hit the fan last night. A soldier, armed with an aging AK47, shot one of his mates just in front of my house. I saw them take away the body this morning. He was a young man, maybe 25. I wondered what would come of his family if he was the sole breadwinner, or if he was perhaps a student at the university. The whole family may have had their hopes and dreams of future (economic) security on his shoulders, on his degree. The news would be doubly devastating on that count: loss of a son and future income and the social prestige of having put a child through university. I thought of his mother, and how she would react when the news finally reached her ears….

I have been thinking to myself for the past several weeks that something has to give…. Butare has been increasingly militarised as the gacaca courts intensify their work, and as more and more ordinary Rwandans try to flee to neighbouring Burundi to seek refuge from the effects of gacaca. Both accused and accuser are unhappy with the current state of affairs around ‘seeking justice’ through the gacaca courts.

The government, in typical prescience, has responded with an armed presence. Instead of the usual 2 or 3 soldiers on foot patrol, we now see contingents of at least 12, often 15 soldiers, walking in formation, armed and ready. Usually, the foot patrols are just a subtle reminder of past insecurity in Rwanda, with the soldiers chatting with locals, laughing with friends, and with weapons hanging at their sides, safety on. Now, the foot patrols are serious. Weapons over the shoulder, primed and ready for use at a moment’s notice.

On top of the stresses and strains of seeking justice (whatever that means around here, I am still trying to wrap my mind around that one…), the government has remained steadfast in its policy of formalising kiosks. Some clever owners have devised innovative ways of circumventing the directive to remain closed until the paperwork with Rwanda Revenue Authority is signed, sealed and delivered. Music plays from within a kiosk while the shop keeper sits at a distance, awaiting customers willing to trade. Candles burning on creaky countertops act as ‘open’ signs. The government is not chuffed with these acts of subversion, and with typical Government of Rwanda sensibility, foot patrols are also ‘to deal with’ shopkeepers who fall out of line.

The problem with this is that the boys get thirsty. They get tired. They get hungry. They don’t make enough money to frequent the restaurants and bars in town. These guys need the closed kiosks to fuel up before they set off of their gruelling 12-hour foot patrols through Rwanda’s hills and valleys. The kiosk across the street from my house had a bar attached to it. The owner has modified to be an informal space par excellence. He has cut down a tree, shaved off the stump and placed a piece of plywood on it to act as a table. He has taken the branches from the felled tree and turned them into a canopy of sorts, a means I suppose to offer some relief from the sun. He has stayed within the boundaries of the kiosk rule, which allows him to sell the stock he had on hand when the directive to shut the kiosks came down.

Last night. 9pm or so. The boys are over having a drink (or 4 or 5). The culture around drinking beer is a constant source of amusement and fascination for me. First, the beer must be big! Mutzig and Primus come in 1 litre bottles. The beer must be warm, meaning room-temperature. The beer must come to the table un-opened, lest someone has poisoned it while in the back room. Yes, beer is served in an air of paranoia and power. Paranoia because you only drink in places you know, in large groups of people you know, in case something happens and action is required. The place you know eases your mind about the quality (and available quantity) of the beer, while the large group serves as a buffer of complicity if something does go down. There should also be enough Rwandans present to totally confuse the situation and leave any possibility of uncovering the fictionalised facts of what happened dead in the water. There is safety in numbers, and Rwandans prefer never to be alone. Power because the server must acquiesce to the whims of his customers. Only big men drink big bottles. Les petits are for peasants!

Then, around 10pm. A shower of bullets from an automatic weapon. The AK. Much clucking from women, and more shouting from men. My ‘guard’, the affable mzee who stays with me, in his Rwandan way, can’t miss an opportunity to get a whiff of the potential suffering of others. He knocks on the door, and tells me in a mixture of Swahili, French and some Kinyarwanda that something is happening across the way. I had already kinda figured that out, but there is so much noise coming from across the way that I tend to ignore it wholesale. Back to reading for me, and off to the drama for mzee. You might think that the bullets would pique my curiousity, but no. I have been told on numerous occasions that the bullets are not counted by the Ministry of Defence, and once fired into the air, they never fall back to earth. Long story short, when I hear the boys firing off a few rounds, I just stay indoors, not convinced that the bullets stay high in the sky.

I am roused to my feet about 5am. This for me is an ungodly hour and not one that I witness very often. A member of the Rwandan National Police is at the gate. You must see him. Ok, I say, I’m coming.

I sit down with the officer. A baby-faced guy, with the front teeth of a 10-year old. His teeth has not yet grown to the smooth finish of adult teeth. And not a spec of facial hair on him! He is a smooth baby face. But crazy eyes, steely, mean, I’ve-seen-it-all-before eyes. When he opens his month, to ask me what I saw last night, he is all man. An exemplar of patriarchal dominance. Bossy, intimidating, probing for me to add credibility to his theory of the death. What am I doing in Rwanda? Why do I live here, in this big house, all by myself? Who takes care of me? Where are my children? These are odd questions when there is a body outside the front gate. Eventually, he tells me about how a young Rwandan died there. Did I know? Did I care? I did care, but I wasn’t going to share anything with this guy.

I did though want to ask him if the further militarization of society, combined with the continued squeeze on the livelihoods of ordinary Rwandans through half-baked and unplanned directives had any role to play the death. I wanted to ask too, was the deceased a survivor, was the killing retribution? But these are not questions to be asked when seeking justice.

revisionism anyone?

so my access to the internet was blocked. i am a member of several list-servs and am always participating in one debate or another. i think the posting that did me in was this one that i made to a members’ only list at Queen’s University. a few days after posting, i was called to ‘account’ for my revisionism by both survivors’ organisations as well as some members of the government, although i didn’t actually get my knuckles formally rapped for this one. i was simply informed that as a friend of Rwanda, i should be more careful about the kind of information i choose to share. here it the post in question…

“I think it goes without saying that there were factors other than ethnic hatred that led to Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. I haven’t read Diamond’s book, so cannot comment directly on his analysis on the genocide. However, reading your overview of his distinctions, ultimate and proximate explanations, leads me to believe that he has not visited Rwanda, but instead has based himself on reading the literature on Rwanda’s genocide and its aftermath. There are both academic and journalistic literatures, and together its quantity is voluminous and its quality mixed. Some works are unworthy of citation (see Pottier 2002 for critical analysis), others outstanding (e.g., DesForges, 1999; Prunier, 1995; Mamdani, 2001; Vansina, 2005; Uvin, 1998), and many in between (e.g., Dallaire, 2004; Eltringham, 2003; Harrell, 2003).

In the first place, I don’t think it is remotely accurate to suggest that Rwanda’s genocide was driven by ethnic hatred. Diamond correctly suggests there were other factors at play, notably competition for land, population density, and drought, and to some extent these factors did play a role. But his analysis is decontextualised from the local realities in Rwanda before the genocide. By decontextualised, I mean that his analysis is lacking local insights into local realities. I’m guessing that his analysis does not include a historical analysis of both Rwandan society and state. Important factors into understanding how fear, racism and violence culminated in the individual acts that constituted the Rwandan genocide must be considered. Without local knowledge, gained from ordinary people living on the ground, most analysis is missing big pieces of picture. I won’t get into broader debates about the validity of local knowledge, but suffice it to say local knowledge is usually overlooked in both academic and policy analysis of conflict and post-conflict situations. I’ll also avoid discussion of those age-old Western discourses that perceive African wars as ethnically-driven by a subaltern ‘other’ (although I wouldn’t be surprised if that was Diamond’s ontology).

His model also seems to ignore the relationship between the then-Rwandan government and the international community (see, e.g., Anderson, 2000; Uvin 1998). Major contributing factors squeezing the legitimacy of the pre-genocide government was the imposition of programmes of democratisation and economic liberalisation by the World Bank and IMF in 1989/90. This effectively wiped-out the ability of the Rwandan state to meet its patron-client obligations, and instead of promoting multipartyism resulted in ethnic polarisation along party lines. The imposition of democracy brought back the bad memories of independence when Rwanda’s first (and at the time, last) democratic experiment, which resulted in the first genocide of Tutsi (1959), and the mass exodus of Tutsi into neighbouring countries. These refugees, and their children, grouped militarily, forming the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and invaded from Uganda in October 1990, claiming their right to return to their motherland. During the period of multipartyism and liberalisation, the government also on the one hand fought (with French and Belgian support) the rebel RPF invaders, and negotiated with them at the Arusha Peace Accords. The then government used the invasion of the Tutsi rebels as a pretext to persecute Tutsis living in Rwanda at the time. In so doing, they resurrected the Hutu 10 Commandments, and used the local media machine to announce to ordinary Rwandans that their deepening poverty was the fault of invading Tutsi inyenzi (cockroaches), and that all Tutsi living in Rwanda were sympathisers with the rebels. In fact, few, if any Tutsi living in Rwanda at the time of the RPF invaded knew of its existence, and indeed of the more than 30 Tutsi that I have spoken to in my research on the period leading up to the genocide reported that they and their Hutu neighbours knew next to nothing of the political pressures facing the elite in Kigali. As one woman reported, ‘”…that was Kigali business. We didn’t think politics was any of our business and so we ignored what we heard. Things were being said but it wasn’t any of our concern”. These are the first signs that the genocide was pre-meditated and systematically planned, rather than the result of spontaneous ethnic violence (as it was characterised by the western media in the April to July 1994 period, see Pottier, 2002).

So it is a misnomer to characterise Rwanda’s 1994 genocide as ethnic. Its genesis is in the manipulation of ethnic identity by a power elite bent on holding state power more than on firmly held identities of ethnicity among local, ordinary Rwandans. I would argue that any so-called ethnic hatred has its basis in what Newbury (1988) called ‘the cohesion of oppression’. Rwandan society is characterised by structural forms of domination — that is institutional arrangements that allowed the political elite to appropriate labour, goods and services from a subordination population, both Tutsi and Hutu (and Twa). Social mobility in pre-genocide Rwanda was virtually fixed, although there are some examples of Hutu becoming Tutsi and Tutsi becoming Hutu recorded before the institution of identity cards in the 1930s, under the Belgian colonisers. The myth that the pre-genocide government propagated was that Tutsi were foreigners, and were illegal invaders to Rwanda. This discourse was ‘verified’ and indeed buoyed, by ideologies of race science from the early 1900s, with ‘scientists’ like Speke to local populations through dubious scientific measurements of width of nose, height of forehead, cranial capacity, etc.

These ‘theories’ of racial superiority were manipulated to justify the manipulation of ethnic identity as innate and immutable. They were also used by the political elite to maintain authoritarian-like control on Rwandan society. Ordinary Rwandans, the 90% of the population that lives a subsistence existence, understood that elite members of state institutions and organisations held power, and they both accepted and accepted that politics was the domain of the elite. The idea of mobility, that is moving up to the ranks of the powerful, or as one of my research participants put it, of “becoming an important person” was virtually nil. This high power divide exists where hierarchy is the societal standard, inequality is anticipated (and in some cases even desired), less powerful people expect to be dependent on more powerful people, centralisation of state institutions is popular and unquestioned, subordinates envision being told what to do, and privileges and social status are expected for elite members of society. The personal rule of the President is sacrosanct, as are relations of patronage and clientelism. These are the main qualities of Rwandan society before the genocide.

Ordinary Rwandans, of low social status, being in the main peasant farmers, petty traders, or day labourers, had a sense of security of knowing their place in society, and these characteristics allowed the idea of genocide – of neighbour killing neighbour, or friend, or spouse, to become possible. In short, the social fabric was such that to imagine a tear as violent as genocide was not much of a leap. These are characteristics that stifle innovation, individual reflection, initiative, or problem-solving, and ultimately made way for the conditions that would culminate in the genocide of Tutsi, and the politicide of Hutu and Twa (see the Radical Information Project for details of this distinction, as well as an analysis of the genocide through time and space: http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/davenport/genodynamics/index.htm ). The cohesion of oppression also allowed mid-level functionaries, well-aware of the political woes of their patrons, to form alliances and make deals, usually sealed in cash, with ordinary Rwandans to do the dirty work. The culture of oppression also allowed for the manipulation of ideologies that fed into the genocidal machinery of the state. In a country that was, as Diamond points out, reaching the limits of its cultivable land, as well as subject to the demands of exiles from a previous generation, both of which feed into the manipulation of the foreigner thesis.

I could go on, but suffice to say that to explain the Rwandan genocide as based on ethnic-hatred between Hutu and Tutsi is an oversimplification. I think also, it allows for the hastily drawn portrayals of peoples who are eternal foes that circumvent contextualised analysis of the multiple historical, sociological, cultural and political causes that led to the final, and lethal, decision to embark on a well-prepared campaign of slaughter.

And, finally, looking to the future, if post-genocide Rwanda, is to use the ethnic identity/hatred angle, which the present government is doing, under the banner of ‘Rwandanness’ (ethnic divisionism has been outlawed), it could lead to a re-creation of the same conditions that gave way to the 1994 genocide. For example, the discourse of ethnic hatred within Rwanda has pointed fingers at the international community for not stopping the genocide and has called on them to account. But what of the role of Rwandans themselves in killing their brethren? In qualifying the 1994 genocide as genocide driven by ethnic hatred veils the true nature of the conflict, and pushes us to ignore its realties, and in the process overlooking and/or underestimating the drivers of genocide. Those drivers need to be studied if we are to better understand political violence with an ethnic dimension.”

"hey kingpins, even pluto was once a planet…!"

or so goes power relations in rwanda. i was apprised that EVEN powerful ministers can fall afoul and they can too fight their way back, but with the appropriate apologies and enough contrition.

i like the quote alot since it was reflective of how my time in rwanda has been going. one day i was up, all was well; next day, calls to present in the big offices of kigali, hat-in-hand, tail-between-legs, etc, etc. they even went so far as to ask me not to blog and blocked my access from my personal wireless modem which was registered with a local company. when i went to the offices of that company to ask what gives on my internet connection, the guy helping me looked at my file and said, ‘ah, you’re the one’. i left it at that.

but the block on my access hasn’t been a block on my writing. i’ll start re-posting when i get back to canada.

squeezing the many for the benefit of the few?

the government is at it again. about 3 weeks ago, a government order to close all kiosks and other informal road-side businesses, like newspaper sellers, water vendors, and the kids that sell sweets and biscuits from over-stuffed boxes they so carefully balance on their tiny heads. the logic is that these individuals are not paying tax and so cannot conduct business until they register as formal shops. the discourse is that if you are not paying taxes, you are not building your nation.

i spoke to several of these informal sellers. the majority are men as the dirty work of informal business is not seen as a place for women. the kiosks tend to be ramshackle wooden structures that have been patch-worked into a recognisable shape while the remainder are mbati (sheet metal) match box-shaped structures that are emblazoned with the logos of international companies like coca-cola or Heineken beer.

kiosks are found every few blocks, they provide a stock of basic goods. soda, beer, water, cooking oil, rice, soap, batteries, candles and the like. instead of walking the up to 2 hours to get to the local, government-run market, Rwandans hopped out their back door for these basics. the kiosk in my neighbourhood often proved a life-saver. unexpected guests and you need 6 soda pops? no problem. eric has them. electrical power cut again and flash-light not working? no worries. eric has batteries.

not only a location of convenience, the kiosks are centres of community life. many of the participants in my research reported to me that they did not like to be alone. when alone, the memories of genocide, or the hunger pangs of poverty, dominate their thoughts. hanging out at the kiosk is an acceptable past-time and one that provides a sense of camaraderie and sense of place. if you can find your spouse, child, work-mate, check at the kiosk. more often than not, you’ll find your missing at the kiosk.

but no longer. the government has outlawed the existence of kiosks and owners are no longer able to trade until they turn the kiosk into a “proper” store front. what counts as proper is not clear; what is acceptable is registration with Rwanda Revenue Authority and payment of local, regional and national taxes…. as for the street sellers, all i can say is that they no longer populate Butare’s main road. where they have gone and what they are doing to survive on what was already a tenuous existence is anybody’s guess.

my first question upon hearing the new law to close down informal businesses was, “is there an international meeting coming up?”. it is well-known that African governments, and Kigali is not exempt, sweep up “vagabonds, street urchins and other unsavories” when other Heads of State come to town for conferences. it is, as Foucault would say, a classic display of sovereign power.

but no, there was no international event that was been stage-managed. it was bona fide government policy instituted at the highest levels, swiftly and deftly as is usually the case in Rwanda, with immediate and lasting impact on the lives of ordinary Rwandans.

to add insult to this injury, the government then decided on another (seemingly) whim, to outlaw taxi-motos on all of Kigali’s paved roads. the decision was made without forewarning and taxi moto owners and operators woke up yesterday (21 August) to find that they could no longer offer their services. Kigali is a city built on the top of seven hills, with the population leaving in the valleys and working in the peaks. with reliable and cheap transport from the outlying parts of the city to town, the city is at a virtual stand-still. the official argument is that the taxi motos are dangerous to life and limb, with the majority of Kigali’s traffic accidents occurring at the wheel of a the small two-wheelers that have been modified to carry passengers and a bag or briefcase.

Rwanda’s english-language daily, The New Times, reports that actually cars and motos are in the same number of accidents. and i’ve been in Rwanda long enough to know that the official story is usually VERY far from reality. the question is, how is driving these policies that touch the working lives of a great many Rwandans? what i see is that the authoritarian government is instituting policies that serve a large policy agenda. what i can’t figure out is what is really driving these recent actions.

one of my friends is stringing in the DRC

one of my good friends, eva g, is a videographer with reuters in the drc. she recently reported on the elections there. check it out:
http://www.blogger.com/profile/27413590

national unity is a tourist brochure

National unity actually reinforces ethnic divisions by foisting ethnic identity on Rwandans. the core assumption of the government is that individual identity is caught up in being either Hutu or Tutsi (notice no mention of the Twa). But many Rwandans have not hardened around their ethnic identity as the myth suggests. I have spoken to Hutu who did not they were different from their Tutsi neighbours until 1990 when the Hamitic myth of Tutsi superiority was first broadcast on Radio Rwanda. For them, the genocide is not a genocide, but a war that started in 1990 and did not end until 1996 when enforced repatriation of Rwandan refugees from neighbouring countries was undertaken. I have spoken to Tutsi who did not know they were Tutsi until local authorities rounded up entire hills – where both Hutu and Tutsi were resident – in the game of moving them to safety from the war, and from invading RPF. Upon arrival at the ‘safe zone’, Hutu were separated from Tutsi, with the remaining Tutsi encircled by Interahamwe.

There is some room to talk to Rwandans formerly-known-as-Hutu about their identity, but virtually none with Tutsi. Never Again means never again target Tutsi. It does not, never again will their be genocide in Rwanda. Interesting response by a government that proclaims national unity on the backs of Tutsi survivors of the genocide and in a country where everyone you speak to considers themselves a survivor as well.

a piece of the puzzle

Part of the code has been cracked. It is now plainly obvious how associational life works here in rwanda, or at least among the survivors. survivors are the bread and butter of the governments public face. Survivors are why certain policies are chosen over other ones; survivors are why the emotional blackmail about the failure to stop the 1994 genocide lingers and is a viable option vis-à-vis the international community. Meeting the needs of survivors is said to be the sole purpose and key objective of this government. the slogan never again is uttered time and time again in the name of survivors, and in respect of the memory of those fallen Rwandese; the tutsi that died during the genocide.

But associational life is highly controlled; membership to groups is necessary to receive support from the government – payment of school fees, provision of health care, transport to and from gacaca trials. Remaining a member of these associations – like IBUKA – is even more arduous. Get on the party line of how a survivor is to behave and act, or get out.

What is the performance? The government says… and survivors respond. It is a ‘perform or else’ situation.

What does this performance mean? And what are the implications for individual peace-of-mind?

the week of 17 to 21 july...

a most interesting week of interviews with ‘Rwandans’ of all walks of life. they ranged in age from 18 to 56 years old. two were cultivators, considering themselves unemployed; another sold newspapers; one fellow works as a taxi-moto driver; my sole woman works as a cake decorator at a local restaurant. the last of my participants was a young woman, 20 years old, a secondary school student. who claims to be born during the genocide. but that doesn’t add up. the 1994 genocide was 12 years ago. her sense of memory, and her sense of belonging — of being a rwandan citizen — are clearly conflicted.

many commonalities emerged all of them were in Rwanda when the genocide started. some of them were caught off guard by its arrival, and its intensity as several of them lived on hills with no tutsi individuals. neighbours and friends were all from the bahutu ethnic group according to this group, and so the local authorities were not ’sensitising’ these populations to do the work of genocide. many of them fled the country after the war, when the former regime pushed individuals out of the country, towards Tanzania. this struck me as unusual since Congo is closer, and Burundi is even closer. the common line was this: t”he RPF was in Butare town, and we were outside. instead of passing through town because we saw so many dead ‘brothers’ that had been killed in revenge by the RPF, we decided to go to Tanzania.” so many walked straight through the hills to Tanzania, avoiding larger villages, towns and Kigali city, as they avoided reprisals undertaken by the RPF in the post-genocide period. ao they feared the RPF; this is also contrary to what the RPF reports in its speeches and policy document. Rwanda was peaceful from the moment they formed government on 1 July 1994.

one of my participants was on the other side of Butare town so decided to walk to Bukavu, Congo. he got tired, he had too many people that he was caring for as they fled. they were walking towards Cyangugu, the Rwandan border town with Bukavu. they stopped at Kibeho, yes the famous Kibeho as written about by both Human Rights Watch and African Rights. the French were to protect them, he said. and they did, because he and his people are Bahutu. the Batutsis and the Bahutus were separated into two groups. i heard a similar story from Tutsi survivors who were not pushed to flee the country once the RPF took power. instead, these individuals went to a French-protected camp near Gikongoro. they too were separated by French troops into groups of Batutsi and Bahutu. that the French assisted the previous government to continue the policy of genocide is widely known. Bahutu, according to my participants, were shipped by truck home to their hills under French supervision. the Batutsi were to remain behind. what happened when the RPF got wind of this is well known (refer to African Rights for their version of events, which is pretty well done).

all this made me think of Marc Lepine, the disgruntled Canadian engineering student who walked into the University of Montreal on December6 1989. he put the male students in one corner and the female students in another. Lepine shot dead all of those women because he believed they were stealing his opportunities for work as an engineer. but there are two differences with the Lepine story. first, Lepine was an isolated incident; an individual that had taken matters into his own hands in a bid to regain some sense of personal power. the Bahutu i spoke to found themselves in flight and eventually in camps because of the political situation within Rwanda at the time; they were in many ways without personal power, but that did not mean they lacked agency. they made life-and-death decisions based on information passed through informal networks, and they survived the genocide. more importantly, they also avoided prison. because of the choices made, the Bahutu i spoke to last week were not swept up by the RPF and put in jail, accused of acts of genocide. the RPF, according to both Bahutu and Batutsi participants, put all Rwandans into camps after the genocide ‘ended’ in July 1994. the difference in rwanda is that almost all of my participants had no clue that they were this ethnic group or that ethnic group. they report that before the war, they were Bahutu, now, as the radio says, they are Rwandans.

all of these Rwandans, whether former Bahutu or Batutsi, have no economic opportunities, just as they had none before the war. most Rwandans live on less than 50USD a month. cultivators are ‘lucky’ if they see the equivalent of 10USD pass through their households in a month. ordinary Rwandans are desperately poor and their poverty is exacerbated by the reconciliation and reconstruction programme of the government.

things are starting to hang together…

some very interesting interviews of late and some common themes are starting to emerge. two recent observations….

apparently the government is keen on ICT as it is used to move their troops around and to manage various parts of the reconstruction effort. heard this from both demobilised soliders i interviewed. i took a look at the infrastructure set up as have been off line for the past 2 weeks (antennae down official story). wireless via rwandatel only available in gisenyi, cyangugu and kigali. hmmm. antennae for all users down allegedly as under service by MINADEF trained technicians. hmmmm

and get this. memorial sites that several govt officials told me were spontaneous in that the communities create them themselves are actually mandated by law, so says several participatns. one woman ‘found’ her the spot where her family was killed during gacaca truth telling stage to find out that she cant bury them on her hill as the govt passed a law that the bodies must be moved to a memorial site. interesting…. must get my hands on that law. not sure if that is law, or if participants are too powerless to challenge the directives of local officials.

all those chevres and not a roll of cheese in sight…!

did a road trip this weekend. travelled butare-gitarama, gitarama-kibuye, kibuye-gisenyi, gisenyi-kigali, and kigali-butare. saw at least 1000 sheep and 3x as many goats. some bits of the countryside had such animal density that there were road signs marking their presence, just like those signs you see marking school crossing zones! now with all this talk about entrepreneurship and innovating products coming from the government side, why has no one picked up the idea of producing diary products, notably that goat cheese roll which is covered in walnuts?

i can’t live on maandazi here people…!

hectic

The last few weeks have been particularly hectic, with interviews 2 or 3 times per day. I am interviewing survivors of the genocide, ranging from individuals who are young adults now, 12 years after genocide, to women who are raising children who were borne of acts of rape committed during the genocide. I am also interviewing those children. To say the least, the stories have been harrowing and I am struggling sub-consciously to cope.

Nightmares are frequent. I have a recurring dream of genocide in my home town. it starts with my mother preparing the house - making beds, straightening the living room, putting food in the freezer - as news that genocidal forces are heading towards our home. My parents disagree on whether we should hide in a local hotel, where my brother is working, or if we should stay at home and hide it out there. She forcefully argues, while snapping a crisp sheet over my other brother’s bed, that we will go to the hotel. My dad decides to stay home because there is a baseball game that he wants to watch on ESPN. So we go, my mom and I, along with my youngest son. My other son, and the rest of my family don’t appear in the dream. Pee Wee Herman is there tho….

We get to the hotel and my brother has organised a suite. So we are sharing the room with about 15 other people, including the mother of my childhood best friend, Pee Wee Herman, and a few friends of my young son. A hotel staff member, dressed in the white frock of kitchen staff, comes into the hallway of the suite, grabs Pee Wee, and my brother, and runs a small hunting knife, replete with bone-inlaid handle, along the waist, up the torso and across the shoulders of both Pee Wee and my brother. Everything is incredibly silent.

Then the dream cuts to me strolling in the garden of the hotel with my mom, and my mom’s friend. We are walking along like Winston Churchill, hands clasped behind our backs, reflecting on the situation around us. we look across the harbour to the hills on the other side of my town to see that where our house once was is now a smouldering block, with the place where my childhood home used to be just a scar in the side of the hill. My mom says, “I guess that’s it for your father”.

At this point, it is getting incredibly vivid in my mind. I force myself awake and turn on the BBC to hear that Israel and Lebanon are at it again. I’ve only been back in country for 2 weeks following a 10-day break. Am wondering if I can keep up the pace that my research requires (or is it what I think my research requires).

What is clear is that the stories of burnt out homes, rape, pillage, running, hiding, running, hiding are starting to weigh on me. Let’s see what tonight brings….

‘Rwanda reigns in the realm of human rights’

this is the headline on page 2 of a recent article in a prominent Kigali english-langauge newspaper.

the analysis goes like this, ‘compared to others in the region, Rwanda is a leader in the protection of human rights of its citizens.’

i’m thinking this, when your neighbours are burundi, DRC and uganda, reigning as the king of human rights in the region is not much of a feat!

ndaho umukara!

i go to Kigali 2 or 3 times a week. this means that i walk from my house to the bus-stop in Butare town between 6:30 and 7:30 am, depending on the time of my first meeting in the city. Butare is about 130 kms from Kigali, which makes for a 2 hour journey by bus.

when i go to Kigali i always seem to happen upon the same group of primary school boys. the boys are dressed in their polished school uniforms – crisp white collared shirt with the school logo on the breast pocket, beige shorts, white socks and black shoes. they range in age from, i’m guessing, ten to fourteen years of age. when they see me dragging myself to the bus-stop, they greet me in chorus. ‘bite muzungu’ (hello white), ‘uraho muzungu?’ (how are you white?), or ‘amukuru muzungu?’ (what’s up white?). i always reply ‘ndaho umukara! (fine blacks!). we all laugh as we pass each other on the street. this has gone on at least a dozen times by now

muzungu is used as a descriptor by Rwandans to identify white-skinned foreigners. when I lived in Kenya, it was more of a derogatory greeting that suggested the dislike/distrust of whites. the different usage of the word muzungu in Rwanda and Kenya is a combination of many factors, including colonial context, but I digress!

one morning last week when i was heading to Kigali for a 9am meeting, i ran into my trusty crew of school boys. they greeted me, uraho muzungu! i replied, ‘ndaho muzungu!’. the group stopped in its tracks, looked at me most quizzically; i looked back at them bemused by their reaction. then, in their clean and shiny uniforms, they all fell on the dusty ground laughing like what i had just said was the funniest thing they had ever heard! having a bus to catch, i said, ‘you guys are crazy!’. as i started to walk forward towards the bus-stop, one of the bigger boys got up, brushed the dirt off his clothes, and said in a very serious tone of voice, ‘madamu, we are not crazy, we are Rwandese…’.

i can’t wait to run into these guys again so we can explore the meaning of that sentence!

genocidaires in my midst

i have, living with me, in my ‘staff quarters’, a man in his 60s and works in the garden. he is blessed with enormous hands, and bears the hallmark sign of a life of poverty – wide, flat and calloused feet. his presence is the by-product of the rental agreement that i share with the owners of the house, self-exiled Rwandans living in Belgium. he is to act as their eyes and ears, while i am to pay his monthly salary.

i was told that “he will cause no problems. he is quiet and respectful and will take care of you!” being “taken care of!” is a cultural imperative in Rwanda, where women alone are a source of concern. so he is my keeper, and when Rwandan men figure out i am here alone, i tell them that “actually, i have someone.”

i speak a little bit of Kinyarwanda, and he speaks no French or English. every morning, when i come into the kitchen for coffee, he is watering the rose bed in the back garden. he says. “bonne nuit madamu” (he says this to me whether it is morning or evening; every exchange we have includes his wishing me “bonne nuit”). there is always a lot of laughing, smiling and holding of hands. he jabbers in Kinyarwanda, and i jibber in English. holding hands is a cultural display of friendship in Rwanda. there is none of the clicking of the tongue or sucking of the teeth that i have come to understand as a sound of worry or concern about a topic of conversation. in conversation with other Rwandans, there is always much sucking and clicking when the health of president Paul Kagame is under discussion, or when we talk about the genocide. but not with him; he talks and laughs openly.

because of the rapport we share, i thought it would be wise to ask him to participate in my research. he readily agreed and we have spent about 15 hours together in formal interview in addition to the time we share together as ‘housemates’ or ‘employer/employee’. but my feelings have changed. he told me last week that he committed acts of genocide, and that he has passed through the gacaca process.

from a research point of view, he is a gem of a participant. but he lives in my home, i share my private space with him. why does his participation in genocide concern me so? what does it mean that i can recoil like this? i mean, i’m a Canadian who is sheltered in every possible way from the horrors of genocide. i experience genocide and its aftermath by choice. but knowing now the intimate details of how and who he killed, i feel differently. if i can’t cope, as far removed as i am from the actual nitty-gritty of the 1994 genocide, where is the objectivity, or it that my research is nothing but subjective and i’d be better off engaging it as such?

whaddya make of this...?

here is something amusing that happened to me last week.

i have this habit of flossing my teeth. i sometimes floss two or three times a day. my teeth are very clean; i do it a bit obsessively since i had a tooth pulled last year. in rwanda, flossing is not really part of the oral hygiene landscape. people use toothpicks. they are on every table in every restaurant i’ve ever been to — road side cafe or 5 star international — toothpicks abound.

at my house, where i do my flossing, there is only one garbage can. so i have developed this bad habit of flossing in front of the tv, or flossing after coffee on the terrace, or flossing while i check my emails. (i know, its disgusting, but i live alone at the moment!). i twirl the used floss into a long braid and then tie a knot in the middle. then i either leave it where i was sitting or i remember to take it to the sole garbage can in the house, which is ever-so-conviently located outside near the garage. let’s just say that i leave it laying around more than i walk it to the garbage can.

the other day, i am at the hotel ibis, sitting on the terrace, having a coke and waiting for one of my translators to show up. as i wait, one of the staff at the hotel come up to me and says, ’susan-ah, i hear you like to clean your teeth alot’. i am looking at this guy, jean-paul, in total confusion. ‘pardon?’ i say. he says, ‘yah, i heard from [the woman who works at my home] that you like to clean your teeth with thread’.

ok, this is interesting i think. first, i am the topic of conversation between rwandan’s who may have never flossed. maybe they are wondering what exactly is it that i do, and why. but jean-paul interrupts my thinking, as he says, ‘yes, in rwanda, prostitutes also use thread. they have very dirty mouths.’

hmm. does he think i’m a prostitute?

accessible elites...

i am amazed at the level of accessibility that senior rwandan officials provide. i am phoning senators, parliamentarians, ministers and other high-level officials on their direct line. it is very easy to track down the cell phone numbers of these people. drop them a phone call, make an appointment, and they receive me.

and when we meet, they avail their time generously. we talk for up to two hours. where a meeting or some other official duty arises at our appointed time, the individual him/herself calls to re-schedule our appointment.

i wonder what it means, that meeting these government individuals is so easy. it is because i’ve been in-country before, and that i have some currency here? nah. is it because my research question is of interest to the rwandan government? also unlikely. they don’t even know my question until i present it to them in our face-to-face meeting. it is because the Rwandan government is open to research about life in post-genocide rwanda? maybe. there are many, i would guess over one hundred foreign whites here doing research at both the Master’s and Doctoral levels, on topics ranging from sustainable agriculture, to deforestation, to resilience among survivors, to ICT and development…

i have no sense of the dominating, controlling elite that i’ve read about in various western journals (see for example, Eltringham, 2003; Reyntjens, 2004). instead, i’m encountering an open, patient elite that respond with well-thought out answers to my equally well-planned questions. (i spent my evening writing and re-writing questions for different members of government, trying to anticipate what might come up so i have something intelligent to say, to ask). what wiggles in my mind is whether the open-door policy is itself part-and-parcel of the policy of national unity…. the western academic literature suggests a manipulative elite. i don’t have this sense; what i see is a compassionate elite that is committed to the reconstruction and reconciliation of their rwanda.

does make me go, hmmmmmmmmmmmmm, nonetheless….

and rwanda likes to think of itself as a state with impermable borders…

a poem on domestic-international borders, by polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, written in 1976, but taken from her 1995 collection, VIEW WITH A GRAIN OF SAND: SELECTED POEMS. translated from the polish-language by Stanislaw Barañczak and Clare Cavanagh

Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!

Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin - still, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won’t stop bobbing!
Among innumerable insects, I’ll single out only the ant
between the border guard’s left and right boots
blithely ignoring the questions “Where from?” and “Where to?”
Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every continent!

Isn’t that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?
And how can we talk of order overall?
when the very placement of the stars
leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?

Not to speak of the fog’s reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes
as if they hadn’t been partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!
Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.

gimme a break

the sexism stared about as soon as i got up. i went down, at 645am, to use the hotel internet. at about 730, half-way through my backlog of email, a french diplomat asked me to leave as he need the sole terminal to do his “business”. i replied that i would be finished in about 15 or 20 minutes. he then slamed down his briefcase on the small desk where i was sitting and told me that his embassy “business” was more important than chatting with my girlfriends. i just looked at him like the idiot he was and kept working. he hummed and hawwed in the background, pacing back and forth, wearing a tread in the carpet no doubt, muttering loudly about his “official” work, his important “business” for the remainder of my time on line. if his business was so important, why hasnt his offce assigned him a laptop with all the bells and whistles of connectivity? codger!

then, at about 8am, i present myself to the front desk of the hotel to send an international fax. the front desk manager takes the two-page fax and makes an attempt to post it to the memory of the fax machine. after one attempt, he declared my fax number incomplete. at about the same time, a herd of business men arrive to check out, pick up messages and get the local newspapers. my fax is dropped like a hot potatoe as the front desk team (of 3 men) falls all over themselves to assist these new arrivals. my fax languishes for the next 20 minutes, is eventally returned to me in a huff.

and so on and so on and so on….

is it just me or are there layers of insecurity?

everywhere i go, i meet people in rwanda who think that the country is very secure. there are no more night time raids in the hills. the economy is doing well. “i know longer fear to go home”. rwandans from all walks of life are joining in the chorus of security.

i was reminded earlier this evening of the complexities of the meaning of the word ’security’. in butare, where i live, there are rolling power blackouts. this is caused by a number of factors, the two bigs ones being lingering drought and regional politics. so i’ve rented a flat with a generator so i can continue my western existence, what i call my bubble. i retreat to my bubble every evening, having spent the day in the hills interviewing rwandans about their life before and after the 1994 genocide. the bubble broke when the generator ran out of fuel.

in broken kinyarwanda, some swahili and a bit of english, i asked my night guard to take a taxi-moto to the petrol station to grab 5 litres of lisansi (kinyarwanda - petrol). here is my first eye-opener. i have a guard, who i pay and take care of. his daughter is ill. i know about his difficulties, his problems. i know nothing of his joys or hopes.

i wouldn’t have a night guard in canada. i suppose his presence is a bit of a make-work project in that he is unarmed, and there is really nothing anyone could do if someone decided to break into the house. with curfews, and armed military patrols, there are not too many people walking around anyway. if i was to suffer a ’security breach’ (sorry, lingo from my former life with the United Nations!), it would likely be military men anyway. no one else can walk around with out raising an eyebrow.

second, my guard has a counterpart. the gardener. the gardener position is also a make-work project. the woman from whom i rent the house requires as part of the lease agreement that i keep emmanuel on staff. ‘ok, i say’. now emmanuel lives about 100kms from butare, in gikongoro. this means that he spends the whole week at home with me in butare. ok, well, i spend half of the week in kigali. emmanuel goes early on saturday morning and returns early monday, having spent the weekend with his wife and kids. so i have 2 men at home most of the time. if emmanuel was more economically secure, perhaps he could work closer to home….

“Expatriates have bankrolled Internet cafes in Somalia and helped build one of the most reliable and inexpensive phone networks in Africa…”

The Washington Post
With Web, a lifeline home
Technology advances help immigrants track Somali crisis, aid families
By Sudarsan Raghavan

Updated: 12:30 p.m. ET June 6, 2006
Dayib Mohamud Sheikh lives on a calm, tree-lined street in Silver Spring, and his aging mother is thousands of miles away in a turbulent war zone in their native Somalia. Yet for the past three weeks, he has lived through her nightmare morning, day and night.

One day, he learned his mother’s house was hit by a missile. She was fine. Another day, the fighting was nearing her neighborhood in the capital, Mogadishu. He was not so fine. Yesterday, Islamic militias captured Mogadishu.

He scoured Web site after Web site, driven by one question: Is my mother safe?

Then he picked up the phone. He would soon find out.

For nearly three weeks, Mogadishu has been the scene of some of the worst clashes since U.S. soldiers withdrew from Somalia in 1994 after a failed intervention.

Closer than ever
But unlike then, the chaos in the East African homeland is closer than ever for thousands of Somalian immigrants in the Washington region and across the nation. Technology is propelling the conflict into their living rooms and offices, providing a painful ringside view of the crisis as well as ways to help relatives in danger.

It’s the latest manifestation of how immigrants in the region, from Ethiopians to Salvadorans, from Liberians to Iranians, are increasingly connected in real time to violence and political upheavals unfolding in their home countries.

“Everything that happens in Somalia is now instantaneous,” said Dahir Amalo, 43, a mortgage banker.

Today, several dozen Internet sites follow every twist and turn of the conflict. They post digital photos of the chaos, blogs and round-the-clock news. It’s easy to listen to online radio and video broadcasts from the BBC and Voice of America.

Expatriates have bankrolled Internet cafes in Somalia and helped build one of the most reliable and inexpensive phone networks in Africa, where cellphone and online use is rapidly growing. It’s cheaper for Somalis in Mogadishu to phone the United States than the other way around, said immigrants here. And they use text messaging, e-mail and instant messaging to further cut costs.

Sheikh knows. He has become a virtual sentry, monitoring his mother’s safety with every click of his mouse.

“If it gets worse, I’m planning to get my mother out,” Sheikh, 47, an account manager for a private tourism operator, vowed last week.

Like many Somali Americans, he came to the United States in the 1970s seeking higher education. He watched the central government collapse in 1991 after the overthrow of the military regime of Mohamed Siad Barre, ushering in lawlessness. The recent clashes, some analysts have said, pitted U.S.-backed warlords against Islamic militias.

The Washington region has about 6,000 Somalis, according to community leaders, including refugees who have fled the violence in recent years — the fifth-largest African community in the region. In the 1980s and 1990s, they paid $10 a minute to phone relatives back home. News was often delivered months later through word of mouth.

“People used to send letters to tell us what’s happening. It was like the Pony Express,” recalled Mohamud Haji, 49, who runs a technology company. “Nowadays, they use e-mails, faxes, text messages, even Skype,” software that enables free phone calls over the Internet.

But the ease and speed of communicating with loved ones can be distressing. Ahmed Afra, 63, recalled the phone call last week from his sister in Mogadishu.

“We’re listening to the news. Is it true or not?” Afra asked her about the situation that day.

“Yes,” she replied.

“We’re praying to God that everything will be okay,” he told her with tears sliding down his face.

His sister told him that she was fine. The fighting, she said, was unfolding in another section of Mogadishu. But he has been logging on to Web sites, getting his daily dose of the mayhem. And he wondered whether she was playing down her plight for his sake.

“You cry over the cellphone. What else can you do?” he said.

Ahmed Eyow, 51, remembers that in pre-Internet days, his imagination would run unfiltered during any upsurge in violence.

Today, he surfs Somalian Web sites such as hiiraan.com. He knows the clashes are confined to some parts of Mogadishu and finds that reassuring.

On Friday, Haji and more than a dozen Somali American men met, as they usually do, at a Caribou coffee shop in Silver Spring.

Inevitably, the conversation turned to their homeland, what the latest news was on Web sites and which blocks of Mogadishu warlords controlled.

Haji spoke about his hopelessness.

“We feel like: When is it going to end?” he said. “It’s a sense of despair that we can’t do anything. You feel helpless. You want to do something. The conflict brings this to us more vividly — in real time.”

Amalo spoke about his cousin, Abdul, who had traveled from the Washington region to Somalia to visit his relatives. Then the war erupted, and he found himself on a different mission. He had to evacuate his mother, sister and 10 nephews and nieces.

Before he left, he deposited about $10,000 with a Somalian money transfer service in Alexandria, part of an informal, ancient global banking system called hawala .

Each time Abdul needed money, he e-mailed the hawala broker, and the broker e-mailed him a password. Then, he went to one of the broker’s partners in Somalia to get the cash, Amalo said.

Abdul rented housing in a safer part of the country, bought airline tickets and evacuated his relatives, Amalo said.

Yesterday, Sheikh was also thinking of getting this mother out.

He has tried to make her leave Somalia, but she has refused.

Now he was on the phone with her. He had four minutes left on his $5 phone card. He allowed a reporter to listen to the conversation as he translated.

Sheikh: “How are you?”

Mother: “I’m fine.”

Sheikh: “What’s happening there?”

Mother: “The ulama [Islamic religious leaders] now control Mogadishu. I’m not hearing any bullets now. Everything is quiet.”

Sheikh: “What time is it?”

Mother: “It’s 8 o’clock at night.”

Sheikh: “How do you feel about the ulama ?

Mother: “Whoever brings the peace, we support them.”

Then the connection went dead.

Sheikh knew there would be more information and more calculations in coming days, but he felt at peace, like his mother.

“I’m very happy to hear that she’s okay,” he said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

a crime to be poor...

i just came across, while walking to catch my bus to Kigali, a scene that is common in the streets of rwanda. grinding poverty is the norm for at least 80% of the population. many are flushed out of the hills in an effort to meet their basic human needs. The street poor are people of all shapes and sizes – young, old; able-bodied, not; men, women, boys, girls. what ties them together is biting poverty.

so it is common to have someone in extreme need approach and ask “cent francs manger” (one hundred francs to eat). 100 francs is about .35¢ Canadian and would buy less than a handful of rice; or a few tablespoons of cooking oil. rice sells for 550/francs rwandais (frw) for a ½ kilo, while a litre of cooking oil goes for between 6 and 800frw.

as i walked towards the bus stop, i was followed by the usual coterie of street poor. i don’t want to call them beggars, as many others – both rwandan and mzungu – do. the word ‘beggar’ seems to me to be an imposition of liberal (western?) concept onto an ordinary rwandan. a beggar is someone who won’t work, and liberal thought suggests that since s/he won’t work, s/he must be lazy and hence, labelled a beggar. in rwanda, to be a ‘beggar’ is a luxury – the individuals that i see on the streets are there for lack of any other opportunity to survive. not all rwandans have land that they are able to cultivate; these people work as labourers on the land of others for a few hundred frw. a day. for those who might be fortunate enough to hold title deed, their land is not always arable, or their holding is in dispute because of outstanding, sometimes long-standing, grievances against the plot. the street poor i see in butare are the poorest of the poor because of their limited options and even more limited means of surviving and coping. this is particularly true amongst survivors of the genocide, particularly those who have lost their family structure. the family is the core unit of support, and care in Rwanda (in fact, the government of rwanda considers the family the base administrative unit!). without a family tie, help of any type – financial, physical or emotional, is not immediately forthcoming.

one of these street poor, a young teenage girl, was ‘begging’ for money and/or bits of food at the window of the bus that carries some 25 passengers to kigali. these buses run every 30 minutes, and there is always a lot of commotion at the stop. the presence of the street poor – there are many, on average 12 or 15 people crowd the bus at any one time – is a source of insecurity for the passengers. in response, the bus company has hired guards, code name ‘guide’ – to keep hawkers as well as the street poor well away from the open windows of the idling bus before its departure. the idling buses are cordoned and the blue-coated ‘guides’ monitor the contact between paid passenger and street poor.

the teenager, a girl of no more than 15, had reached for a packet of biscuits that a seated passenger had proffered through the window. between the moment of offering, and her reach over the cordon, the ‘guide’ decided that a theft had taken place. she was grabbed from behind by two men, at the base of her neck, and flung down towards the ground. the biscuits were recovered, and handed back to the passenger who offered them in the first place. he refused. i then saw the ‘guide’ — whose cries initiated this string of events — put the packet in his pocket. meanwhile, the girl is prone on the dusty shoulder of the road, while a crowed gathers to await her fate. much ululating from the teenager. tears run down her dusty face. tremors of fear, fear of what will happen next. the crowd is silent as are the clientele of the hotel restaurant adjacent to the bus stop. no one moves, no one says anything. finally, after a minute or two, the ‘guide’ releases his grip on the girl, and she is lead to a room behind the bus stop. what happened behind closed doors, i don’t know.
i got up to see if i could assist the girl, painfully aware of my status as a white woman. intervention in such a scene is none of my business. i was stopped, bobby stick across my hips, by one of the security handlers at my restaurant. he instructed me to sit down and not to worry. i wasn’t worried until he suggested that i not worry…. i also realised that i was totally powerless in this moment. what could i do, how could i help without causing more of ruckus. i couldn’t, i didn’t.

just as revealing about the divisions and divides of rwandan society was the ambulating presence of a white aid worker, pushing his baby daughter in a pram, across the same space that had just been a space of fear and intimidation.

on traffic...

having spent more than a week on foot in rwanda’s capital, kigali, i remain amazed that there are not more pedestrian accidents. the roads are teeming, and I mean teeming, with people. most people don’t own a car, and they come into the central business district by taxi bus. jam packed with commuters coming in from the surrounding environs, people pop out of any one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of buses that ply Kigali’s commuter routes like the fizz that erupts from a can of coke.

like many african cities, kigali is not very foot-traffic friendly, and the leap from inside to outside the taxi bus is a sight to behold. women with babies strapped to their backs navigate the uneven transition from passenger to pedestrian with great dexterity. young men leap from the bus with athletic ease. business men and women, smartly dressed for a day at the office, add some decorum in gingerly exiting the taxi to join the stream of people walking along kigali’s dusty streets as they attempt to navigate a space to occupy in amongst the competing traffic.

once the foot hits the broken pavement, a bevy of activity meets the newly anointed pedestrian. men push wooden wheel-barrels full of bags of cement or cooking charcoal, women balance jerry cans of water or 15 kilo bags of rice on their heads, young men hawk their wares - khaki pants, chewing gum and packets of tissues, men’s shoes and neckties, or cell phone credits - while business commuters weave in and out of the foot and vehicle traffic that crowds kigali’s main routes. students, arms full of books stroll to school, hand-in-hand, in large groups. the yellow-jerseyed parking attendants that the city of kigali employs call after offending drivers to pay the hourly parking fee. most streets don’t have sidewalks - those are reserved for the main roads. so cars and people agree to disagree on the boundaries of what constitute roadway and what could be considered a sidewalk. a great cloud of red dust, kicked up by the competing activity, casts a pale shadow on the bee-hive that is kigali city centre.

from my perspective, walking is a defensive art. there is nothing resembling a shoulder that could be deemed sidewalk. it is simply one open space where the road becomes parking and parking becomes store front. pedestrians of all shapes and sizes vie for discernible space among the taxi-buses, the taxi-motos, the white toyota taxi-cars, known locally as ‘specials’ as the fare is too high for everyday use, and the SUVs and pick-up trucks of government projects, and internationals.

walking in busy places, where there are no discernible agreements between car and pedestrian, is a great source of stress for me. everyone else bobs and weaves, shuffles or strides their way to their final destination. i am focused on the 3 foot space in front of me, lest i walk into a car, trip on a pothole or land a foot in one of the many open manholes. the rwandans seem to enjoy my hesitancy. “mzungu (white person), you can move” is often uttered, and some particularly gracious individuals grab my elbow to walk me across the wide boulevards that cause me so much consternation. “don’t be afraid, it’s just kigali” is another oft-made observation. seems my fear is palpable….

the traffic along avenue de la justice is perhaps reflective of rwandan society itself. on the surface, it appears to be your average street scene, found in any city, anywhere. people are bustling with the day’s activities. any fear of pedestrian accidents is likely my eyes seeing an african scene through a western lens. if others fear for their safety, it is not revealed by the skill and precision with which they navigate their journey. how and where to navigate an appropriate space from which to walk to work or school, sell their wares, or wait for their next fare. this, i think, is not unlike the broader scheme of things in rwandan society.

finally...!

i have been thinking about doing a blog for a long time. i’ve just never done anything about it until now. i decided to get started as my field research gets under way.

i am doing a study that is designed to contextualise the lived realities of individuals in post-genocide rwanda. i am interviewing ‘ordinary’ rwandans on their lived experiences before, during and after the genocide of 1994. my interview data is inherently subjective, anecdotal, partial, selective and, of course, individual. i am currently running around meeting with various government officials and representatives of civil society trying to get the necessary local approvals and letters of permission before embarking on the actual interviews. i hope to be in county at least 6 months and will remain until the work is completed. i wanted to blog my experiences for a wider audience of individuals doing research in countries where politically sensitive research is also difficult and, as a means of documenting my own feelings, perceptions and beliefs about rwanda and the stories i am privileged to hear as they unfold. i also thought a blog would keep me honest as i tend to ignore my own journalling and diaries in favour of repeat episodes of ’seinfeld’ or ‘will and grace’!

i used to live in rwanda in another life. i worked as a lawyer for the UN human rights mission in 1997-1998 and then left the UN to teach law at the national university of rwanda on a USAID contract. rwanda was a very different place then, and i was a very different person. so, with new technologies, i hope to map out the nooks and crannies of all that i experienced between 1997 and 2001 when i lived in rwanda, and my return now, in mid-2006. just as i was based in butare from 1998 to 2001, i am now too based in butare. i have only been in country about a week and must admit i am still suffering sensory overload, and have yet to calm my mind sufficiently to write about what i am seeing, hearing, and feeling to be back in-country.

right now, as the day ends and the swelter of heat that marks an ordinary day in rwanda begins to dissipate, i need some dark roasted coffee to transition from day to night. unfortunately, with the recent agreement that government of rwanda signed to sell its premium bourbon coffee to starbucks, the only coffee available within walking distance of my hotel is instant nescafe!!!

on betrayal...

why didn’t you leave?” tell me that they really thought the UN would take care of them. one survivor, who lost her mother, sister, and three brothers, said, “we thought the UN was in rwanda, if the UN is here, nothing major will happen to us.” she clearly believed that the UN would protect her and her family; i have never heard a survivor say, ‘we knew the RPF would protect us.’ in fact the opposite — survivors have said that they weren’t even aware of the RPF until they entered Rwanda from Uganda in 1990 to liberate it, and even then most Tutsi inside Rwanda did not identify with the RPF, let alone look to it for protection or survival. so is it that the breach of trust is between the UN and survivors, not between survivors and the RPF…?

“kigali sluts for CHOGM”

so blares the main headline from rwanda’s Newsline newspaper. in a country where it is illegal to discuss ‘genocide ideology’, meaning any references veiled or overt to the manipulation of ethnic identities that gave rise to the 1994 genocide, and in the same country which considers women the backbone of its reconstruction and reconciliation efforts, i am amazed that such a headline can go unnoticed.

here are some tidbits from the story…

next to the front page headline, “kigali sluts for CHOGM” is a picture of the Queen of England in her Sunday best. Teal hat and dress, strings of pearls, the works…. on page two, where the text of the story is found, the following caption: “Elizabeth II: The Queen of England might dine with Rwandan sluts”. I have no idea what CHOGM is, nor is this revealed in the story. something do with the commonwealth heads of government; i’m guessing the ‘m’ stands for meetings. will the queen show up? is she a head of government?

instead, we are informed that rwandan sluts have been busy applying for visas to to kampala, uganda where the Commonwealth Heads of States will meet in November 2007. the sluts are going now “to get used to the place”.

when questioned about the visas for the many young girls going to kampala on rwandan passports, an immigration official replied, “every Rwandan has a right to have an international passport”. our intrepid reporter then notes, “Rwandan sluts always flock to Kampala and other towns mostly during weekends for greener pastures”. this quote is my favourite, “according to one prominent pimp who is based in Kampala, ‘the presidents and visitors who are coming here need to enjoy and therefore we must prepare ourselves to get money out of them’.

sigh. why do women lack agency even when they are the subject of the damn article!? never mind the million and one other comments that i could make here….