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.
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