The Buganda take enormous care with their grooming and their attire. In contrast to their fellow countrymen the Karimojong, who disdain clothing, the Buganda dress neatly and carefully, covering their arms down to the wrists, and their legs down to the ankles.
Apollo says that things are good because the civil war has ended, but bad because the price of coffee has fallen (it’s the 1990s) and they grow coffee here; it is the main source of livelihood. No one wants to buy it, no one comes for it. The coffee goes to waste, the bushes grow wild, and the people have no money. He sighs, and carefully guides the iron among the patches and seams, like a sailor navigating his boat between treacherous reefs.
As we stand talking, a cow emerges from a thicket of banana trees, followed by several playful little shepherds, then a stooped old man—Lule Kabbogozza. In 1942, Lule fought in Burma—he refers to this as the only event in his life. The rest of it was spent in this village. Now he laments the same as the others: “What do I eat?” he asks. “Cassava. Day and night cassava.” But he has a sunny disposition, and gestures toward the cow with a smile. At the beginning of the year several families get together, save their pennies, and purchase a cow at market. The cow grazes in the countryside, there is plenty of grass. When Christmas comes, it is slaughtered. Everyone gathers for the occasion. They make certain that everything is equitably divided. They offer most of the blood as a sacrifice to the ancestors (there is no more precious offering than cow’s blood). The rest of the beast they immediately roast and cook. It is the one and only time in the year when the village eats meat. Later they will buy another cow, and in a year’s time there will be another feast.
If I find myself somewhere nearby, I am told, I will be welcome. There will be
pombe
(banana beer), there will be
waragi
. And I will get as much meat as I want!
A Lecture on Rwanda
L
adies and gentlemen.
Our subject is Rwanda. It is a small country, so small that on certain maps of Africa it is marked with only a dot. You must read the accompanying explanatory notes to discover that this dot, at the continent’s very center, indicates Rwanda. It is a mountainous country. Plains and plateaus are more characteristic of Africa, whereas Rwanda is mountains and more mountains. They rise two thousand, three thousand meters, even higher. That is why Rwanda is frequently called the Tibet of Africa—although it earned this moniker not only because of its mountains, but also on account of its singularity, distinctness, difference. It is extraordinary not only geographically, but also socially. As a rule, the populations of African states are multitribal (Congo is inhabited by 300 tribes, Nigeria by 250, and so on), whereas only one group inhabits Rwanda, the Banyarwanda, a single nation divided into three castes: the Tutsi cattle owners (14 percent of the population), the Hutu farmers (85 percent), and the Twa laborers and servants (1 percent). This caste system (bearing certain analogies to India’s) took shape centuries ago; because no written sources exist on the subject, there is ongoing disagreement as to whether this occurred in the twelfth century, or as late as the fifteenth. Suffice it to say that a kingdom has existed here for hundreds of years, ruled by a monarch called
mwami,
who was Tutsi.
This mountain kingdom was a closed state, maintaining relations with no one. The Banyarwanda initiated no conquests, and, like the Japanese at one time, they did not allow foreigners into their territory (which is why, for example, they had no experience of the slave trade, the bane of other African peoples). The first European to enter Rwanda, in 1894, was a German traveler and officer, Count G. A. von Götzen. It is worth noting that eight years prior to this, at the Berlin Conference that partitioned Africa, the colonial powers awarded Rwanda to the Germans, a development about which no Rwandan, including the king, was so much as informed. For a number of years, the Banyarwanda lived as a colonized people, without knowing it. Later, too, the Germans took little interest in the colony, and after World War I they lost it to Belgium. The Belgians also were not exceedingly active here. Rwanda was distant from the coasts, more than 1,500 kilometers away, and, most important, it was of little value, no significant raw materials having ever been discovered there. The Banyarwanda’s social system, shaped centuries ago, was thus able to endure unaltered in its mountainous stronghold until the second half of the twentieth century.
This system had several characteristics reminiscent of European feudalism. The country was ruled by a monarch surrounded by a group of aristocrats and a throng of noblemen. Together, they constituted the ruling caste: the Tutsis. Their greatest, and really sole wealth was cattle: the zebu cows, a breed characterized by long, beautiful, swordlike horns. These cows were never killed—they were sacred, untouchable. The Tutsis nourished themselves with their milk and blood (the blood, drawn from arteries in the neck cut with the point of a spear, was collected in vessels that had been washed with cow’s urine). All these actions were performed by men, for women were forbidden to have contact with cattle.
The cow was the measure of everything: wealth, prestige, power. The more cattle one had, the richer one was; the richer one was, the more power one had. The king owned the most cattle, and his herds were under special protection. The main focus of the festivities marking the yearly national holiday was the parade of cattle. A million of them would pass before the monarch. This lasted hours. The animals raised clouds of dust that hung over the kingdom for a long time. The dimensions of these clouds attested to the health of the monarchy, and the ceremony itself was endlessly and emotionally extolled in Tutsi poetry.
“The Tutsi?” I often heard in Rwanda. “The Tutsi sits on the threshold of his house and watches his herds grazing on the mountainside. The sight fills him with pride and happiness.”
The Tutsis are not shepherds or nomads; they are not even breeders. They are the owners of the herds, the ruling caste, the aristocracy.
The Hutus, on the other hand, constitute the much more numerous and subordinate caste of farmers (in India they are called Vaisyas). The relations between the Tutsis and the Hutus were authentically feudal—the Tutsi was the lord, the Hutu his vassal. The Hutus lived by cultivating land. They gave a portion of their harvest to their master in exchange for protection and for the use of a cow (the Tutsis had a monopoly on cattle; the Hutus could only lease them from their seigneurs). Everything according to the feudal order—the dependence, the customs, the exploitation.
Gradually, toward the middle of the twentieth century, a dramatic conflict arises between the two castes. The object of the dispute is land. Rwanda is small, circumscribed, and densely populated. As often in Africa, a battle erupts between those who make their living raising cattle and those who cultivate the land. Usually, however, the spaces on the continent are so great that one side can move onto unoccupied territory and the sparks of war are extinguished. In Rwanda, such a solution is impossible—there is no place to go, nowhere to retreat to. Meantime, the Tutsis’ herds increase and need ever more grazing land. There is but one way to create new pastures: by taking land from the peasants, i.e., by ejecting the Hutus from their territories. But the Hutus are already cramped. Their numbers have been swelling rapidly for years. Making matters worse, the lands they farm are poor, for all intents and purposes infertile. The mountains of Rwanda are covered with a very thin layer of soil, so thin that when the rainy season comes each year, the downpours wash away large stretches of it, and in many places where the Hutus had their little fields of manioc and corn, naked rock now glistens.
So, on the one side, the powerful, expanding herds of cattle—the symbol of Tutsi wealth and strength; and on the other the squeezed, huddled, increasingly displaced Hutus. There is no room, there is no land. Someone must leave, or perish. Such is the situation in Rwanda in the fifties, when the Belgians enter the picture. They have suddenly become highly involved: Africa is just then at a critical juncture, there is a surging wave of liberation, of anticolonialism, and there is pressure to act, to make decisions. Belgium is among those powers whom the independence movement has caught most by surprise. Thus, Brussels has no game plan, its officials do not really know what to do. As is usual in these circumstances, their response is to delay finding real solutions, to stall. Until now, the Belgians ruled Rwanda through the Tutsis, leaning on them and using them. But the Tutsis are the most educated and ambitious sector of the Banyarwanda, and it is they who now are demanding freedom. And they want it immediately, something for which the Belgians are utterly unprepared. So Brussels abruptly switches tactics: it abandons the Tutsis and begins to support the more submissive, docile Hutus. It begins to incite them against the Tutsis. These politics rapidly bear fruit. The emboldened, encouraged Hutus take up arms. A peasant revolt erupts in Rwanda in 1959.
In Rwanda, alone in all of Africa, the liberation movement assumed the form of a social, antifeudal revolution. In all of Africa, only Rwanda had its siege of the Bastille, its dethronement of the king, its Gironde and its terror. Groups of peasants, enraged, inflamed Hutus armed with machetes, hoes, and spears, moved against their masters-rulers, the Tutsis. A great massacre began, such as Africa had not seen for a long time. The peasants set fire to the households of their lords, slit their throats, and crushed their skulls. Rwanda flowed with blood, stood in flames. A massive slaughter of cattle began; the peasants, often for the first time in their lives, could eat as much meat as they wished. At the time, the country had a population of 2.6 million, including 300,000 Tutsis. It is estimated that tens of thousands of Tutsis were murdered, and as many fled to neighboring states—to the Congo, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Burundi. The monarchy and feudalism ceased to exist, and the Tutsi caste lost its dominant position. Power was now seized by the Hutu peasantry. When Rwanda gained its independence in 1962, it was members of that caste who formed the first government. At its head was a young journalist, Grégoire Kayibanda. I was visiting Rwanda for the first time then. My memories of Kigali, the capital, are of a small town. I was unable to find a hotel; perhaps there wasn’t one. Some Belgian nuns finally took me in, letting me sleep in the maternity ward of their neat little hospital.
The Hutus and the Tutsis awoke from such a revolution as from a bad dream. Both had lived through a massacre, the former as its perpetrators, the latter as its victims, and such an experience leaves a painful and indelible mark. The Hutus have mixed emotions. On the one hand, they vanquished their masters, cast off the feudal yoke, and for the first time attained power; on the other hand, they did not defeat their lords in an absolute way, did not annihilate them, and this consciousness, that the enemy was painfully wounded but still lives and will seek vengeance, sowed in their hearts an insuppressible and mortal fear (let us remember that fear of revenge is deeply rooted in the African mentality, that the immemorial right of reprisal has always regulated interpersonal, private, and clan relations here). And there is a lot to be afraid of. For although the Hutus seized the mountainous fortress of Rwanda and established their rule there, a Tutsi fifth column, numbering around 100,000, remains within its borders; furthermore, and perhaps even more dangerously, the fortress is encircled by the encampments of Tutsis expelled from it yesterday.
The image of the fortress is not poetic license. Whether you enter Rwanda from Uganda, Tanzania, or Zaire, you will always have the same impression of stepping through the gates of a stronghold that rises up before you, fashioned from immense, magnificent mountains. And so it is now for the Tutsi, a freshly exiled and homeless vagabond; when he awakens in the morning in a refugee camp and walks out in front of his shabby tent, he beholds the mountains of Rwanda. In those early hours of the day, they are a startlingly beautiful sight. I myself often jumped up at dawn just to look. High yet gentle peaks stretch before you into infinity. They are emerald, violet, green, and drenched in sunlight. It is a landscape devoid of the dread and darkness of rocky, windswept peaks, precipices, and cliffs; no deadly avalanches, falling rocks, or loose rubble are lying in wait for you here. No. The mountains of Rwanda radiate warmth and benevolence, tempt with beauty and silence, a crystal clear, windless air, the peace and exquisiteness of their lines and shapes. In the mornings, a transparent haze suffuses the green valleys. It is like a bright veil, airy, light and glimmering in the sun, through which are softly visible the eucalyptus and banana trees, and the people working in the fields. But what the Tutsi sees there above all else are his grazing herds. Those herds, which he no longer possesses yet which were for him the foundation of existence and the reason for living, now swell in his imagination into myth and legend, become his fondest desire, dream, obsession.
That is how the Rwandan drama is engendered, the tragedy of the Banyarwanda nation, born of an almost Israeli-Palestinian inability to reconcile the interests of two social groups laying claim to the same scrap of land, too small and confined to accommodate them both. Within this drama is spawned the temptation, at first weak and vague, but with the passing of years ever more clear and insistent, of the
Endlosung
—a final solution.
But this is still a long way off. We are in the sixties, Africa’s most promising and optimistic years. The great expectations and euphoria reigning on the continent ensure that no one pays much attention to the bloody events in Rwanda. There is no communication or newspapers, and besides—Rwanda? Where is that? How does one get there? The country appears forgotten by God and men alike. It is quiet here, lifeless, and—as can be quickly ascertained—boring. No major road runs through Rwanda, there are no big cities, it is rare for anyone to pass this way. Years ago, when I told a friend of mine, a reporter from the
Daily Telegraph,
Michael Field, that I had been to Rwanda, he asked: “And did you see the president?” “No,” I answered. “So what did you go there for?” he exclaimed, astounded.
It is true that what strikes you most in a place like Rwanda is its deep provincialism. Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or, at the very most, on the border of their valley. That which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens. The newcomer has a wide-angle lens, which gives him a distant, diminished view, although one with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail.
For the natives, however, the dramas are real, and the tragedies painful and not exaggerated. So it was in Rwanda. The revolution of 1959 divided the Banyarwanda nation into two opposing camps. From now on, the passage of time would serve only to strengthen the mechanisms of discord, sharpen the conflict, lead again and again to bloody collisions and, finally, to apocalypse.
The Tutsis, who have spread out in the camps along the borders, conspire and contract. In 1963 they strike from the south, from neighboring Burundi, where their kinsmen, the Tutsis of Burundi, hold power. Two years later—another Tutsi invasion. The Hutu army stops it, and in retaliation organizes a great massacre in Rwanda. Twenty thousand Tutsis die, hacked to pieces by Hutu machetes. (Other estimates put the figure at fifty thousand.) No outside observers are present, no international commissions, no media. I remember that a group of us, foreign correspondents, tried to get into Rwanda but were refused entrance by the authorities. We were reduced to gathering what information we could in Tanzania, from escapees—mainly women with children, terrified, wounded, hungry. The men were usually killed first, did not return home from expeditions. Many wars in Africa are waged without witnesses, secretively, in unreachable places, in silence, without the world’s knowledge, or even the slightest attention. And thus it was with Rwanda. The border skirmishes, pogroms, massacres go on for years. Tutsi partisans (called “cockroaches” by the Hutus) burn villages and slaughter the locals. The Hutu villagers, in turn, supported by their army, organize rapes and massacres.