Perseverance is so important to these young people. Most of these quotes are from the poorest of the poor. They know that life is hard, that failure is likely, but they also intend never to give up. In the literature on young men in Africa, it has become so common to describe them only as angry, frustrated, drifting into mindless violence – potential rapists and killers, all of them, it seems. In some theories, their very existence is taken as an indicator of violence, regardless of their personalities, beliefs, dreams. And yet, when you talk with them, how different they are from these simplistic images – how filled with perseverance and hope, ready to take on life and all that it may bring.
These lines should also once and for all lay to rest the constant repetition of the dependency syndrome argument in development circles. How many hundreds of times have I heard that argument – the poor depend on our aid; helping the poor is dangerous – expressed by high-earning intellectuals, local and foreign. Aid dependency, it seems, acts as an explanation for every negative social phenomenon. It is also condescending nonsense, spouted by people who would not survive for a week the life conditions of those they talk about.
Good management and responsibility
Men who are in a good situation can fall into bankruptcy if they hang out with girls with bad behaviors. They start to spend more than they earn and find themselves without money. When a girl starts a business, she thinks only of her business. It happens rarely that she goes bankrupt. The big problem for girls is to accumulate enough funds to have a start-up capital. (Thirty-year-old male waiter in a bar in Musaga)
It happens that young people manage to improve their level, especially when they have a business that works well and they limit their expenses to the absolute minimum. It happens that someone who sells peanuts becomes a seller in a small ambulant store. Me, I know that I will finish by quitting this job to become a seller of dried fish. There are those who fall because they waste their money or are careless and lose it all or are fired by their bosses. For girls, the risk of falling is bigger because the products they sell at the market are very perishable. Others become pregnant and aren’t capable of working anymore. (Twenty-three-year-old male seller of phone cards, Kamenge)
Dynamism
Some young men I know have become rich because of their dynamism. Some of them even came from poor families. They may have started selling peanuts in little plastic bags and now they are big traders. (Twenty-six-year-old farmer who also had animals and a little trade on the side)
[talking about his hopes for his children] They will be dynamic in life and become good managers. I don’t expect them to study because I don’t have enough money to pay for that. In that respect, they will have to endure the life of their father. But everything depends on their personality, because every bit of money that they earn, even at a young age, they can use to start a small business. I know big traders who started by selling peanuts. (Twenty-eight-year-old farmer, no formal education at all)
I admire every young person who doesn’t let destiny decide for him. Destiny will find you if you remain sitting down. I advise youth to stop with the bad habit of staying all day in the ligala, and to get working to evolve in life. (Twenty-two-year-old poor farmer, returned from displacement camp)
Illegal means
In many conversations, people also made the observation that illegal or extralegal means may also sustain economic mobility, whether upward or downward. Here, too, they sometimes had examples. Politics, theft, and the war came up frequently here.
Some people gained during the war through dishonest means. They don’t greet you or talk to you anymore because you know too much about them. (Fifty-five-year-old widow in Ruhororo; gets assent from three to four other people her age)
A trader can become rich too. I know one who started selling petrol in little cans for fifty francs, and now he has a whole fleet of trucks and buildings and more than ten employees. [Did he do that cleanly?] You are right: a lot of theft and clientelism goes on. During the crisis, for example, much was stolen and sold cheaply at the bazaar, where others bought it for nothing and made a lot of money later. Other businessmen had close relations to the army or the rebels and benefited when their turn came. Fraud and corruption is the fastest way to get rich. If you are honest you will not earn much. (Twenty-four-year-old university student, Bujumbura)
Young men live very badly because of the crisis. They are underemployed, but there are others who have profited from the crisis by stealing and pillaging. Some, thus, have made strides during the crisis and others fell down. They consequently live very differently. (Thirty-seven-year-old urban teacher, university education)
Here we touch at the underbelly of mobility. Hard work, perseverance, dynamism – all well and good, but political connections, sexual favors, corruption, or theft can bring people much farther much faster – and everyone knows it.
When intellectuals told me about anger in Burundian society, they often talked about houses as well – how ordinary people see villas being built whereas they still live in run-down shacks. There is an interesting point here: the popular anger is often more from the winning side, the one in power, for it is there that disappointment is the biggest; it is there that the fate of leaders and followers most visibly diverges, with the former making it big-time and the latter often finding their lives unchanged (Pouligny 2006: 59). This is why the anger in Kamenge, a radical Hutu neighborhood par excellence, is so much greater and more palpable than in Musaga, a Tutsi neighborhood that is hardly better off.
Help, self-help, mutual help
Following a discussion of people’s plans or projects for the future, we asked: ‘Who helps you with your plan?’ It is to the analysis of these answers we now turn.
As can be seen in Table 5.5, by far the biggest category of answers consists of negative ones. Only in Busiga and Nyanza-Lac did international aid agencies get mentioned with any frequency. These were primarily humanitarian INGO programs: CARE, which had built houses for IDPs in Ruhororo, and distributed goats, food, and water points throughout the province; NRC and ADRA in Nyanza-Lac for their support to returning refugees and IDPs.
Very striking as well is the almost total disappearance of international aid in the city of Bujumbura. Not a single person out of more than 150 with whom we discussed this in Bujumbura mentioned an international NGO,6 and only a handful mentioned a multilateral agency (mainly UNICEF for school books). This says something about a very odd phenomenon, namely the almost total neglect of the city by the international development community. If one takes away the 1 square mile where the ministries are and where the foreigners and senior civil servants live, the international community has no presence in Bujumbura. Apart from the jobs it creates for the fortunate few, the international community’s impact is chiefly felt by the price hikes for rent and food, which have repercussions all the way down the line, and the big white SUVs passing by at high speed with their mysterious occupants behind tinted glass.
TABLE 5.5 Answers to the ‘who helps you’ question, by area
Busiga Ruhororo Nyanza-Lac Musaga Kamenge Bwiza Other Urban Total
Nobody/no agencies ever helped 21 17 24 42 17 5 8 134
Family 10 5 17 13 19 9 10 83
International NGOs1 31 9 26 0 0 0 0 66
National NGOs2 7 0 0 5 104 3 1 26
Bank/Credit Union 0 1 2 0 0 3 12 18
International organization5 3 0 1 0 5 1 2 12
National human rights NGOs3 0 1 1 1 0 0 3
total 72 33 71 61 51 21 33
Notes: 1. Mainly CARE in Ngozi and ADRA and CNR in Nyanza-Lac. 2. References were to SWAA, THARS, CARITAS, and Centre Jeunes Kamenge. 3. One mention of Ligue Iteka for getting land back on which a displacement camp is built (no success); one of APRODH for a person unjustly accused and imprisoned (successful), and one of Association des Femmes Juristes for support after a rape (ongoing). 4. Seven out of ten were references to Centre Jeunes Kamenge, which is without doubt the most recognized organization I me
t in Burundi during six months of research. 5. Mentions of WFP, UNICEF, HCR.
There exists a traditional donor perception, backed up by government rhetoric, that poverty is rural only. This view is mistaken for two important reasons. First, there is a lot of poverty in the city. Second, the city is deeply connected to the countryside: not only does it offer a place for young men to escape rural stagnation, but these people invest much of what they earn in the city back in the countryside. This urban neglect is dangerous too, for it is in the city that the conditions for violence are by far the most ripe: the dense concentration of ex-combatants, the deep frustration felt by many as a result of their relative impoverishment and the visibility of the wealth of the new elite, and the presence of counter-elites with deep pockets willing to buy themselves some shock troops.
Burundians overwhelmingly presented a picture of being without support, of facing life’s difficulties alone, of not being able to count on much except their families and friends. The table above doesn’t really capture well the tenor of our conversations: the high figures for some agencies make it look as if there was general appreciation of support received, but such is certainly not the case: most of these answers came grudgingly, were said in a way that suggested the smallness of the aid received, or were S accompanied by references to corruption. Of the local institutions in Burundi – the ones not dependent on or inspired by international aid – the only one that is mentioned frequently is the family. This is logical: it is from here that the funds come which allow families to invest in what matters to them. Recent data show, for example, that educational expenses are paid for 66 percent by fathers, 15 percent by mothers, 2.8 percent by the government, 1 percent by the children themselves, and 0.8 percent by aid agencies (MINIPLAN 2006: 57) – so much for aid dependence.
Mutual help At the same time as the family was mentioned as the prime source of aid for people’s projects, people talked to us, over and over, about the decline in social solidarity. This argument came in two versions: one stresses that mutual help has gone down because there is no more love between people, and another that social relations between the rich and the poor are getting worse and worse. A quote from an old widow in Ruhororo camp brings these both together. Her life story was very sad, and she was clearly angry at the way life had treated her: her whole body moved as she told stories of how her children and husband died, her land was stolen, her sons left, their whereabouts unknown to her, aid never reaches her. At the same time, she was so poised, so forceful, and she had asked us to talk to her.
At one point, I was sick. I was in a coma, and had to be brought to the hospital, where I got a transfusion. When I had to pay, I did not have the money and was forced to sell part of my land to a neighbor. In the past, my neighbors would have lent money, but now I have to sell my land. Now I die before his eyes, but it doesn’t matter to him. Mutual help has declined, people don’t love each other anymore. Before, neighbors would help each other, but not anymore. Now the poor only have social relations with the poor and the rich with the rich.
We heard a very similar story in Nyanza-Lac, from a young repatriated farmer this time.
Recently I have known difficulties and nobody came to my help. My wife was poisoned and even my mother did nothing to help. One of my friends then proposed to buy everything I have and I accepted to save my wife and she became better. But if he had been a better friend he would have lent me the money.
There were significant regional variations. The majority of the people who bemoaned the loss of mutual help and social solidarity came from Ruhororo. Indeed, as many as 80 percent of the remarks on this subject in rural areas came from this commune, and they came from both the IDP camp and the remote colline. This suggests that the social malaise in Ruhororo is felt equally strongly among the displaced people (a small Tutsi ghetto) and those who are at home (primarily Hutu).
Of course, we encountered instances of solidarity as well, even in Ruhororo: while we were talking with the old widow there, an old man began putting a new straw roof on her house. In Banda colline, we talked to three young men, aged nineteen, twenty and twenty-two, who were building a house for the oldest one. The middle one gave us the standard mutual help line: he was helping his friend to build a house and believed his friend would return the favor some day when he needed it. But then the younger one added, with typical honesty and the insight of youth:
Also, we should not hide the truth that one chooses one’s friends according to their economic level. If, for example, we had a friend who is very poor and is not envisioning to build a house soon, he would say that he is wasting his time with mutual help, because we would not be able to return the service to him. So we’d have to pay him.
And in the same town, another young man told us something very similar.
If a young man is from a rich family, he gets a lot of help from those who are at the same level and who can receive something in return. Who could provide service to someone who can’t return the favor? Social relations are like this: rich to rich, poor to poor.
By all accounts, mutual help – carrying a sick person to the hospital, feeding a hungry neighbor, preparing the land of a person too old to do it – was the default mode in the countryside until recently. Many people told us it had disappeared because of the war. Two mechanisms may have caused this: the divisions that emerged within communities, and the dramatic impoverishment of people. The fact that in better-off Nyanza-Lac people bemoaned the decline in mutual help significantly less suggests that it is primarily the economic-crisis impact of the war which is important.
Some people explained the decline in mutual help by the spread of new values – the move from a moral economy to a capitalist one, so to speak. A young migrant student in Bujumbura explained this argument well to me:
here, while learning the languages at school you also learn the cultural assumptions that are built into it, and they are of individualism and consumption. You take this over. You know, Peter, now, when someone from my family in the interior comes by, I barely give them five minutes; when someone is dying along the road, I look the other way.
This sort of long-term cultural-change explanation, resulting from the spread of market relations and education, is an old argument, and I frequently heard it when I worked in the Burundian countryside two decades ago. It has an immediate, anthropological type of appeal, but I am not sure it is correct. First, money (and taxes) were introduced in Burundi many decades ago now, but people see the decline in mutual help as a much more recent phenomenon – as witnessed by the instances they recall of past mutual help. Second, it does not seem that mutual help is much less prevalent in the urban world, as it should be if market relations and cultural individualism were the prime driving forces. Surprisingly, many more urban than rural interviewees spontaneously said that mutual help is alive and well in the neighborhoods they live in, and they gave me many examples.
My sister and I assure the needs of our mother, who doesn’t work anymore, as well as the wife and child of my older brother, who recently died of sickness. Here, notwithstanding the few means and the daily difficulties, there is a lot of love and mutual solidarity. I could not go home to eat now, for example, without telling my friends that the one who is hungry can come with me. If I do not have enough they will see it and voluntarily tell me, ‘No thanks, it is just enough for you.’ (Twenty-five-year-old driver, born in the city)
Yes, there is mutual help, for we all are in the same situation. If I have no salt today, I can go to my neighbor and ask. And tomorrow he can ask me for salt. If I have nothing to eat, the same thing. (Twenty-five-year-old woman, street seller)
The fact that urban youths, a rather alienated and unhappy bunch to begin with, living in conditions of squalor, very often far removed from their nuclear families, systematically assure me that mutual help is alive and well in their neighborhood is telling. At the very least, even if it is not entirely factually true, it means that there is still a positive premium placed o
n mutual help, which may explain why people seek to convince me of its existence, or why they overestimate its presence. But I believe it is also possible that their words describe a real-life phenomenon. In the city, there is no family that does not have people from the larger family, or from the native commune, living in its house;7 there is no weekend that passes without envelopes of money being handed out for celebrations, for education, and for a never-ending list of needs and obligations.
That said, all urban people did recognize problems with mutual help as well, and they invoked the most prosaic reason for it: the dramatic poverty that characterizes people’s lives. What they told me, in other words, is that a norm in favor of mutual help still exists, but it is constantly challenged by the fact that people have as good as nothing.
[so, there is mutual help here?] Yes, but not much. It is because the others have very little too. They have many kids and must feed them too, so if you arrive too late, the plate is empty. It is not by badness or lack of trust: it is by poverty. (Twenty-four-year-old unemployed man)
Mutual aid does exist. If we survive, it’s because of that. It changed, though. There used to be peace and people loved each other. If you asked for something, you could not be refused. Now you’ll only be given if you can give too, for it is hard to find things to eat. If people give you something, they won’t find something else to replace it with. […] Someone of high standing passes in a car, and will not notice you on foot. The place he lives in, you can’t get to. His places to drink and relax in you can’t afford. (Nineteen-year-old unemployed man)
One of the striking images I carry with me from this research into life in Burundi is the degree of segmentation in society: how economic groups live physically close to each other but with little exchange. This very much undermines the notion of community as a bounded geographical entity. In the development business, we have been told for years that ‘community’ participation may hide significant differences in wealth and power. Certainly this is strongly reinforced by the results of our conversations, which clearly suggest that, even in what look like traditional, poor, and closely bounded spaces, there exists major and structural segmentation; as a result, individuals – the ‘youth leader’ or the ‘women’s representative’ – may really only speak for themselves or offer the perspective on life of their own income group.
Life After Violence Page 12
