Life After Violence
Page 13
Conclusion: Burundi is a capitalist paradise
All Burundians we spoke to told us they have been materially hurt by the war. The litany of theft and destruction, of forced migration, of education years lost, and of family members and friends killed, is unending. Almost nobody, it seems, whether rural or urban, rich or poor, has not seen their meager assets depleted if not eradicated entirely by the war.
At the same time, the war is not the full story of people’s economic evolution over the years. Rural people, especially in the north, consider that population growth and what they term climate change have been equally important – and problematic – in affecting their lives. The war may have captured all the attention, but many other economic and ecological dynamics continue unabated.
A surprising proportion of people told us they lived better lives than their parents – even after twelve years of war. Some of this was about modernization – women’s empowerment, surely a growing reality in Burundi (see the next chapter), or more general economic diversification. A lot of it was about migration – people escaping the prison of agriculture, trying different things, having a sense of possibility, no matter how small. In most countries, war provokes urban migration, and Burundi seems to be no exception. This urbanization is considered a step forward by many young people (not all: I recall some women, for example, whose forced migration to the city was catastrophic, depriving them of support and leaving them vulnerable to sexual predation), and may have positive impacts on the rural areas where these people come from, as they send money back to their parents.
Few make it in the city – as in the countryside. But some do, and everyone knows of such people. Those who manage to improve their fate are widely admired – all the more if they did so legally. Burundians are deep believers in the most Weberian values of hard work, perseverance, savings, and good management.
To conclude, let me try to synthesize the story of development as seen by Burundian youth. Individual effort is at the heart of young Burundians’ station in life. It is through intelligence and studying, through hard work, perseverance and good management, that they hope to improve their fate. They expect little to nothing of the state or of the aid system. Family members continue to be the main source of support, although there is a significant decline in their ability and willingness to provide mutual aid.
What is it young people try to do when they work hard to escape poverty? In the northern rural areas, diversification out of agriculture is absolutely crucial. Education is the main way of achieving this, but there is also a very strong demand for vocational training. Migration is also crucial for many poor young men – but probably not the poorest, who need it most. While there remains widespread social resistance against migration too, especially for young women, it is a recognized fact of life.
In the city, young men and women want only three things: jobs, jobs, and jobs. Only a lucky few have truly good jobs, like those in NGOs or the United Nations – the ones you need education and good social connections for. The overwhelming majority of the others live in the informal sector, selling products along the road, working in bars, in houses, doing little bits of artisanry or heavy lifting. Many of these jobs are temporary and earn extremely little. Those who manage to save money – to build a house and marry; to invest in a better business – do so through constant sacrifice and stunning self-control. They survive by drawing on the values of frugality, forward thinking, and resilience. A sense of destiny and the support of God are important in this.
People often present harsh judgments of those at the margin, especially urban young men. They are regarded as having failed to live by the values of perseverance, hard work, and resilience that Burundians value. Many people fear them. A negative attitude to idle youth, then, is widespread, not only among the elites but also among ordinary people. But not all people are harsh. Some do not judge marginalized youth on the basis of their personal attributions, but rather ascribe their misery to structural factors – poverty and violence. This more ‘progressive’ analysis is especially prevalent in the case of marginal young women: there is a widely shared opinion that young women who engage in prostitution do so through force and need, and not through character weakness. In short, there are clear ideological differences between Burundians; they don’t all think alike, and they sure don’t all think the way aid agencies tend to.
Aid seems to hardly relate to these dynamics. Because people see life improvement as individual – the result of personal choices and hard work – collective development actions are not popular. Credit (individual, preferably) is very important, as can be insurance and protection against shocks, especially of sickness. But at its core, job creation is the only key to development. Nothing else matters. Any way to promote job creation must be pursued: decentralized vocational training that builds on local economic dynamics and resources; the transformation of primary products; economic networks that bring to the growing cities the food, artisanal, and other products they need; intermediate technologies that use local resources, including in the field of recycling and trash removal; public works that create employment during low economic periods at the same time as maintaining infrastructure; training in basic business skills for young men and women, as well as simplified and preferably non-corrupt procedures for establishing small businesses. A productivist – as opposed to welfarist – approach to development is what Burundians themselves talk about. Burundi truly is a capitalist paradise, at least as far as its citizens’ attitudes are concerned.
This capitalist ethos has long roots in Burundi. The way people describe it, Burundian society used to be a tight and complicated balance between individual initiative and communal obligation. Individual success was always appreciated and encouraged. What a man earned belonged to him and nobody else, and someone who earned more was admired for that. As a young migrant worker in Nyanza-Lac told me: ‘in our region, a son who becomes better off than his father will become a mushingantahe before him.’ At the same time, there was a strong expectation of mutual help: if you had food or tools, you would share this with your neighbors. If you failed to live up to this code, the social pressure could be great indeed, but it was your personal decision, as the individual owner – there was no organized redistributive mechanism.
The modern combination of individualism and mutual aid, then, builds on long-term historical dynamics. On the other hand, there is a rupture here. A decline in mutual help is occurring. Structural changes of growing destitution, population growth, pervasive violence, and the systematic uprooting of communities have made life far harder than it ever used to be. The war is at the heart of many of these negative trends, but it is by no means the only factor. People also see – and discuss – how social and political connections, corruption and outright criminality allow some individuals to advance greatly, and make others lose. Burundians typically do not develop a structural analysis of their society: they observe empirical differences in how some won and some lost and they are angry about corruption and politicians, but they do not make a class analysis. They look at life in a far more individualistic manner (reflecting the way they regard human rights and citizenship).
By calling it a capitalist ethos, I make it sound wholly positive and desirable, especially to Americans, who have been told that there is no more beautiful way of organizing life than unbridled capitalism and individual competition. But the spread of this cutthroat capitalism constitutes a profound loss for Burundi as well. Burundi’s capitalist ethos feeds on fear and desperation – the knowledge that destitution and death lurk around every corner, that nobody is there to help you, and that you can only count on your own actions to survive, day by day, month by month.
In a country where people are with their backs against the wall, and where there is no rule of law, the sort of capitalism that emerges is often a brutal one. It is often a capitalism of unequal power and cheating, where employers cheat their employees, sellers their buyers, and neighbors their neighbors. It is a capitali
sm where intimidation, political connections, and cunning pervade too many transactions. Burundians bemoan this brutality of life and spend enormous amounts of time and resources protecting themselves against likely cheating and depredation, thus holding back individual incomes as well as macroeconomic growth.
And what is the impact of development aid on all this? On the positive side, development aid, at the end of the war, has invested enormously in promoting primary education. This is as much due to a fine political sense that the new government ought to be supported in a key programmatic goal as to the fact that this particular goal is in any case part of the sacrosanct Millennium Development Goals. Vocational training, crucial to the many people who are forced to leave school, is much more neglected. And some projects work well. In Ngozi province, for example, CARE did nice work with credit for women, in a combined livelihood and gender approach. The DDR program was in the process of providing reinsertion funds to thousands of child and adult ex-combatants.
All of this is worthwhile and important. It leaves enormous gaps as well. The most important of these gaps is the surprising neglect of the urban slums. Especially from a conflict perspective, one imagines that tens of thousands of underemployed urban youth – many of them with first-hand experience of violence – would constitute a major priority, but nothing could be farther from reality. The reasons for this neglect are both political (the government seems to see its power base in the countryside, which is a priori a welcome reversal of decades of Burundian politics) and due to donor misperception of poverty as rural. Be that as it may, young men and women in the city and in the countryside overwhelmingly desire just one thing: to have a steady job. Another important neglected group consists of IDPs, overwhelmingly Tutsi, in the north: they, too, are clearly no political priority to the current government, and the donors seem to have no idea what to do with them either, so they just wither away, neglected by all.
More generally, much aid seems not to be in touch with the productivist, capitalist, individualist ethos of most Burundians. Most aid programming is focused on welfare and community. More reflection is required on how to better match aid modalities and objectives to the life conditions and values of Burundians: this will make it more effective.
There is long-running debate about horizontal inequalities, and how aid ought to decrease those (Stewart 2000; Boyce 2004). This concern did not appear at all in the conversations we had in Burundi. People did not refer to other ethnic groups’ economic advantages. Also, not one of our 386 conversations mentioned a problem with the benefits received by ex-combatants, and the sixty-three ex-combatants themselves did not relate to us instances of anger about their advantages either. What did come up in many conversations, however, was both a generic set of complaints about corruption – mainly related to local authorities, but some also spoke about national leaders – and a general disdain of politicians: their luxurious houses in posh neighborhoods were always mentioned. Given that Burundi is historically a country with extremely significant horizontal inequality, these results are interesting. Burundians clearly see the war – and the challenges of the post-war period – as a problem of personal corruption and venal political class, but this is not an ethnic matter (and thus not one of horizontal inequality either) – it is a matter of evil people. Also, lest we forget: these corrupt authorities, at both the local and the national level, are as often Hutu (especially in the post-war situation) as Tutsi.
6 | ‘I want to marry a dynamic girl’: changing gender expectations in Burundi1
KIM HOWE AND PETER UVIN
This chapter analyzes norms and practices of masculinity and femininity in Burundi. We asked people, old and young, men and women, what expectations they hold of their boys and their girls, or what expectations their parents had of them. We asked people what is a man, what is an adult, whom they respect, and why. We asked others whom they wanted to marry – that always made them laugh, but also provided us with further insight into masculine and feminine ideals. In addition, we constantly gendered most of our other interview questions. Whether discussing the situation of youth, migration, or plans for the future, we asked interviewees to address how their responses would be different for men than for women. We thus have three sources of information about gender in Burundi: first, the answers to explicit questions about gender roles; second, the comparison of answers given by men and by women to all our interview questions; and, third, the way interviewees themselves differentiated the situation of men from that of women.
In much of sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world, the main requirement to become ‘a man’ is to marry and provide for a family. Marriage requires bride wealth as well as money for the construction of a house and the organization of the festivities. Historically, these costs were borne by the father of the groom, but increasingly families are not capable of maintaining this tradition. The responsibility for covering the full costs of marriage thus falls to the young men themselves, but without jobs, income, or land, this proves extremely difficult for them as well (Correia and Bannon 2006: 245). As a result, in much of sub-Saharan Africa the average marriage age has risen, and desirable young women are picked as second or third wives – or as concubines – by better-off older men. And even those men who manage to marry may not be able to provide for their families.
Throughout Africa, then, men fail to reach normative ‘man-hood,’ and as a result suffer profound personal frustration and social embarrassment. This often leads to alcoholism, low self-esteem and depression, multi-partnered sexual relationships (with clear implications for the spread of HIV/AIDS), violence against women, and, at worst, participation in violent political conflict (Silberschmidt 2001: 657; Barker and Ricardo 2006: 161–77; Sommers 2007: 153; Hyden 2006: 153, 165; Amuyunzu-Nyamongo and Francis 2006: 220, 223). Richards (2006) has argued that this is one of the root causes of young men’s involvement in the civil war in Sierra Leone. Does this argument also hold for Burundi?
The primary role ascribed to women in sub-Saharan Africa is to marry, have children, and take care of the household. Women are responsible for the subsistence of their families and for producing children to secure additional labor (Hyden 2006: 165, 167). Even educated women are supposed to meet traditional obligations of marriage, childbearing, and domestic work (Sall 2000: xv; Kwesiga 2002: 139). In general terms, women’s proscribed behavior is couched in moralistic terms and includes obedience, deference to men, and sexual chastity (Jefremovas 1991: 379, 383). Women who do not conform to these ideals are often labeled as ‘immoral,’ ‘wicked,’ or ‘prostitutes.’ They are embarrassments to their families and ostracized by their communities (Hodgson and McCurdy 2001: 1). Is this the case for Burundi as well? And has the war changed anything in this respect? These are the sorts of broader questions that guided us.
Marriage
One of the most significant mechanisms through which gender ideology is produced and reproduced is marriage (Silberschmidt 2001: 659). In Africa, marriage is a cornerstone in the attainment of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’; it gives one a social identity and is a crucial part of achieving adulthood (Kwesiga 2002: 58). Spinsters are generally not respected in African communities and they are an embarrassment to the family. Bachelors do not command the same social respect that married men do (Okeke 2001: 239; Kwesiga 2002: 139).
Our interviews with rural Burundians largely confirm the notion that marriage is a hallmark in the achievement of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood.’ When asked a general question about their plans for the future, 58 of the 117 young unmarried men we interviewed spontaneously told us they wanted to marry or build a house – almost always an indication of a plan to marry. Plans focusing on marriage were higher in the countryside than in the city, but still a good number of young urban men, especially migrants, described marriage as their main plan for the future.
Historically in Burundi, young women marry in their late teens, and young men slightly later. The family of the groom makes sure the new couple has a hou
se to live in and land to cultivate; they will also pay for the dowry (crucial, for without dowry the new father has no rights over his children; Trouwborst 1962: 136ff.) and the ceremony. For the first two years or so after the marriage, the family of the groom supports the new couple in various ways, including by preparing their meals. This ends with a ceremony in which the young family becomes fully independent. At this point, the husband acquires full financial and social responsibility for his wife and children.
In our conversations, the overwhelming majority of people told us that young men face difficulties meeting marriage expectations because they lack land and/or the financial resources necessary to accumulate the requisite bride wealth and support their future wives and children. Only well-off households still manage to support their children’s marriage – and thus, in rural areas, when one meets people who are married at a young age, they are typically the better off.
Most young men desire to marry, but can’t because of poverty. They can’t build a house, or even buy pants or shoes. Some have parents who help – they build the house and pay bride wealth – and they are the ones who can get married. (Twenty-five-year-old woman from the IDP camp)
I will only marry if I am economically secure. The age of marriage is getting higher, for young men need to save. In the past, parents financed the wedding, such as the bride wealth, they also paid for the house and celebration, but now there is too much poverty. (Twenty-year-old man, Busiga)