by Levison Wood
As we finished setting up camp and brought together kindling for a fire, a crowd was appearing out of the village. ‘Hutus,’ said Boston as the chief made himself apparent.
‘What is this place?’
In the shadow of the fortress, the village chairman was approaching. A fat man in his fifties, he wore a tattered blue shirt and a face bearing a benevolent grin. As Amani stood to greet him, they shook hands warmly.
‘It was a prison,’ Amani explained. ‘Gisovu Prison, for genociders.’
I looked across the riverbank, to where the crowd was growing. Boston gave a firm nod. ‘Yes, Lev,’ he said. ‘These genociders.’
Amani returned with the village chairman. ‘Do you want to see the prison?’ he asked. ‘They are happy for us to do so. It is . . . full of cows now. The government gave it to the community after the prisoners were all released.’
Part of me didn’t want to see this place, but another part wanted to understand. With Boston and Amani, I followed the chief up the steep hillside to the great iron gate. When he pushed it open, I expected him to show us around but, instead, he simply waved us on. The prison, to them, was a thing of the past, to be forgotten – but to me it felt very real.
Inside, the prison was in a state of disrepair. Walls had crumbled, long grasses had grown up. Piece by piece, the stone was returning to the earth. Another twenty years, I thought, and it would be gone, not even the bullet holes in the walls to remind us what had happened here. The smell of cow manure was strong as we crossed the open yard and into the cells that remained. Shards of the day’s last sun filtered in through shattered windows and holes in the roof. Spiders had built empires of webs in the corridors and, as Boston and I clawed through, I saw that the cells were daubed in faded graffiti in a language I didn’t understand.
‘What does it say?’ I asked Amani, but Amani only shook his head. ‘I do not know.’ By the way his eyes were lingering on the words, I knew that he was lying. Whatever the prisoners had scrawled on these walls cut into his own memories of that terrible year. Amani, I knew, was thirty-one years old. It made him eleven in the year of the genocide.
‘What happened here, Amani?’
He stared for a while. ‘This was a prison for genociders. Eventually, it wasn’t needed any more. Prisoners who confessed could halve their sentences and go and work in the fields or the city instead. We did not keep them locked up. We set them to work, rebuilding Rwanda. You have already seen some of them, in the village out there. Probably every man in that village killed a Tutsi. A friend, a neighbour, somebody they’d known since they were children.’
‘There’s more,’ I said, tracing the bullet holes scored into the cell wall. ‘There was fighting here.’
‘When the genocide began, hundreds of Tutsi were rounded up and brought here. The Hutus crammed them, eighty into a cell, before they opened fire.’
I was standing in the scene of a massacre, in a place that had later been used to imprison those responsible. Twenty years had passed, but the feeling of dread in the air was still palpable.
‘Amani,’ I ventured, not knowing if it was the right thing to ask, ‘what happened to you in 1994?’
But Amani only shook his head and brushed past Boston as he made to leave the cell. ‘I will tell you stories about Rwanda, Lev, but not my own. It is too painful.’
That night, in our camp beneath the prison, there was quiet. As the red African sun descended into a horizon clad with pines, the river turned the colour of copper. I trailed my hand in the water. I was thinking, again, of how this same water would one day reach the coast. But I was thinking, as well, about the thousands of Tutsi corpses that had been thrown into this same river as a kind of symbolic gesture, the Hutus sending the Tutsis back home to North Africa, from whence they believed they had come. The prison looked down on us, the mellow sound of the river filling my ears, and I knew for certain then that this was going to be a journey through the past as well as the future.
KIGALI, NEW HISTORY AND OLD TERRORS
December 2013
The journey from the source of the Nile to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, lasted more than a week. From Gisovu Prison the hills had been tough, but we found friends in the villages along the way and, when we didn’t make camp at the banks of the Nile – now more recognisably a real river – we found places to stay with the local people. It had not always been easy and, for the first time, Amani’s presence on the journey had felt like a real boon; it was Amani who negotiated the stables for us to sleep in on the final night before we reached the city, while Boston lurked just out of my field of vision, muttering murderously that the village chief was a backward, illiterate brute.
Sometimes children from the villages followed us on our walk and, though we knew they were there, they managed to remain totally unseen, concealed in the banana fields that often flanked the river’s brown torrents. ‘Muzungu!’ they goaded us. It was colder than I had anticipated, and the rain, when it came, came in wild, concentrated bursts, flurrying down from the steep escarpments and mountainsides all around. On the fifth night it stayed for hours and, in the darkness, Boston, Amani and I had to abandon our camp at the edge of the river and scramble for higher ground.
On the day we arrived in Kigali we had walked more than 53km – an epic march, and completed entirely in flip-flops; after ten days of travelling, my feet were so blistered and swollen they no longer even fitted in my boots. The day had been spent wading through the stagnant water of the paddy fields, an early reminder of how people across Africa depend on the Nile for agriculture. Boston, wearied by the day – not to mention his constant bickering with Amani – was arguing vehemently that we should give up and spend the night in a village, but the thought of an actual bed in a Kigali hotel spurred me on. Finally, limping, we left the paddy fields behind and entered the western suburb of Nzade just as darkness was falling.
When we reached it, central Kigali was throbbing; this small, hilly city had an air of the tropics and, in stark contrast to the rest of Rwanda, it never seemed to sleep. I had flown into the city only ten days before, but that felt like a lifetime ago. Though we found a place to stay, the only room we could find was a dormitory at a youth hostel, Discover Rwanda, in the heart of town. As we carried our packs into the bare room, to be faced with rows of naked bunks, the look on Boston’s face was implacable. I got the feeling he would have preferred the cow sheds and swamped riverbank that had been our bed for the past week. Still, I was grateful for a few home comforts. Ten days walking the riverbank had taught me some stiff lessons about my body, and a hot shower, cold beer and a decent meal were the restoratives I needed.
In the morning, I set out to explore the city. I’d promised myself two days of rest here, while my body recuperated. I was going to need it. Much of the time I’d have to spend provisioning for the journey ahead – new boots were a must, and I intended to find somebody who could stitch new pockets to my rucksack as well – but Kigali has a unique part to play in the history of the Nile, and I wanted to explore that while I was here.
Kigali is the boom-town of Rwanda. Twenty years ago, this was the centre of the genocide, but today it shines like a beacon in the heart of central Africa. On the day I had first arrived, I’d been intrigued to find it clean, orderly and fresh. Its broad avenues were green and leafy, and gated mansions adorned the hilltops amidst lush trees and vegetation. A city of a million people in a country of only twelve million, life in Kigali is the polar opposite of the village life that dominates much of the nation, and it feels metropolitan in a way no other part of Rwanda could match. In two days here, I was to eat Chinese, Italian and Indian meals, and there were moments when, as the glistening sheen of glass-plated banks and shiny Land Cruisers rolled by, it would be easy to forget that this was the scene of one of the world’s greatest tragedies.
It was a stark contrast to the image I first had of Rwanda, one cultivated by movies, books and news bulletins. Just the name of this country invokes imag
es of darkness, machetes and death; it has become so synonymous with the genocide of 1994 that it was difficult to balance my preconception with this gleaming, up-and-coming capital city. But it was on my first day in Kigali, before we had set out for the source of the Nile, that I got my first inkling of the way this country has forcibly pulled itself up from that dark episode, the nadir of its history. There was an element of truth in Boston’s observation that Amani towed a kind of party line; moving on from the genocide, I was to discover, required a kind of collective decision, an effort to make amends and work together – and this could only be achieved by a form of coercion.
On the day I flew into Kigali and first met Boston, the city was unusually quiet. The hustle I had expected from this capital city was non-existent. Cars didn’t cram the roads, horns didn’t blare at intersections; the shops were all shuttered up and the people in the streets barely whispered a word. I strode through the strangeness with Boston and whispered, ‘Is it a national holiday?’
‘Of a kind,’ Boston snorted, and rolled his eyes towards some bushes on the edge of a small park. ‘Look.’
Behind the bushes, a group of men were all holding automatic rifles.
‘Police,’ Boston said, ‘in plain clothes. It is umuganda.’
Umuganda, Boston explained, was a custom particular to Kigali itself. On the last Saturday of every month, the entire population of Kigali is required to devote itself to the city’s upkeep. For one day a month, business in Kigali comes to a stand-still and every man, woman and child turns out to sweep the city’s streets, tend its parklands and hedges. It is a remarkable feat of civic co-operation, but as Boston directed my gaze to the police guarding over the boda-boda taxi drivers tending the park, I understood it as something more: here was a great leveller, Hutus and Tutsis both being forced to work for one common goal, on the streets of the city they were obliged to share. In the quest to reach some form of reconciliation, the government was using every tool at its disposal – and force has always been one of Africa’s most effective methods.
‘They don’t have any choice,’ said Boston. ‘They’re like prisoners.’
It was not the last time we were to see the way the government exerted its influence on the population in an attempt to find a resolution to its recent bloody history. Between Gisovu Prison and the first suburbs of Kigali the perfect paddy fields had been tilled by prisoners. Agents of the genocide, dressed in orange and pink boiler suits, these prisoners were both the convicted and the accused – and here they were, in hard labour, twenty years after the atrocities were committed. Some had been captured, some had handed themselves in – in what was, I suppose, a mass-assuaging of guilt – but it was evident, in every corner of Rwanda, that those events of twenty years before still defined the country. In a village three days back along the river, Amani had introduced us to a local pastor. The pastor had welcomed us with a feast of cassava, bananas, beef and hot milk – a platter of delicacies compared with the provisions we were carrying – and, as we ate, he told us all about his work in peace and reconciliation. Like Amani, the pastor was a Tutsi, and had lost close friends and family members to the extermination of 1994. As he spoke, Boston grew incensed at what he saw as Amani’s one-sided tour. The current policy, he exclaimed, was for the country to engage in an act of wilful amnesia, and simply forget the truth of what happened. But Amani fixed him with a look. ‘How would you feel if your mother had been gang-raped and beaten to death in front of your eyes as a ten-year-old boy? That’s what happened to many people.’ In these circumstances, Amani suggested, forgetting was just one of many useful tools in moving on. These were the kinds of questions that Rwanda grappled with daily. How do you judge and sentence half a population? Is forgiveness a real possibility, and how can we collectively put paid to the past? In this context it was not so surprising to be watching Kigali’s citizens being forced to sweep the streets. It seemed, in that moment, as much an act of collective penance as it was a scheme to force co-operation. On the surface, Rwanda has turned itself from a country destroyed by hate and racial violence to a seeming paragon of virtue – but, like Amani’s insistence that the country has made accommodation with what happened here, it is all a façade. The orderliness of Kigali is the result of heavy policing and arbitrary arrests. Human rights are commonly flouted, boys regularly abducted by government officials and families torn apart. In Kigali, you can go to Chinese markets and African bazaars, stay in luxurious hotels and visit glistening modern banks – but while the country has taken several steps forward, the hearts and minds of its citizens seem yet to have caught up.
‘I want to see the crocodile,’ said Boston, his face breaking into a half-deranged smile.
He had been talking about it all morning, as we traipsed from one market to the next on still-swollen feet. At the back of a bazaar where cheap new imports from China were being sold alongside secondhand European goods, I had found a small tailor’s shop, where a one-eyed tailor hunched over a fake Singer sewing machine and fixed two new pouches to the sides of my rucksack. For the few minutes’ work he had charged the exorbitant sum of $15 – he had clearly seen me coming, but it was worth it. This was the last place in Rwanda I would be able to get them attached. That was one of my first lessons about Rwanda – outside Kigali, there is virtually nothing. It is as if the entire economy is built around creating a surreal urban veneer that bears no relation to the rural reality.
The crocodile Boston was intent on seeing was on show at the Natural History Museum of Kigali. A sixteen foot monster, it had been killed in April 2012 and the taxidermist tasked with preserving it – badly, as it turned out – had discovered a pair of shoes and a woman’s hair braids inside. ‘A man-eater,’ Boston kept saying, clearly quite taken with the idea. It reminded me, unnervingly, of the stories he had told about his great grandfather, the cannibal king.
On this occasion, I was happy to give in to Boston’s whim. There was another reason to see the Natural History Museum, one more closely aligned with my own quest – the building used to be the home of one Dr Richard Kandt.
Richard Kandt is not a name as famous in the pantheon of great African explorers as Burton, Stanley and Speke, but he holds a special place in my heart, and he felt especially important to this expedition. It was Kandt who first explored the Nyungwe Forest and, in 1898, declared it the true Source of the Nile.
Kandt was born in Posen, in latter-day Poland, in 1867. A physician by training, he had explored swathes of German East Africa around the turn of the century and, in 1908, been appointed Resident of Rwanda. Residents, of the time, were effectively government ministers asked to take up residence in another country – and their duties often amounted to a form of indirect rule. It was in this capacity that Kandt had founded Kigali itself. His name has lived long in the memory here, and he is still, more than a century later, a feted citizen.
Kandt’s house sits atop a suburban hill and is one of the few original colonial era buildings in the city. As we entered the museum, to be faced with racks of toy dinosaurs in what passed for their ‘Evolution Exhibit’, I tried to picture it in the days when this was the official German residence. That was the thing about the early African explorers – many of them were officially appointed colonialists, traders, merchants, doctors and bureaucrats. Some had long titles and family histories, while others were misfit chancers who saw Africa as a way to make their name and, hopefully, pocket lots of cash on the way. I was saying as much to Boston, but his eye had already been drawn to the racks of bad taxidermy that surrounded the museum’s prize exhibit. The crocodile certainly was huge, and its glass eyes looked as callous as its man-eater reputation deserved, but there was something almost pathetic about the way its body had been mangled in its preservation.
‘Exploration’s changed,’ I thought, drifting through the exhibits. ‘Now it’s a pauper’s game.’
It wasn’t, of course, the only way it had changed. Before I set out on this expedition I had been asked, more tim
es than I care to remember, about the idea of exploration. The question of what it means in the modern world isn’t so easy to answer. To some, the very idea seems archaic – and, in a world of Google Maps, where every valley and hillside has already been plotted, the traditional age of exploration is certainly gone. But exploration has always been about more than pure discovery, or of being the first to do something. The famous Victorian explorers were, of course, not the first into Africa; Africa is a continent where mankind has lived for longer than any other, and when Stanley found Livingstone he was doing so in a land where civilisations had existed for millennia. In the modern era, it is more important than ever to acknowledge this fact. There is a certain romanticism attached to the Victorian explorers, but the truth is that their motivations were not really so clear-cut as we would like to think. Livingstone was, first and foremost, an evangelical missionary, Stanley an egomaniac journalist and mercenary whose talents for self-publicity knew no bounds. John Hanning Speke was a glory-hunter with no reservations about making bold and often unfounded geographical claims, while Richard Burton had more in common with a 1970s hippie than a classical adventurer; his desire to immerse himself in cultures was most often expressed in relentless fornication. Kandt himself was one of a breed of explorers working at the behest of their governments. Their missions were officially sanctioned exploits – all part of what we would come to know as the Scramble for Africa, as Europe’s colonial powers sought to carve up the newly discovered parts of the world.
As I wandered through Kandt’s old residence, part of me knew I was on a different kind of journey from the ones I had grown up reading about, but our journeys did have some things in common. Like them, I was here exploring people. Constantly in flux, constantly evolving, there is always something new to discover about people – and I was here to bring home stories of what life was like in corners of the world that do not always make it into our headlines. I had this, at least, in common with the heroes in whose footsteps I was following.
