Walking the Nile

by Levison Wood

  I stopped to linger over a photograph in the hotel lobby that depicted the house as it had originally been, back in Kandt’s time. In the frame a grand bungalow sat alone amongst the bare hillsides, with only a few wattle huts for neighbours. The Kigali of Kandt’s time, I realised, was little different from the country we had been walking through – but, whereas that country had remained in the past, Kigali had somehow contrived to join the modern world.

  ‘Boston,’ I said. ‘Are you done?’

  Boston was positively slavering over the thought of the crocodile, and it took some moments before he looked up. ‘Let’s hope we don’t meet any further north.’

  Kigali’s Genocide Memorial Centre is not far from the place where Kandt used to live, and it is much more than a museum. When we arrived, Amani was waiting for us at the gates. Eager as ever, he took my hand in an enthusiastic hello.

  The Memorial Centre stretched before us, and there was no denying its beauty. The air was heavy with the scent of eucalyptus, and the gardens of the hilltop were vivid and bright, their flower beds perfectly arranged. Colourful birds – western citrils and mustard yellow canaries – darted around in the trees. Somewhere, as Amani began to tell us of this place, I heard children playing.

  ‘It has been open ten years,’ said Amani, ‘and that was ten years after the events. It is all here, everything that happened.’

  He was speaking about a record of the genocide. I already knew that one of the principal aims of the Memorial Centre was to bring together the testimonies of all those who had survived, and taken part in, the atrocities – as well as taking part in the Gacaca trial process, the traditional community courts whose role had been to try those accused of involvement. But it wasn’t until we reached the foot of the Memorial Centre building, a piece of modern architecture seemingly at odds with the natural surroundings, that I understood that Amani meant something different as well. Outside the building, which looked somewhat like an English crematorium, were a series of large concrete slabs inscribed with names. Trellises and decking served as a path between these great stones. We followed it in silence, finally reaching the centre’s exterior wall which was dominated by a single, vast brass plaque. Here were inscribed hundreds of names written in a list that was still incomplete, petering out half-way down.

  Amani was not being his usual energetic self, and now I understood: the Memorial Centre is not just a museum to memories of the genocide: it is a mass grave, a site of genocide itself.

  ‘There are a quarter of a million victims buried here,’ he explained. ‘We can collect only a fraction of their names.’

  Inside, the centre was black, the only lights those illuminating the laminate display boards recounting individual stories of those horrific months. Boston and I followed Amani from room to room. In one, banks of bleached skulls glared at us, each one of them wearing the wounds from bullets and machetes. In the next room, nothing but thigh bones, stacked from floor to ceiling. With only our footsteps to break the silence, I slowly understood that the graves we had seen outside were only a fraction of what the Memorial Centre could show, and even this was only a fraction of the people who lost their lives in 1994. Death on a scale like this is hard to absorb, even when you are faced with it so starkly.

  In the next room thousands of portraits stared at us. These, Amani told us, were the images of those who had died: men, women, and children. Most of them were smiling. These were photographs taken at Christenings, weddings and graduations. Some were classic portraits, gazing to one side like posed Victorian sittings, while others were taken from afar, in the background an object of pride – a new car, a motorbike, a young couple in front of their first home. As I stared, I saw Boston focusing on a picture of a mother who held her new-born children, and a man in a shiny, black suit.

  All of them were dead.

  Beside me, Amani was unusually still. ‘Just walk around,’ he said. ‘See it for yourselves.’

  A video, which showed indescribable scenes of murder on a constant loop, masked Amani’s quiet exit. It wasn’t until an hour later, shell-shocked by what we had seen, that Boston and I emerged from the Memorial Centre, back into the glorious sunshine, to find him sitting on a bench beneath the eucalyptus trees. He looked emotionless, and the only noise was that of cicadas.

  That night, I got to thinking about this first staging post of our journey. If ever there was a place to give life to the cliché of Africa’s dark heart, it is here in Kigali. I sat in the incongruous surroundings of an Indian restaurant and, as I looked into the eyes of the waiter, the diners, and the people who passed outside, I understood in a way I hadn’t before that every one of them had been there. Every one of them was a survivor or a perpetrator, locked together in uneasy accommodation. There is a sense in which Kigali and Rwanda have worked a miracle in forging a way ahead. Coercion, recounting, memorialising, and even a kind of ritualised forgetting, have all been components of that – but the scars remain fresh, twenty years on, and in some way they’ll remain fresh for the twenty to come.

  Across the restaurant, at the bar, Boston was propped up with a drink, engaging some locals he had just met with one of his tall tales. I caught his eye across the restaurant. ‘We have an early start,’ I mouthed at him – but, right in that moment, he didn’t want to know.

  BANDIT COUNTRY

  Tanzania, December 2013 – January 2014

  From Kigali the river wound south and east. Two rest days in Kigali might have helped heal the feet, but it had in other ways made me feel weaker somehow. Perhaps it was the drying up of momentum, or the sobering thought of the city we were leaving behind. As a parting gift, Amani had helped organise a local man who would walk with us to the border. We hoped to reach it by Christmas, but there was no telling if it was possible; here, the river disappeared into miles of thick, sometimes impenetrable swampland. Vianey, the porter Amani had organised, took to it without complaint – but, always, in the back of my mind there was the memory of how Amani had first described him. ‘Vianey,’ he had said, ‘is a genocide perpetrator.’ I did not know whether I believed it or not, and Vianey himself claimed to be only twenty-four years old, but occasionally, in the right light, I got the impression that he could be much older, so perhaps there was some truth in it after all. Like many Rwandans, I decided it was better to look the other way and not broach the subject. I was sure it wasn’t a tactic of which Boston would approve.

  Outside metropolitan Kigali the country returned to its impoverished, rural state. We built our days by trekking from village to village. Sometimes the river was kept at bay by dense papyrus marshes. These were the true Rwandan wetlands and, where the papyrus did not dominate, the villagers had turned the land into paddy fields and cultivated rice. On a diet of painkillers and rice wine bought at every village, we followed the twisting river south. The paths were virtually non-existent and we resorted instead to trampling down the reeds and walking for miles on what felt like a water bed; the reeds held our weight, but there was always the sensation that they might break at any moment, plunging us into the stagnant marsh beneath.

  ‘Do you remember the crocodile?’ Boston kept asking. I laughed in reply, but in truth I didn’t feel like laughing at all.

  We’d been walking now for two weeks and steadily become attuned to the environment around us. That’s not to say it was easy; in fact the constant shifting from swamp to field to mountain to jungle made for tough-going. In a day we’d sometimes gain a thigh pummelling thousand feet as we crested a ridge, only to drop down again into a misty valley where we’d get lost amongst the reeds and orchards, cursing the muddy slopes as we fell over every few steps. Mentally it was tough too; although we’d started off eager to make headway, the reality hadn’t even sunk in yet as to the magnitude of the distance we were undertaking. Neither of us had any clue whether our feet and minds would hold up.

  The Rwandan wetlands are dominated by great lakes and, though I knew none was as great as the one we would eventually
reach – Lake Victoria, the vast inland sea of southern Africa, was already looming in my mind – after a few days the river wound between shimmering expanses of grey and brown. On the west were the smaller lakes – Gashanga, Kidogo, Rumira and Miravi – while, on the east, were the bigger, more majestic Sake and Mugesera. Soon we had to give up our attempts to stay true to the riverbank itself and followed it at a distance, sticking to the higher ground above the marshes, from which we could look down on these magnificent natural reservoirs. A series of finger-like ridges pointed south to the point where the river curled east and became the borderline between Rwanda and Burundi. The trek through the hills was slow-going and, though I sometimes wondered about Vianey and his past, I was glad he was with us to help shoulder our packs. As we tramped slowly onwards, the silence was broken only by the drone of mosquitoes coming up from the swamps, and Boston’s continual lament. He had somehow pulled a ligament in his left heel.

  ‘I thought you used to be a soldier. A leader of men,’ I said jokingly.

  ‘That was a long time ago. I was a young man. I am not used to hills, not after seven years in Uganda. Kampala is completely flat.’

  ‘You spent long enough in the Congo,’ I said. ‘What about Goma? It’s full of mountains.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Boston, with newfound nonchalance, ‘but who’s stupid enough to climb them?’

  Each day we gained and lost a thousand feet or more in height – and, on the eighteenth day, reached the Rusumo Falls border crossing. Back home, the festivities of Christmas would be fast approaching, but this was a different world. At 1600m above sea level, the land felt almost Mediterranean. The villages had terracotta tile roofs, and were surrounded by beautiful orchards and meadows. It was easy to get lost in daydreams as the walking found its own rhythm, and to forget the thousands of miles that lay ahead, and for a moment or two the pain in my feet, and to sink into blissful immersion in this wonderful foreign land.

  At the falls, we stopped to take in the view. We were approaching the point at which three borders meet: Rwanda was behind us, Burundi to the south, and ahead, Tanzania, where the river banked north towards Lake Victoria. As Vianey set down our packs and stared into the falls, I was reminded suddenly that this was one of the Rwandan genocide’s most memorable images. It had been at Rusumo Falls that the genocide had come to the attention of the world, when thousands of dead bodies that had been cast into the river further upstream floated under the bridge into Tanzania while, on the bridge above, thousands of people tried to flee the slaughter for sanctuary across the border. Many of those who fled were Hutu, fearing revenge killings as the RPF swept south in response to the genocide.

  I looked at Boston, and Boston was looking at Vianey, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing: had Vianey been responsible for any of that? The idea of living among people who had systematically turned on their neighbours and friends was still difficult to comprehend, and I was finding that the longer we remained in Rwanda the more admiration I had for Amani.

  The Rusumo border heralded an entry into an Africa more familiar than the Rwanda I had passed through. Between Rwanda and Tanzania there is a kilometre-long no-man’s-land; Boston and I walked it together, and crossed the bridge that would forever be associated with the genocide. As we ate fried grasshoppers and ugali – a staple dish of the African Great Lakes, maize flour cooked with water to form a kind of thick porridge – on the other side, I had to admit I was not unhappy to leave the country behind. I had come into Rwanda with a preconception of the people built on stories of the genocide. Those preconceptions had not been shattered. Rwanda was a haunted place and I was eager to leave it for a country less consumed with guilt and barely concealed scars.

  ‘You hear that, Lev?’ Boston began as we returned to the river. At Rusumo the river banked north-east. It would lead us across the border into Uganda before it finally joined Lake Victoria, but that was still three or four days’ walk away.

  ‘What?’ I replied.

  ‘It is Swahili,’ he said, and nodded sharply as if I would instinctively understand.

  ‘So?’

  ‘You know what kills Africa?’ Boston began. I could sense another tirade coming and, without Amani here to bear the brunt of it, knew I would have to listen. ‘It is all these dirty, dirty languages Africans speak. If there’s one thing good about Tanzania, it’s Swahili. They should impose it on everybody, like they do here and in the Congo – but your liberals would say it was destroying indigenous cultures. Well, I’ll tell you what destroys indigenous cultures – war and division and starvation. On my life, it’s these ridiculous languages, ones only a few hundred or thousand people even understand, that cause all of this. How can a country work when people can’t even talk to each other?’

  Three strides ahead of him, I stopped. ‘You have a point, Boston.’

  Boston beamed. ‘I know it.’

  The United Republic of Tanzania has a chequered history, and Boston and I began to believe we could see the results of it in the attitude of the locals we came across. Tanganyika, which formed the greater part of what would later become Tanzania, was originally part of German East Africa but, after Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the country became a British mandate. Britain treated Tanganyika in the same way it did its other African territories, parcelling off much of the country to retired generals and servicemen in gratitude for the years they had devoted to consolidating the Empire, while at the same time investing in railways, roads, farming and the other infrastructure that made modern countries flourish. Wheat became important to the Tanganyikan economy, but the most important product of this era was the humble peanut; British investment in what became known as the ‘Tanganyika Ground Nut Scheme’ brought an influx of Western migrants to the country and, though the groundnut scheme itself was not successful, it transformed the makeup of the population.

  After the Second World War, when the independence movement in the neighbouring Kenya was lurching towards violence, with the Mau Mau fiercely resisting British rule, Tanganyika somehow bucked the trend and found itself gliding towards self-government in an ordered and peaceful fashion. After the war ended, it became a United Nations trust territory and, in 1954, a schoolteacher by the name of Julius Nyerere – one of only two Tanganyikans educated to university level – founded a political party, the Tanganyika African National Union. Nyerere would go on to oversee the transition to independence when, in 1961, Tanganyika became self-governing. Two years later, the neighbouring territory of Zanzibar declared its independence from Britain and, after a bloody civil war, threw off the shackles of its own monarchy and formed a government. One year later, Tanganyika and Zanzibar were formally joined, and symbolically united their names to form the new ‘Tanzania’. It was a joining of cultures as well as governments – for, though both countries had at one time been British colonies, Zanzibar had first been subsumed by the Portuguese expansion into Africa and had, latterly, become part of Islamic Africa, with the island nation being pivotal to the Arabic slave trade. This joining of different histories gives Tanzania a flavour unique among African nations.

  Christmas came two days into our time in Tanzania. In that time we had slowly made our way north, along the bank of the Kagera river. The water was wide and slow-moving; there would be no rapids to speak of until we crossed the Ugandan border and came close to the great lake. Tanzania had a wilder, edgier feel to it than Rwanda, even with the ghosts of Rwanda’s past. ‘It’s because of the Communists,’ Boston declared. The banks of the river here were fed by countless little tributaries that we were forced to cross, and the best way of doing so was to enlist the help of local villagers and their small dugout canoes, made from native palms. The hostile way the local fishermen looked on as we climbed into their precarious little crafts was enough to convince me of Boston’s theory: years of Communist rule had instilled in the population a certain paranoia and a constant suspicion of others. ‘Every Tanzanian has the right to question someone not known to t
he community,’ Boston explained. I could feel it too. In the villages we had passed through we faced more suspicion than we had encountered in all our time in Rwanda, where every day we shook hands and ate with possible killers.

  Soon after Tanzania gained independence, the new Prime Minister, Julius Nyerere, had moved to suppress opposition in all its forms, including not just other political parties but trade unions and community groups as well. It was Nyerere’s belief that, in a nation made up of hundreds of different ethnic groups – and coming from backgrounds as distinct as Tanganyika and Zanzibar – multiple political parties would destabilise the new nation. His aim was to suppress not just the parties but the cultures themselves, and he swiftly instituted a policy that banned all languages except his native Kiswahili. Everything was nationalised, private businesses destroyed, and Nyerere implemented a policy of ‘Ujamaa’, a kind of African Socialism that brought his government into a close relationship with Communist China. Boston’s belief was that we were seeing the relics of that as we walked: the suspicious nature of the locals was itself a direct product of those years of close, scrutinised rule. Tanzania is a democracy now – but its people seemed somehow to be defined by the suspicion and hostility of those years.

  Christmas Eve came and with it the fiercest sun we had encountered. In the morning, Boston returned to camp, trailing two local Tanzanians who could act as porters for us until we reached the Ugandan border some seventy miles north. I was grateful for the help carrying our packs, but I was less than convinced by Boston’s choice of men. Both were scrawny, dressed in rags and broken flip flops, and my instinct was they would be more of a hindrance than a help. ‘They look like criminals,’ I told Boston, who only shrugged. The taller man, whose name was Selim, had a lame eye and scars across his face. The other, shorter, had a broken nose and seemed to be permanently drunk. ‘They’re the best we’ve got,’ Boston declared, and we started the day’s walk.