Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

  Deo later told me that exhaustion from our flights had left him so addled that he was having hallucinations, imagining that he recognized terrifying faces in the airport crowd, faces of killers. But the rush of fearfulness he felt didn’t show. He strode into the terminal, back into Burundi again, wearing his dark glasses and his hat—the black hat with a chin strap, the brims curved up on either side, like an Australian bush hat. He scolded a woman who cut the line at the passport control booth. In the baggage claim room, he greeted his tall, lanky, soft-spoken uncle cheerily, in a booming voice—they exchanged what I took to be the customary greeting among the men of his family, each placing hands on the other’s waist and shoulder, as if they were about to hug but then thought better of it. Then Deo took charge of finding our baggage, barking orders right and left.

  The comfort one gets from being with a person who knows his way around a place—I hadn’t anticipated feeling this with Deo. I had known him only in his American roles, as an assistant at PIH and a medical student, and I think my first impression of him, of youth and neediness and damage, hadn’t entirely worn off. Not until then. Blearily watching this slender young man in his rakish hat and sunglasses, who was carrying himself with what seemed like just the right amount of swagger—not too much to give offense but enough to get things done—I had the feeling that somewhere between the United States and East Central Africa he had become a size larger.

  I slept a little at our hotel in the city, and was awakened by the sounds of an evangelist preaching through a bullhorn outside on the street. The evangelist woke up Deo, too, but I was simply puzzled by the noise, whereas Deo imagined for a moment that war had broken out again. After breakfast, he took me on a tour of the capital.

  Gashes of red earth spread across the hills above Bujumbura. It looked like a city of walls. In residential areas especially, sheets of corrugated roofing metal had been placed on end to make provisional-looking barriers, all high enough to block direct gunfire, which I imagined was their purpose. The stately trees that Deo remembered on the margins of the city’s grandest avenue had been cut down and replaced by billboards. In a little grassy square where one would have expected the statue of a national hero—such as the beloved Prince Rwagasore, the champion of independence who died too soon—there stood instead a giant plastic bottle of Heineken beer. Apropos of which, and of a pair of stumbling-drunk, armed policemen we’d recently passed, Deo said, “This is a country of alcoholics now.”

  A lot about Bujumbura felt familiar, common to the capitals of impoverished countries: the potholes, the dust and noise, the hydrocarbon haze, the close calls between pedestrians and vehicles traveling too fast—“If you drove like this in the States, you would lose your license,” Deo said. “Even in New Jersey.” But much was strange to me, especially the bicyclists with sheaves of fresh-cut grass heaped on their backs, processions of them bringing fodder for the herds of cows that milled around the tents and makeshift huts in the urban camps of the internally displaced. “This is so pitiful,” said Deo. “I mean, cows in the city. All these are internally displaced cows. Most of the people here just say, ‘Our land has been taken,’ or ‘We can’t live next to people who killed our families.’” Here was the teeming market. “It’s still a chaos. Look at this, look at all these people waiting for something, and people really cross the street without looking. This is mental retardation, right here. People simply don’t care. Oh, see this cow?” The animal, being led down the street on a rope, had one long horn, but the other was missing. It must have been knocked off by a taxi, Deo said. “I mean, this is the heart of disorganization, right here.”

  Deo remembered, from a previous trip, taking a walk here in Bujumbura with his beloved older brother, Antoine, and coming upon a corpse. This was back during the war. The body was laid out on top of a heap of garbage. Deo had yelled at the sight, frightened and appalled. His brother had looked at the corpse and said, “What’s strange here?” Then he’d looked at Deo and said, “You’ve been away too long.”

  In Bujumbura, Deo told me now, the dreadful had become normal. Just as in some troubled dreams.

  His litany of passing sights went on and on: young men racing barefoot down the sidewalks in hopes of getting a little job unloading a truck; men and women and children washing themselves in the dirty water of open storm drains. Goats around gas stations; half-destroyed buildings; children playing in trash heaps; dump pickers. “All these are people who are in misery. This is another abandoned health center. It’s big, totally abandoned. Public. Of course. Now it’s trash. Look at the destruction. Abandoned abandoned abandoned.”

  He had never liked Bujumbura. Now, he said, he loathed it. The ostentatious corpulence of the well-to-do, the huge gold cross he saw hanging from the neck of a priest—“God knows how many people are dying in Congo in a bloody war for diamonds, for gold.” A woman with a baby at her breast came up to our vehicle, begging. He shooed her away, she wouldn’t leave, and he said angrily to her, “Next time I’ll bring a stick.” It is possible to hate people for their weakness. They can excite your fears about yourself. I thought that for Deo the begging woman personified the problems of his country, and his fears for it. He said, as the woman walked away, “I hate these people!” I gathered he was speaking about all his people. He paused and looked at me and said, “And of course I love them.”

  Deo had given me two cautions before our trip. He had said it would be best if I didn’t take notes openly. And he had told me I must never use the word “genocide” or the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi” in public.

  I had done some reading on the history of those fatal names in Rwanda and Burundi. Who were the Tutsis, the people who, most scholars write, made up about 14 percent of the populations of both countries? Who were the roughly 85 percent called Hutus?

  There are no simple answers. For decades, ideologues of Hutu or Tutsi supremacy have borrowed or invented myths about the origins of their ethnic groups. The real history remains uncertain, mainly because of a lack of records. Even the composition of the two countries’ populations is, as historians say, “contested.” But there are scholarly hypotheses on the origins of the two groups, and a great deal is known about their evolution, about how the difference between Hutus and Tutsis became lethal in Burundi and Rwanda. These, it seemed to me as I read, are the essential facts:

  Hutus and Tutsis might once have been separate peoples, maybe several separate peoples, back in unrecorded days. By the time the European colonists arrived, late in the nineteenth century, Hutus and Tutsis had a great deal in common: language, religion, and for the most part culture. (Later, they would come to look much alike as well, at least in general.) There were many exceptions but, very broadly speaking, the aristocracies of the kingdoms were drawn from the populations of cow-owning Tutsis, and their inferiors or dependents were predominantly Hutu farmers. (There was a third group in both kingdoms, called the Twa, usually described as pygmies, who made up about one percent of the populations and had very low status.) Not all scholars agree that Hutus and Tutsis have ever constituted “ethnic groups,” but some use the term—to describe two groups that are different because they have been treated differently and because they believe they are different.

  It was the colonizers—first the Germans, then the Belgians—who simplified what had been complex societies and made the Hutu-Tutsi difference a paramount and rigid fact of life for Rwandans and, to a lesser degree, for Burundians. The colonizers introduced a racist myth: Tutsis were Caucasians with black skin who had come from somewhere else—Ethiopia, perhaps—and civilized the native blacks, the Hutus. In effect, the Europeans altered the societies to fit that myth and to suit their main purpose, which was to make profits for themselves. The Europeans never occupied Rwanda and Burundi in large numbers. They kept their expenses down by governing indirectly. They made Tutsis (and in Burundi, both Tutsis and a small princely class) into their intermediaries. Most Tutsis didn’t benefit, and no doubt many suffered. As one histori
an puts it, 90 percent of “ordinary Tutsis” were all but invisible to the colonists. But Hutus suffered most. Colonial administrative changes made them powerless. They were completely vulnerable to the demands of the colonizer and to the demands and depredations of the Tutsi chiefs. They were subject, among many other things, to onerous taxes, to the forced planting of certain crops, to involuntary, unpaid labor on projects designed by the Belgians and Tutsi chiefs, and to whippings for disobedience. One result of all this appears to have been periodic famines, and, in Rwanda, great resentment among Hutus, easily generalized to all Tutsis.

  Burundi and Rwanda became independent again in 1962. In both countries, political struggles accompanied independence, old and new elites vying for control of the state. Ultimately, in both countries, the contests were organized around ethnicity. But the results were roughly opposite, mirrorlike. What one scholar calls a “vicious dynamic” was established, “with events in each country presenting to the other, in a kind of distorted mirror, the proof of its worst fears, its worst nightmare.” In short, Rwanda and Burundi accentuated each other’s path toward mass violence.

  In Rwanda, Hutus took power. The “Hutu Revolution” grew increasingly bloody. Small attacks by Tutsis in exile led to larger and larger reprisals by the new Hutu authorities. Thousands of Tutsis were killed. By the middle 1960s, something like 140,000 Rwandan Tutsis had fled to neighboring countries. Ethnic violence lent strength both to Tutsi supremacists in exile and to ideologues of Hutu power, ascendant inside Rwanda. Ironically enough, each side adopted parts of the European colonists’ racist myth. To the Tutsi supremacists, God and nature had chosen them to rule the inferior race of Hutus. To the ideologues of Hutu power, Tutsis were an alien race that had conquered the Hutus, stolen their lands, and held them in bondage. After a coup in 1973, a new Rwandan military government allowed Tutsis a small role in politics. Some Tutsis prospered economically. But they remained potential scapegoats, available when needed.

  In Burundi, by contrast, the postcolonial political struggles weren’t ethnic. Not at first. In Burundi, social divisions had long been more complex and the barriers among them more permeable than in Rwanda. In Burundi, it was mainly the small princely class, called the ganwa, whose members fought each other for power when the Belgians left. But that fight led to the assassination of Prince Rwagasore, the newly elected prime minister, immensely popular with both Tutsis and Hutus. In his absence, politics devolved into struggles among the old and a new elite, among ganwa and Hutu and Tutsi, and the struggles gradually became infected by events in Rwanda. During the Hutu Revolution, many Rwandan Tutsis fled across the border into northern Burundi. The refugees and the example of the new Rwandan state terrified Tutsi elites. They feared the loss of power and privilege at best, pogroms and exile at worst. And the Rwandan example whetted the appetites of some of Burundi’s Hutu elites.

  The terms of Burundi’s political competition became simplified into Hutu versus Tutsi. Attempted coups and killings were perpetrated by both sides. Eventually, a faction of Tutsis deposed the king and took control. Over the next twenty-seven years, from 1966 to 1993, three Tutsi military governments ruled Burundi. Power changed hands, through coups, but its geography remained the same. All three of Burundi’s unelected presidents came from the same town. Two of them were cousins.

  Rwanda and Burundi had a lot in common, linguistically, historically, culturally. And from the early 1970s until the early 1990s, their governments also looked similar. Both were military dictatorships. Both were dominated by cliques from a small region. Each clique ruled for its own benefit, mainly, and used repression and violence and forms of ethnic politics to hold on to power. That is, both countries looked like versions of the colonial state.

  But they also differed, fundamentally. Indeed, they could stand as a textbook case against the notion that countries are shaped by the intrinsic qualities of their people. In these two cases at least, the shaping was done by the competition for power and privilege among a relative few.

  In Rwanda, it was competition among Hutus. The winners practiced self-serving government while claiming to represent the majority. For this, anti-Tutsi prejudice was essential. The government portrayed itself as a bulwark against the return of alien, Tutsi hegemony, the ever-present threat, which events in Burundi made entirely plausible.

  Burundi’s Tutsi military rulers couldn’t claim to represent the ethnic majority, of course. So they found it expedient to claim that ethnicity was a colonial invention, that all Burundians were just Burundians, equal in the eyes of the law. An enlightened-sounding position, completely at odds with the fact that discrimination against Hutus—and indeed against many Tutsis—was the rule, in education and business, in the army and the institutions of government. To maintain their power, the various military governments resorted to violence, considerably more violence than in Rwanda, until the 1990s. The pattern of bloody Hutu uprisings and even bloodier repressions by the army reached its height in the slaughter of 1972. This was much more than a reprisal. It was, as one historian writes, a state-sponsored “selective genocide,” clearly designed to eliminate all potential Hutu leaders, even including children in secondary school.

  The massacre lasted two months. At least 100,000 Hutus were murdered, not a few, it seems, in ingeniously horrible ways. About 150,000 fled, many across the border to Rwanda. The mass killings of Hutus in Burundi reaffirmed long-standing fears and anti-Tutsi prejudice among Rwandan Hutus, further strengthened the position of the ruling faction, and inspired massacres of Rwandan Tutsis and more flights of Tutsi refugees into Burundi. This in turn justified, for some Burundian Tutsis, both the slaughter of ’72 and continuing discrimination against Hutus. Meanwhile, Hutu and Tutsi refugees outside Burundi and Rwanda became some of the principal and angriest keepers of the memories of massacre and injustice, and their camps became staging areas for opposition movements—most consequentially, settlements of Rwandan Tutsis in Uganda and of Burundian Hutus in Tanzania. Each group’s fear of the other ethnic group had long since become a justified reality for everyone in both countries and, in both, a tool for those in power.

  From 1972 until 1988, the years of Deo’s childhood and adolescence, Burundi looked fairly calm on the surface. The military government and its supporters referred to the bloodbath of ’72 as “the events.” International donors seemed content with the euphemism and continued sending development aid, crucial to the very existence of the government and, of course, a principal source of wealth for the few. But the apparent calmness rested on fear. For years, it is said, “the events” had left many Hutu families afraid even to send their children to school. As for the top dogs in the government, it may be axiomatic that those who rule by fear also rule in fear. The government tightened its control over every aspect of the country’s life. It also made a shambles of the economy, among other ways by creating a bunch of new state-owned enterprises and with them new opportunities for cronyism and corruption.

  The seeming calm ended in 1988, with the revolt and army repression that caused Deo and his family to spend a week or so hiding in the woods. For once, international donor nations responded. Facing losses of foreign aid, among many other problems, Burundi’s president instituted reforms, bringing a number of Hutus into the government. The elections five years later, in 1993, were widely praised by outside observers, but they also represented a grave threat to Burundian Tutsis with positions in the middle and lower levels of the government. Many lost their jobs soon after Ndadaye took power, and the loss of a job often meant rejoining the impoverished masses. For many Tutsis, and many in the military, an end to Tutsi control of the army seemed imminent, and to them this represented an even more dire threat. What followed, of course, was the assassination of President Ndadaye (and of the president and vice president of the National Assembly), the beginning of Deo’s long flight, and Burundi’s civil war.

  According to rough estimates, about fifty thousand Burundians died in the violence of 1993, Hutus
and Tutsis in roughly equal numbers, most of them civilians. After a period of maneuvering, Tutsi politicians reclaimed power, and the war went on, growing wider. For the most part it was waged between the Tutsi army and various Hutu militias, with most of the population caught in the crossfire. Burundians, it seems important to say, are no more or less inclined to violence than other human beings. Only 3 percent of the country’s young men joined armed movements during the war.

  A virtual library of treatises on the Rwandan genocide has been published, and a relative handful on Burundi. As I read, I felt drawn especially to the work of Peter Uvin, a scholar with long experience in both countries. In several articles and in separate books about each country, he attempts a synthesis not just of the events that led up to catastrophic violence, but also of the political, social, and economic forces at work. While careful to say that no single factor can explain each country’s violence, he tries to depict the essential settings of the slaughters—that is, the lives of the peasant majorities.

  For this, Uvin borrows the term “structural violence.” Violence, that is, of the quotidian kind, the physical and psychological violence of poverty, the type of violence that had surrounded Deo all through his childhood and adolescence. Hunger and disease and untimely death. Exclusion from the means to a better life, especially exclusion from secondary school and college. And examples of what the peasant majority was being excluded from—portly men in suits, foreign development workers and their privileged Burundian and Rwandan counterparts riding through dirt towns in suvs. I thought of Deo’s descriptions of easy arrogance among fellow high school and university students. There was the violence of widespread unemployment, the plight of many young men who were prime recruits for armies and militias. There was rampant and blatant corruption, and complete impunity for those who practiced it—and impunity also for the soldiers who killed and the officers who gave them their orders.