I don’t know where the idea to walk the entire length of the Nile came from. It was a question I’d been asked a hundred times or more, by well-meaning family, friends, and the occasional journalist, in the weeks before I set out on the expedition. I’d given each of them a different answer – but all of them were true. When George Mallory was asked by a reporter from the New York Times why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, he retorted with perhaps the three most famous words in mountaineering history: ‘Because it’s there.’ In the end, I could think of no better way to express the singular urge that drove me to Africa. I wanted to follow in a great tradition, to achieve something unusual and inspire in others the thirst to do the same. Much of my motivation was selfish, of course – to go on the greatest adventure of my life, to see what people can only dream about and test myself to the limits. But, ultimately, it came down to one thing. The Nile was there, and I wanted to walk it.
I sat in a truck, rising high through the Rwandan hills. Even now, that same question was buzzing in my ear. The man sitting beside me was staring out of the window, looking smart in a green polo shirt, his hair closely cropped. He smiled as the banana plantations passed us by.
I liked Boston because he hadn’t asked why. Boston was different; he instinctively knew that those who have to ask ‘why’ would never understand. Ndoole Boston, descendant of Ngumbirwa, King of the Nyanga, was to be my guide for the first leg of this journey, and he was more interested in the practicalities of our mission.
‘How far is it?’ he said, as the green expanse of the Nyungwe rainforest came into view.
‘Four thousand miles.’
Four thousand, two hundred and fifty miles, to be precise – and that didn’t even include the diversions we were bound to have to make in trying to cross the river’s most inhospitable domains.
We had driven all day yesterday and camped in these rain-drenched hills, but this morning the wait was almost at an end. Mist seeped through the forest as we rose, but occasionally we’d burst through one of the reefs and I could see the forest dropping steeply away beneath us. It was, I knew, almost time.
At last, the car came to a halt on the very edge of the Nyungwe Forest. It was known locally as the ‘buffer zone’, an expanse of planted pines and eucalyptus, trees alien to Africa but introduced in colonial times to meet the growing need for firewood. Stepping out of the truck, I got to thinking how very English it all looked, like a tiny piece of Staffordshire plucked up and planted on top of the indigenous tropical forest. Under other circumstances, it might have been disappointing – but not for me, not today.
Our local guide was waiting for us under the trees. Amani was a representative of the National Tourist Board of Rwanda, a Tutsi by ancestry. There was no mistaking him against the backdrop of dense foliage: he was wearing a fluorescent red plastic raincoat and carried a tattered child’s rucksack over his shoulder. No sooner had I set foot outside the truck than he was shaking my hand earnestly. ‘Come, it’s this way!’ he declared, taking off into the bushes before the introductions were even concluded.
Setting off to follow, Boston muttered into my ear, ‘Don’t trust this man. He is a government agent.’ I looked sidelong at him; Boston was deadly serious – but, up ahead, Amani was waving us on with the vigour of a young man who genuinely loved his job.
‘Government tourist agent,’ I said, and started to follow.
Amani was a government guide by profession but, as we entered the forest, I got to thinking he was probably far more at home taking corpulent Russian businessmen around the night spots of Kigali than he was hacking through the jungle. Before long, it seemed he had lost his bearings, and I doubted he could find his way back to the trail where we had begun. Still, his efforts at pretending he knew where the river flowed were second to none and soon, whether by accident or design, we had joined a path that screamed out ‘tourist trail’. I could tell this path was well-trodden because its edges were crisp and clear, the encroaching foliage beaten back. Spanking new signs and litter bins reinforced my impression that this was as tame as England’s own woodlands.
As we went, Amani gave us a spiel I knew must have been given to a thousand other visitors. ‘Most people think the source of the Nile is in Uganda at Lake Victoria,’ he began, ‘but most people are wrong. What you’re about to see is the true source of the river – it’s furthest tributary.’
Once again, Boston wasn’t impressed. I heard him tut beside me. Boston, it seemed, had his own beliefs about where the true source of the Nile was, but people have been fighting over the origins of this magnificent river since before recorded history began, and perhaps this was not the right moment to try to settle it once and for all.
‘Here,’ said Amani, ‘I hope you are not disappointed . . .’
At Amani’s side, we stopped. Despite the tourist trail, the tiny spring below us was every bit as insignificant and natural as I had hoped. A hole in the rock sprouted a trickle of water so pure it glistened in the mist. Dropping to my knees, I took an army-issue metal mug from my rucksack and dipped it into the water. It tasted cold and sweet, and would live forever afterwards on the tip of my tongue.
‘Not disappointed at all,’ I said, and offered the mug to Boston.
This was the Nile. More than four thousand miles to the north, the waters trickling through my fingers would meet the spectacular coast of the Mediterranean Sea. I was going to follow them, walking every step of the way.
What we were standing beside was only one of many contenders for the true source of the river. What we think of as the Nile is actually the confluence of two great rivers, the Blue Nile, whose waters rise in the highlands of Ethiopia, and the longer White Nile, whose tributaries stretch further south, through Uganda, past Lake Victoria and Tanzania, until they turn into the faint trickle whose waters I was now tasting. Even this is contested. White Nile purists are fervent in their belief that the Nile only truly begins at Jinja on the northernmost shore of Lake Victoria, but those with a less conservative approach argue that the river actually flows into Lake Victoria from the west. Here it has no name, but a few miles downstream it is known as the Mbirurumbe, and after that the Nyaborongo, and after that the Kagera; as wide as the Nile and longer than the Thames, the Kagera itself has tributaries originating in both Rwanda and Burundi. It was the longest of these, by a scant thirty miles, that Amani was showing us now.
The Nile has captured the imagination of mankind since the days of the Pharaohs, and the mystery of its source is one that held explorers at bay for millennia. The location of this little spring was a question that confounded Alexander the Great. It was a secret denied to the Roman Emperor Nero despite his expeditions upriver from the delta far to the north. In Rome, in 1651, a public fountain – the Fountain of the Four Rivers – was erected to depict the four major rivers of the known world, and the Nile was portrayed by a god with a cowled head, symbolising the fact that nobody could ever know from where the waters came. For a fascinating period in the middle of the 19th century, the urge to discover this tiny water source became a kind of grail quest for a particularly dedicated, and often idiosyncratic, group of British explorers. Piece by piece, these reckless, intrepid individuals had forced the mighty Nile to give up its secrets – by guile, pig-headedness and sheer power of will. Some of those explorers gave their lives to accomplishing this quest – others gave their legs, or their sanity itself – and in doing so, opened the world up to great swathes of the African interior.
Those Victorian explorers – David Livingstone, John Hanning Speke, Henry Morton Stanley, Samuel Baker and countless others – had lived long in my imagination, and it was faintly surreal to be standing here, having reached the apex of their quest so easily, with a big wooden sign that announced, in bold yellow letters, ‘THIS IS THE FURTHEST SOURCE OF THE NILE’ in the corner of my vision. My quest, however, lay in the opposite direction. The idea of recreating this fantastic voyage of discovery in reverse had first come to me in the winter of 2011, and it had taken almost two years to reach this point. For as long as I can remember, I had wanted to embark on an epic journey, one that harked back to the great expeditions of times past, a journey that would test me both physically and mentally in a way that no other could. I had done plenty of expeditions before, of course, and more or less devoted my life to travel and exploring the world. At the age of 21, I had hitch-hiked home from Cairo by way of a very troubled Middle East, including a reckless perambulation through Iraq just after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. A year later, I continued my roadside-thumbing career with a four-month voyage overland to India, following the fabled Silk Road. Again, I took the road less travelled, by heading through the middle of an insurgent-infested Afghanistan and fanatical Iran. It wasn’t the thrill of warzones that drew me to these hostile environments; rather, I hungered to discover the people in these places, the way humanity shines in the most troubled places of the Earth. The Nile itself had first cast its spell over me in 2010 when, as part of a charitable expedition, I had driven overland from London to Malawi to deliver ambulances to communities in need. Now, three years on, I had given in to its irresistible spell. I wanted to see the places Livingstone, Speke, Stanley and the rest had discovered as they cut their path into the heart of this most challenging continent. And, as in my expeditions in the past, I wanted to learn more about the people who lived along this mighty river, people whose lives were dictated by its ebb and flow. In a continent in which borders are always in flux, the Nile is a constant. I wanted to see how it shaped lives from the ground, day by day and mile by mile.
‘So,’ said Amani. ‘Now you begin, no?’
I stood and put the metal mug back in my rucksack. ‘Let’s start walking.’
The spring that fed into the puddle that, in turn, disappeared under the dense foliage soon faded into memory. As the day wore on, the excitement of having left the source of the Nile turned into something new: the promise of movement itself. Just as the Nile begins with a tiny trickle of water, this year-long voyage was beginning with a few tiny steps. No more planes, buses or Land Cruisers; no more anticipation and worry; now, only forward motion. On foot.
In the space of a few hundred metres, the forest seemed to alter immeasurably. Coming down the forested escarpment, we left behind the pines and eucalyptus. As we walked, the jungle grew more tropical, thick with oversized ferns and vines that wrapped around teak and mahogany giants.
Amani had nominated himself our leader, though as we progressed I could tell that my first impression of him hadn’t been far off the mark. The difficulty in following a river from a forest source is that it keeps going underground, or gets hidden by the vegetation, ferns and thorn bushes that fill the jungle floor. Above us the canopy was so thick that it was almost impossible to see the sky, and it seemed that we were walking in a perpetual twilight. On occasion, I could hear where the water trickled. It was this tiny trickle that would become the greatest river on Earth, the life’s blood of civilisations that had risen and fallen since time immemorial. This elusive trickle gave life to six nations before it met the sea, but today it proved impossible to follow.
It soon became evident that Amani was not practised at blazing a trail. His occasional entreaties – ‘This way!’ ‘Here is the river!’ – soon proved themselves little better than wishful thinking.
At my side, Boston silently shook his head. ‘All he does is go east,’ he muttered. ‘He thinks, if we get out of the forest, he will see the river then. These Rwandans, they’re not jungle people like the Congolese.’
I had known Boston for less than a week, though he came highly recommended by two friends, Tom Bodkin and Pete Meredith, who had availed themselves of his services in the past. Pete in particular had spoken highly of Boston’s skills; Boston had looked after the logistics of one of Pete’s own expeditions, to make a film about kayaking the Nile’s biggest rapids, a feat never before attempted. What they hadn’t told me was that Boston wasn’t really a guide at all. In fact, Boston had never had any formal training in anything, and I was quickly beginning to understand that he was a jack-of-all-trades wheeler-dealer. Whatever you wanted Boston to be, that was him.
He was also the most outspoken man I had met in all my travels, and it was evident he was not going to pull any punches where Amani was concerned.
Ndoole Boston had grown up in eastern Congo, at a time when that country had been rife with fighting and internal conflict. Boston was proud to come from a royal bloodline. ‘My great-grandfather ruled a tribe in the mountains west of Lake Albert,’ he had told me, before adding that, ‘He ate men. It was normal then. He was the king, and would eat whoever he wanted – men, women, enemies. It was usually enemies – but, if he had a lazy servant, he’d eat him too.’ Across the generations, though, savage cannibalism had given way to religion and Boston’s paternal grandfather, Mwalimu Ndoole Nyanuba, had been a Pentecostal pastor with his own church in rural Machumbi. Boston’s own father had rejected family tradition again, becoming first a professor of geography who passed his disgust for religion onto his son, and later an MP under Zaïre’s – later, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s – Mbutu regime. In 1993, as Boston told me, tragedy struck, when his father died under mysterious circumstances. ‘Poison,’ Boston declared as we followed Amani aimlessly through the forest. ‘He was probably murdered, although I’ll never know. That was the year I became a soldier.’
After Boston’s father died, Boston became the head of his family. When he was only seventeen years of age, his mother encouraged him to take up arms and head out to fight the roving gangs that plagued eastern Congo and protect their family ranch. In no time at all, Boston had become head of his own militia, commanding some 300 troops, and it was with these men that he joined the then-rebel forces led by the future president, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, in 1996. Boston’s unit were instrumental in taking the cities of Kisangani and Lubumbashi from government forces, and bringing about the end of the Mbutu reign.
In 2005, eight years before we met, Boston had fled the Congo. His flight followed months of targeted assassinations of former soldiers and activists like himself, and escalating violence against his family. His ‘home’ was now in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Boston would accompany me on my journey that far, but there we would part ways, I on my journey ever north, Boston back to the comforts of his wife Lily and their three children.
Around us, the jungle was becoming denser, and the trickle of water seemed to be ebbing further away. With it impossible to keep the river – if this could truly be called a river – in sight, the only really effective method was to look around at the mean height of the trees and estimate which way was downhill. By following invisible contours, I hoped we would stay abreast of the water. The theory seemed to work, albeit slowly, but by the time we stopped to refuel with lunch we’d covered only five hundred metres in a straight line, despite our GPS having logged a distance of 4km walked. We hadn’t completed our first day of this journey, and already I had a sign that I was actually going to walk much further than the 4,250 miles I’d planned.
‘We need to cover more ground,’ said Boston, with an ironic smile pointedly directed at Amani. ‘It is not even hard going! It reminds me of my time in the Congo, but there it is much thicker.’
There was an element of malice in Boston’s voice, and I could tell that he was trying to provoke Amani in some way. Boston, the proud fighter, didn’t want to cede any authority to this skinny Tutsi who, he believed, was leading us in circles. ‘You know, Lev,’ he went on, ‘we Congolese are jungle people. We know the forests. Rwandans, well, they just look after cows. They know nothing of trees. Do you know what they call snakes in DRC?’
I hadn’t a clue.
‘Go into any restaurant in Kinshasa and you can ask for two types of fish. Water fish and tree fish.’
‘What’s a tree fish?’ This sounded like the beginning of some terrible joke.
‘It is a snake. Everything is related to the trees in the Congo. Lev, I believe I should lead from now on.’
As I tried to pick my way through the logic of this particular argument, Boston unsheathed the machete I had bought for him and encouraged us to take off. It was a sturdy army-issue panga with a comfortable wooden handle, not like the flimsy machetes that are for sale all over the African bazaars. Gripping it with an iron fist, he pushed past Amani and started cutting blindly at vines and branches. I gave Amani what I hoped was a conciliatory smile and, together, we followed.
Boston’s path didn’t seem any better than Amani’s – but his panga was making short work of the dense vegetation, and our progress was faster. With Boston blazing the trail, too, we were able to stay closer to the occasional gurgle of water that marked the Nile’s first passage. In places the water didn’t seem to flow at all, and the only indication that we were following the mighty Nile was the soft earth underfoot. Sometimes this bog seemed to suddenly grow deeper and more expansive, so that we had no choice but to pick a way across. Thick and glutinous beneath the feet, it had the same effect as quicksand, and on more than one occasion I plunged into the quagmire up to my waist. As I wriggled, shouting profanities and grappling for Amani to help me, Boston seemed to float above the filth, keeping his boots as clean as the moment they came out of the box. He really was a jungle man.
As Amani hoisted me from the quagmire for the second time, I fixed my gaze on those boots. A nice pair of desert Altbergs, they were the best money can buy. I knew it – because I’d bought them for him. He looked back at me from the undergrowth ahead, beaming. He was proud of those boots, determined not to get wet feet.
With Boston hacking away, I could better take in the wonders of the Nyungwe Forest. Amani might have been a poor bushwhacker, but he was good at one thing: it was Amani who first saw the colobus monkeys leaping through the trees above us like little black ghosts. By mid-afternoon, we had dropped a couple of hundred metres in altitude, following the natural contours of the valley. In a short distance, the stream had grown from a pure, clean trickle to a bog and then, as it filtered through layers of vegetation, it finally emerged as a fully-fledged little river. At the moment it was hardly a foot’s length across, but it was clean again and definitely flowing. Trailing my fingers in the stream, it felt as if the water – even more than me – wanted to be rid of its forested womb and head out into the open sunshine beyond.
The water and I both got our wish when, in the late afternoon, we emerged from the Nyungwe. The forest ended suddenly, snatching us from the close darkness under the canopy to the bright sunshine of fields and mountains. It had been silent in the forest, save for the gurgling of the river and the occasional sniping of Boston and Amani, but now there were new sounds: the lowing of cows.
After leaving the sweaty humidity of the forest, it was a relief to be welcomed by the sight of this open plain. From the trees the stream trickled down, through small waterfalls, and seemed to be revelling in its first touch of daylight. With Boston’s panga back in its sheath, our feet followed the water. The first sign of life was a single large cow, wading in the long grass at the bottom of a hill. On the hillside were the first signs of human habitation. Neatly furrowed fields and a few banana trees stood before the distinctive shape of a track leading south. At the bottom of the track, still clinging to the stream, several small huts hid behind a stand of tall brown-and-white eucalyptus trees.
It dawned on me that what I was looking at was the first village that depended on the Nile.
‘Come on,’ said Amani, with renewed vigour. ‘These are Batwa. Let’s speak to them before they run away.’
Amani had already set off when I realised who he was speaking about. Outside the huts were the outlines of four diminutive people.
‘Pygmies,’ said Boston as he watched Amani stride ahead, shaking his head in what I thought was reproach. ‘Do not believe what this man tells you. He is a government agent.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘The Twa were in this country long before Hutu and Tutsi,’ Boston told me. ‘Amani will not tell you that.’
I followed Amani to the edge of the village, where he was already in conversation with the Batwa men outside their huts. Only one of them appeared particularly small, and none of them looked concerned at our approach. They simply sat on a grassy bank, looking rather nonplussed at this band of sweaty pedestrians who had emerged from their forest.
As I approached, their leader, a man a little more than five feet tall introduced himself as ‘Kazungu’.
‘Isn’t that what you call white people?’ I asked Amani.
‘No,’ Amani replied, ‘that is Muzungu, but it means the same thing. Look at him – he is lighter than these others.’
The village was nothing more than a collection of five small huts among the banana trees. As Kazungu led us around, Amani translated his story in fits and starts. At my side, Boston occasionally snorted. I made daggers at him with my eyes. No matter what spin Amani was putting on this story at the behest of his government superiors, I still wanted to hear it.
‘Kazungu’s fathers lived in the Nyungwe. They were forest dwellers. They did not grow crops like they do now. They hunted and foraged. But, after 1994, things had to change. Education for all!’ announced Amani. ‘The Batwa came out of the forest to join the one Rwanda.’
Amani was veiled in how he spoke about it, but he was making a tacit reference to the event that still, in spite of everything else, defines Rwanda: the genocide of 1994, which had both put this beautiful country on the world map, and changed its history forever.
Since 1990, Rwanda had been engaged in a bloody civil war. The Hutu-led government was desperate to suppress the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel organisation largely made up of refugee Tutsis based across the border in Uganda. Some of these refugees had been settled in neighbouring countries for a generation, but still considered themselves to have fled from the country that was rightfully theirs. For three years a war was waged between the two, until a ceasefire in 1993 seemed to bring an end to hostilities. It was not to last long. A plan was being prepared that would eventually see a power-sharing government in place in Kigali, but to many Hutus this felt like a concession too far. Tension was high, and a delicate balancing act would need to be performed to ensure peace.
It didn’t come. All that was needed to trigger something devastating was a smoking gun, and it came in early 1994. On 6 April, a plane carrying the Hutu premier of Rwanda was shot down on its approach to Kigali, killing all on board. To prominent Hutus in the armed forces, this was nothing more than a political assassination. On the very next day, the genocide began in Kigali and spread rapidly outwards to consume the whole of Rwanda. Soldiers and police quickly executed prominent Tutsis in the capital and, within hours, roadblocks had been established to contain refugees. Systematically, the Hutu police and militias swept Kigali and, checking the documentation of every citizen to ensure ethnicity, began a genocide that would go on to claim an estimated one million lives.
Perhaps the most terrifying thing was that Hutu civilians were later pressurised to take up their own guns and machetes and join in the slaughter. So it was that Hutus turned on Tutsis across the country, and Rwanda was defined forever as a place of genocide. The killings lasted a hundred days, brought to an end only by the mobilisation of the RPF across the border and a military campaign that moved south, from Uganda, capturing first the north of the country and, finally, Kigali itself. We would reach Kigali in about a week’s time, if the walking was good, crossing the killing fields to reach the centre of the tragedy itself.
I looked at Amani. He was still talking, but I was thinking less about the Batwa and their village than Amani himself. He was, I knew, a Tutsi by ancestry. I wondered what his experience of those hundred days had been like, how many friends and family members he had lost, what it now felt like to be living in a country carrying those fresh scars. Those were all questions Rwanda itself was trying to answer every day.
‘Since 1994, we do not have ethnicity. All Rwandans have the same language, the same history, the same culture. There is only one ethnic group – the Banyarwanda. We are all the same, and we are all Rwandans. It includes Kazungu and his village here. That is why they came out of the forest.’
‘So they were forced out?’
Boston felt it was time to interject. ‘In Rwanda, you cannot even remember. You cannot say my father came from here, or my grandfather came from here. Talking about those kind of things – it is not allowed.’
It sounded draconian to me, but when I asked Kazungu – through Amani – if he and his people missed the forest, he just shrugged. ‘In the village,’ he said, ‘we can grow bananas, eat potatoes, eat beans. We can even own a cow, or a mobile phone – if we are rich enough.’
‘There are Batwa in Uganda also,’ said Boston. ‘They lived in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. But the government forced them to leave. Do you know why?’
‘Why?’
‘Because the forest was needed for gorillas. Can you believe?’
‘It makes all Rwandans feel like Rwandans,’ said Amani. We had reached the middle of the village, and one of Kazungu’s headmen was approaching with a plastic bucket. When he set it down, I saw that it was filled with honey and pieces of comb.
Kazungu said something to Amani. ‘It is for us,’ he began, ‘to give us strength for our walk. It is wild honey. They sell it on the roadside for fifteen dollars a kilogram.’
Reaching into the bucket, I took a spoonful of the hard yellow substance. No sooner was it in my lips than I regretted it.
Picking bits from my teeth, I looked round to find Kazungu’s face open with laughter.
‘Lev,’ began Amani, not unkindly. ‘You have to get rid of the wax first . . .’
The stream grew wider as, renewed by our taste of wild honey, we walked into the afternoon. Downstream, the valley broadened and the perfectly clear water ran between manicured fields of sweet potato and maize, small tea plantations and – higher up – pine forests that disappeared into high cloud. Amani was keen to point out how almost all of Rwanda’s land was put to use to feed its people. Agriculture was one of the ways society held itself together since the dark days of the genocide. ‘Rwanda,’ he kept saying, much to Boston’s chagrin, ‘is about co-operation and setting differences aside. This above all else.’
The constant reminders of how the disparate peoples of Rwanda were compelled to unite were beginning to grate. Boston’s silence was telling. Yet, as evening approached and thoughts turned to making the expedition’s very first camp, another stark reminder of the past was about to appear.
We had come fifteen kilometres out of the forest and, by the time dusk drew near, we’d reached the plantations outside the village of Gisovu. On the hillside above, overlooking the vibrant greens of the riverside, stood a high-walled compound, with crumbling watchtowers in each of its four corners and an intimidating metal gate against its south-west walls. As Boston, Amani and I set up our small, blue tents, my eye was constantly drawn to this imposing fortress. Even at a distance I could tell that its walls were pockmarked, not just with natural decay but with the unmistakable marks of bullet holes – vicious reminders of the past.
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.