The Congolese city of Bukavu, on the edge of Lake Kivu, not far from the Rwandan border, once enjoyed a provincial charm that delighted its inhabitants and all passing visitors. In the summer of 1994, however, the gaiety of its terraces and the sweet singing of its fishermen were swamped by the misery of an immense horde of refugees.
It was late July, four months after the first machete blows, one month after the first mass exodus of Hutus from Rwanda. My most striking memory of my arrival in the city is of sheets of corrugated metal piled up along the unpaved road, in the villages, around the refugee camps, and taller piles in the streets near the market, and even taller ones down toward the river and at the customs station—jubilantly eyeballed, from behind their Ray-Bans, by the big-shot thugs of the Congolese army.
A constant stream of hundreds of thousands of Hutu exiles was fanning out into this area around Lake Kivu. The most exhausted of them lay down on any open ground, while the more vigorous pushed on to camps in the region of the volcanoes, and the most enterprising or richest refugees scattered throughout Bukavu. Some carried a bundle or a child, while others lugged a chair, a basin, or a sack of grain, and the strongest advanced bent double beneath heavy sheets of corrugated metal, which they exchanged for passage across the border, a bag of grain, a ride in the back of a truck, or a place to rest out in a field.
The strangest memory I have of entering Rwanda, right after
crossing the river and heading toward the town of Cyangugu, is again of that endless, surreal procession of corrugated metal porters. Filling smugglers’ pirogues to the water line, heaped onto the logs of raft-ferries, in handcarts, beneath the buttocks of passengers in the backs of trucks, carried by one or two people, lying around tents or huts, stacked around camps, on the roads, in the devastated banana groves, and in the depths of the forest, sheets of corrugated metal stretched out between the bivouacs and the refugee columns as far as the eye could see.
Shaken by the genocide just ended, dazed in the throng, a foreigner might naturally have filed away the puzzling sight under the heading of a collective madness, some trauma to be understood later on, and he would have missed the story behind that corrugated metal.
Sheet metal arrived in Rwanda at the same time as the Belgians, immediately after the First World War, and not by accident, since it was intended as roofing for colonial buildings. Tiles covered the colonists’ houses, foliage covered the Rwandans’ homes, and sheets of metal covered the public buildings where both peoples would be brought together.
The sheet iron of that period was a good centimeter thick, able to last around fifty years, or as it turned out, until independence. With the passage of time and the emancipation of the people, sheet metal became thinner and spread into the towns, their outlying districts, and gradually the hills, to cover almost every dwelling, including the most modest, which have come to be known as terres-tôles (sheet metal adobes). The sheet of corrugated metal is now the measure of a habitation. One says, “So-and-so has built himself a house” not “of so many square meters” but “of so many sheets.”
The sheets last varying lengths of time depending on whether
they have been imported from Europe (the best), Uganda (the most compact), Kenya (the toughest), or manufactured locally, in the Tolirwa factories of Kigando, near Kigali. These homemade sheets are the thinnest (three millimeters), cheapest, and flimsiest. They last around fifteen years, about as long as the adobe walls of the farmers’ houses.
After the genocide, humanitarian organizations handed out sheets of compressed papyrus fiber, but their life-span of a few months fooled no one, either as to their usefulness or as to the benevolence of their donors.
Corrugated metal sheets made a tardy but precipitous appearance in the Bugesera in the early 1960s, to roof the houses of the first waves of Tutsi refugees. Light, transportable, and cheap, they are a godsend in a rainy country that does not provide thatch from cereals or savannas. The sheet metal is sold new or used, impermeable or permeable (in other words, with holes). It serves first as an enclosure, until the walls are up, and then as a roof, but its usefulness does not stop there. After the walls have worn out or collapsed, it serves secondhand to build kitchen shelters, toilets, animal pens, and silos in the courtyard. It also enters into the making of doors, shutters, cabaret terraces, chests, and coffins for the poor.
Of all the elements of the house (walls, frame, furniture, domestic accessories), the corrugated metal sheet is the only one the villager cannot make with his own hands—hence its commercial value. “Before the war, in Kibungo, people organized lotteries of sheet metal,” says Innocent. “Everyone brought in a brand-new sheet, they passed around bottles of urwagwa, they drew lots, and the lucky winner left with a new roof. You could also offer them more formally, in a dowry before a wedding, for example.”
A nanny goat costs two sheets, an Ankole cow at least twenty.
One sheet clears the slate for about fifteen Primuses. Its price in Rwandan francs depends on its quality and even more on the season. “During a racking drought, the farmer tends to take down his metal roofing to sell and replaces it with strips of plastic. Then prices nosedive,” according to Innocent. “Later on, if the harvest proves bountiful, he buys more metal roofing, new or used, and the price looks up again.”
Many factors besides drought can feed the secondhand market, including theft. To hear Innocent tell it, “Agile boys can climb onto a roof and, using damp cloths, uncover sleepers during their dreams, then flee into the bush, especially if they know the owners have been partying.” Gambling and alcoholism are frequent causes of “uncovering.” I shall not mention here the name of a friend in Nyamata who, at the end of a monumental binge, sold his sheets of roofing one after the other for a last little drink for the road and wound up sleeping under the stars.
The most serious impetus for this trade, however, is war, which impoverishes its victims and drives them into exile.
Although metal roofing is the only element of a house that its owner cannot make on the spot, it is also the one he can most easily transport: a few turns of the screw, and it’s on the ground next to the bundles. Its standardization makes it usable throughout the Great Lakes region of central Africa. In 1973 the first sheet metal from the Bugesera went into exile with its owners, who in this case were Tutsis fleeing into Burundi. Then Burundian Hutu refugees fleeing the terror of the Tutsi army and the coups d’état at home brought sheet metal with them to their camps in Rwanda. These comings and goings speeded up in the early 1990s with the increasingly intense clashes on both sides of the Burundi-Rwanda border. Still, they gave no hint of what would happen in the spring of 1994.
On May 13 in Nyamata, while the first gunshots from the Rwandan Patriotic Front troops rang out, most of the Hutu killers set aside their machetes, tore down whatever metal was left on their roofs, and packed for the next day’s exodus across the country, toward Bukavu or Goma, in Congo. The metal roofing was abandoned or sold along the way or in the camps, or confiscated or extorted during the exodus or at the border, so obviously it did not come home again during the great return of the Hutu refugees in the autumn of 1996. Today, however, on the hills of Kibungo, Kanzenze, and Ntarama, the inhabited houses bear metal roofs once again thanks to international donations, thanks to the repatriated Tutsis who returned in the wake of the victorious Patriotic Front, and thanks, above all, to on-site salvage.
Not all the sheet metal, in fact, went into exile—quite the contrary. Betraying their optimism, many Hutus attached theirs to their roofs before leaving. And some Hutu refugees abandoned theirs in panic a few kilometers down the road, where Tutsi survivors collected it when the killings were over.
Still others, finally, craftily, took the time to hide the sheet metal from their roofs or their pillaging by burying it on the banana farms. In Nyamata people say that the first thing certain prisoners do, after they’ve been released from the penitentiary in Rilima, is to dig, one moonless night, for their hoards of corrugated zinc, a touch corroded. Occasionally they are too late because, as Innocent explains, “sometimes a farmer chops a hard blow with his hoe into his field, and immediately you see him break into a wide smile. He knows he has just struck a sheet of corrugated metal and come into a tidy sum.”