The first mudugudus sprang up shortly after the genocide and spread throughout Rwanda, appearing mainly near hilltop villages and occasionally along paths or near small streams in the bush. In Kibungo you can see a mudugudu by turning off a bush trail just before you reach the first houses; there is another in Kanzenze on an unpaved road that climbs up from the taxi-bus stop, and another in a clearing downhill from the church in Ntarama.
This pretty word does not mean anything particularly pretty. A mudugudu is a cluster of standard-issue houses, a clump of lined-up rectangles. The most impressive settlements contain three thousand units, the more modest ones about thirty. Depending on where they are and who paid for them, the houses are built of fired brick, concrete, or adobe, with or without window frames, and roofed, of course, in corrugated metal.
Nicolae Ceau
escu’s conception of a Rumanian village, the Israeli kibbutz, and the Soviet kolkhoz (minus Soviet collectivism) were all models for the mudugudu project. This rearrangement of rural living conditions served two purposes: it provided emergency housing to replace the countless homes, mostly Tutsi, destroyed during the war, and it offered better security for peasant families who had once lived scattered throughout the jungle and the bush.
escu’s conception of a Rumanian village, the Israeli kibbutz, and the Soviet kolkhoz (minus Soviet collectivism) were all models for the mudugudu project. This rearrangement of rural living conditions served two purposes: it provided emergency housing to replace the countless homes, mostly Tutsi, destroyed during the war, and it offered better security for peasant families who had once lived scattered throughout the jungle and the bush.This type of urban consolidation and the resulting abandonment of isolated little villages is distressing, at first glance, to a
Westerner familiar with previous catastrophic experiments. Most of the Rwandans who live in mudugudus do not share such reservations, however. Francine Niyitegeka, Berthe Mwanankabandi, Claudine Kayitesi, Angélique Mukamanzi, and Christine Nyiransabimana, whom I wrote about in my book on the Tutsi survivors, all abandoned their family homes, which they could neither rebuild nor repair, and moved into mudugudus with their children. The women say they feel safer and are much better off there, in spite of the unfamiliar crowding, the several kilometers now separating them from their plots of land, the loss of walled farmyards and flower and kitchen gardens, and the absence of the scarlet-black-and-yellow gonoleks, the long-tailed little souimanga sunbirds, and Rwanda’s marvelous nightingales.
To understand this withdrawal, we should think about these words from Francine: “When you have experienced a waking nightmare in real life, you no longer sort through your daytime and nighttime thoughts the way you did before. Ever since the genocide, I always feel hunted, night and day. In my bed, I turn away from shadows; on a path, I look back at forms following me. I fear for my child when I meet a stranger’s eyes. Sometimes I see the face of an interahamwe near the river and tell myself, Look, Francine, you’ve seen that man before in a dream, and I remember only afterward that the dream was in real time, wide awake, back then in the marshes.”
Less obtrusive than the mudugudus, other features appear or reappear, to the surprise of strangers and native Rwandans alike. In Nyamata new churches are going up beside the old ones, all of them packed during services, especially the funerals attended every week by hundreds or thousands of the faithful. The trumpeting muezzin of a mosque frequented by repatriates from Uganda startles the village awake twice a night. A slew of local
and international Christian sects flourishes even to the farthest reaches of the bush.
In Nyamata the commune has become a district, and the burgomaster a mayor. Here and there computers with the promise of e-mail and the Internet await a telephone jack or the return to work of an ailing engineer. The cultural center, once occupied by the militias under Joseph-Désiré Bitero’s command, now hosts a reading club in the morning and television shows in the afternoon. At night dozens of recently acquired TVs join antediluvian radios in a vain attempt to overpower the mooing, croaking, clicking, and cooing of cows, frogs, crickets, and turtledoves.
On Sundays the Bugesera Sport soccer team, renamed Nyamata FC, shows off the more fashionable red and white jerseys that replaced its old purple ones, and although the team has not yet regained its former brio, exuberant fans, or commercial sponsors, it proves its optimism with practice sessions three times a week.
On Wednesdays and Saturdays the market is vibrant with the swirling colors of the vendors’ clothes, the fabrics piled on the ground, and the umbrellas deployed against the glare. This is the only place where the air hums with hope for a bright future. On market days, farm women, women wholesalers and retailers, fishermen’s wives, stockmen, craftsmen—all find themselves back again, side by side, delivering their usual patter, while the hill people stream in at dawn for a day in Nyamata. The square smells just like old times, traffic jams return to the main street, and the cabarets are noisy once again. Jostling throngs visit the mills, the veterinary and medical clinics, the slaughterhouse, the post office, and the town hall.
Hutu and Tutsi families crowd the church pews to pray, their eyes on the priests; perched on their school benches, kids listen to
their teachers; at the soccer field, people cheer or boo the teams, but the market is the only place where they speak normally to one another, haggling and joking. As Rose Kubwimana, Adalbert’s mother, says, “At the market Hutus recover the spirit to be themselves as they were before.” It’s a kind of pleasant interlude, before people return to the isolation of their neighborhoods or hills.
Up on the hills, the coffee plantations, which need three or four years of care to become productive again, still lie fallow, but the banana groves already show pale green against the darker vegetation of the countryside. More people are drinking more urwagwa than ever before, although quality may not have kept pace with quantity.
In Kibungo there are already two cabarets: Francine’s is patronized exclusively by survivors, while the one across the way caters to a more “mixed” clientele, as they say here. On the central square Hutu and Tutsi women strip beans by slapping the plants against jute sacks. A tailor has set up a Singer sewing machine. A diesel-powered mill now spares farm women a trek of twenty kilometers lugging sacks on their backs to grind their harvests of sorghum and manioc. Hundreds of kids dribble a foam-rubber ball around the schoolyard, and cows take advantage of abandoned houses to calve in comfort.
At the bottom of the road leading down the other slope of Kibungo, pirogues glide along the stagnant river through reeds and water lilies in the company of pelicans, sacred ibises, and white flamingos, which have all been irreproachably faithful to these waters. The fishermen are still Hutus, and they dry-smoke their black fish—which they never eat themselves—over live charcoal before stringing them onto vines. The cattlemen of the surrounding area are still Tutsis, who neither milk nor eat their
Ankole cows. The prime showcase for these powerful horned beasts and their owners, who carry staffs and wear their traditional felt slouch hats, had once been the igiterane, the Tuesday stock fair, but it has yet to return to the clearing in Kayumba; negotiations are currently conducted in private. The community has restored its cattle holdings to their prewar numbers, however, and the animals roam the bush even more freely, in groups watched over once again by cowherds dressed in the rags believed to protect their charges from envious eyes.
The major innovation is the erection of hedges of prickly euphorbia along paths to protect field crops. Ten years earlier such barriers were a sacrilege, and the dispute over them was reminiscent of the nineteenth-century range wars between farmers and cattlemen on the prairies of the American West, but today they no longer provoke outrage.
Years have passed since the genocide. Now that the refugees have returned to these Hutu and Tutsi communities, forced by fate to live together despite the genocide, the constant question is—how are they getting along? There are promising signs in Nyamata: noisy, happy wedding celebrations on Saturday afternoons, the construction of an antenna for cell phones, a brand-new hospital, the departure of the humanitarian organizations, the fashion for black, pink, and almond-green seats in the pedicabs, the reaccreditation of examinations at the Lycée Apebu, the rivalry between two hardware stores over the sale of corrugated metal sheets, the appearance of the first new detached houses …
Another answer is that the fear is still there, ever present, and there is no way of knowing how many generations it will torment before it fades away.
It is the fear experienced by Angélique: “I saw many people
cut down beside me, and all this time I have battled a tenacious fear, truly overwhelming terror. I have overcome it, but I cannot say it has let go of me for good.”
Or the fear felt by Hutu children, as Sylvie described it: “For the Hutu youngsters who went to Congo, the oppression remains, because they are not facing the past. Silence is paralyzing them with fright. Time is holding them back. From visit to visit, I find no change. One can see that anxiety is stifling their thoughts. It is such hard work to encourage them to speak, but they can never set foot back in life if they don’t talk about what they must confront within themselves.”
On the path down the slope where the families of Pio, Pancrace, and Adalbert live is the house of Denise Nikuze, a twenty-year-old Hutu woman. Magnificent flowers bloom within the dilapidated walls of her courtyard. Together Denise and her sister, Jacqueline Dusabimana, are raising their children born of “love on the run, affairs that bring small advantages.”
In a faded T-shirt and skirt, Denise goes to her field at dawn. Wrapping her infant in a cloth, she places it in the shelter of an avocado tree and plies her hoe until midafternoon without anything to eat or drink. On Sundays she wears her lace-trimmed dress to church in Kibungo, occasionally walking a few hundred meters farther to the shops to buy soap or oil, but sometimes she prefers to walk the twenty-five kilometers to Nyamata, where she doesn’t feel so many eyes upon her.
Denise Nikuze is very sweet, hospitable, and intelligent. She offers us urwagwa and some pineapple from the marshes. At the mention of the killings she falls silent, except to say, “Terrible sickness came for my mother during that bad time. Death carried off papa amid a mystery of rumors. My three brothers were scattered during the confusions, perhaps to Congo, perhaps to a prison far away … somewhere I may never know about. Here I
meet only passing lovers who will never hold me with the arms of a real husband. No one threatens me anymore, but I hear no words of conciliation, either. From now on I see only silence to protect me from fear and the evil shadows that stalk our fields.”
Farther along the road, we meet Rose and Pancrace’s sister, Marthe, sitting on their doorsteps shelling beans or grinding sorghum. They are gracious, sometimes funny, as well as curious about a world they have vaguely heard about on the radio; they are eager for news from Rilima, but without turning hostile, they fall silent whenever mention is made of the bloodstained past.