5. INTO THE GREAT UNPLANNED

MBARARA, UGANDA, 17 JANUARY 1997

Each evening at 7.00 (or soon after) and Akamba ‘luxury’ coach departs from Nairobi for Kampala. The journey takes sixteen and a half hours owing to frequent and prolonged stops – to eat, to cross borders, to negotiate Uganda’s contraband-seeking military roadblocks. At 11.30 this morning we reached Kampala’s bus station and I emerged stiffly into a steady drenching downpour; it had been raining and foggy over the last fifty miles. An hour later I left for Mbarara in another sort of vehicle, a grievously battered rural bus.

In front of me sat two young women with five babies and toddlers between them, all going to Kabale. Four of the juveniles were model travellers: either sleeping or suckling, or content and chuckling. The fifth was a two-year-old who could not be deterred from banging on the window with a tin spoon. Her expression of jolly defiance replicated Rose’s and induced grandmaternal nostalgia. But for Laurence Kabila, my grand-daughter would now be ahead of me in Bukavu instead of behind me in London.

That five-hour journey ended on Mbarara’s High Street where the Pride Lodge provides an adequate £3 room leading of a small concrete yard. The receptionist is a charming handicapped youth who carefully wrote out my tiny receipt despite lacking forearms and having only three-fingered hands where his elbows should be. When the town’s electricity supply failed at 7.40 he brought a candle within moments. Over the bed hangs a 1991 calendar depicting a simpering Indian film-star and advertising Roadmaster Cycles: ‘Any Road, Any Load’, a text very germane to this part of Africa. As the bedding is damp I must use my sleeping bag.

In a café-bar across the street I quickly downed two Nile beers to give me Dutch courage before I set out to look for my Tutsi friend, Marie. Since our first meeting in ’92, when I was cycling through Uganda, we had corresponded occasionally – but the letters were long – until January ’94. Then, in her last letter, Marie mentioned that she was about to visit her mother and seven-year-old son in Kigali. Three letterless years suggested the worst but I continued to hope; possibly she remained too traumatized to rite.

Two tables away I noticed an elderly man studying me with that furtive intentness one employs when trying to work out whether or not a person is known. At last he approached, diffidently, and asked, ‘You were Marie’s Irish friend?’ Were … So I had been silly to hope. Marie had rented Mr Kanabalula’s flat; he recognized me from a photograph of the two of us that one hung on her living-room wall. She had remained longer than planned in Kigali because her mother fell ill. In April ’94 she and her son and two brothers were murdered. Her mother survived but has since died. I have just repacked the three paperbacks I brought for Marie, as requested in her last letter.

KABALE, 18 JANUARY

By 6.45 I had secured a front seat in a minibus about to depart for Kabale – according to its driver. Two hours later it was full and we took off, or seemed to. But that was an illusion. Beyond Mbarara several individuals and groups appeared by the wayside, desperate to get aboard, and a vehicle licensed to carry fourteen passengers ended up carrying twenty-two. Delay-wise, extra passengers are no problem. But it does take time to load chairs, poultry, matoke, planks, sacks, cartons, baskets, bundles, blankets and rolled-up mats. Then it turned out that not all passengers were going to Kabale. At intervals we stopped an much hectic unloading took more time – much more, if the disembarking person’s sack was under other passengers’ possessions. And always, before anyone’s belongings could be retrieved, it was necessary to remove the two chairs roped to the open back door. Happily, I readjusted to the rhythm of African life. But the Kampala businessman beside me registered extreme impatience. ‘Time is money!’ he fumed, repeatedly unzipping and rezipping his briefcase in a near-paroxysm of frustration.

For the first twenty miles or so we were driving through fertile level farmland, interspersed with wide papyrus marches and wooded hills. At this season the hedges are aglow with blossoms: scarlet, blue, yellow. Despite the fertility, the local folk look wretchedly poor: skinny, many with infected sores on their legs, all clad in dirty rags. Scores of mothers and children – not fathers – were walking to their fields in single file. Some of the children, carrying child-sized hoes, seemed no more than six or seven years old. A few herds of Ankoli cattle paced along ridge-tops towards valley pastures, their lyre-horns a mobile frieze etched against the pale blue morning sky.

Leaving the cultivated land behind, we climbed slowly into hunky green mountains, boulder-strewn and steep, unpredictably shaped and so irregularly spaced that every bend presented a surprise. The superbly engineered road rises – and rises – and rises. Then it levels out to curve around the rims of deep valleys, some lightly wooded, some with orange-red erosion gashes furrowing their sides. Next come longer and still steeper climbs, the air now perceptibly colder. Suddenly one is aware of leaving East Africa, entering a region more remote and quite distinctive, a temperate well-watered zone that remained inaccessible for so long no Arab slave-traders ever penetrated here. Which is one reason why Rwanda and Burundi have become Africa’s most densely populated countries.

In April ’92 Marie had urged me to do a detour from Mbarara to visit her family in Kigali. (At that date an impossible détour, I discovered; there was sporadic fighting along the border.) I remember her exact words: ‘The climb to the heights, it is of the greatest magnificence!’ and indeed it is. Today a curious incredulity is mingling with my sorrow. Genocide lies far beyond the grasp of one’s imagination; it is illogically hard to believe that anyone known personally was among the victims.

In this south-western corner of Uganda one is already within the Rwandan ‘sphere of influence’; the Kigeza district was part of Rwanda until the British and Germans did a boundary adjustment deal in 1910. By now Kigeza might be described as a Banyarwanda home-from-home-land. Some of the Hutu peasants who escaped the Belgian forced-labour barbarities of the 1930s settled around here, as did many of the Tutsi who fled after 1959.

From the pass above Kabale I glimpsed the Virunga chain of volcanoes far away to the west, their rugged austerity seeming extra-dramatic in contrast to Kigeza’s lushness. I longed to disembark here and walk the last few miles. But the disinterring of my rucksack (in first) would have caused such time-consuming upheaval that the Kampala businessman might have succumbed to hyper-tension.

From the pass the road plunges into a narrow valley then rises again, gently, to enter Uganda’s highest town (about 6000 feet) where a cool breeze tempers even the noon heat. During the afternoon blue-black clouds suddenly filled the sky and soon delivered an hour’s torrential rain to lay the dust and fill water-barrels. In this congenial little town the local traffic consists mainly of bicycles; scores are registered cycle-taxis with cushioned carriers and number plates. Kabale is the ‘base-camp’ for back-packers and over-landers en route to the mountain gorilla reservation near Kisoro. Most say in the Visitour Hotel (£2 per night) and they are puzzled by my turning towards Rwanda, by my interest in a different species of guerrilla.

MULINDI, RWANDA, 19 JANUARY

I was unwise to leave Kabale in darkness; within a mile three speeding lampless cyclists had missed me by inches. But soon came a subdued dawn, the pale light filtering through low grey clouds. As the invisible sun rose, those clouds sank to ground level and became a shifting mist, a silver veil that sometimes briefly revealed the nearby hills, the clumps of tall wayside trees or stands of bluegum saplings, the wide valley pastures where imported Ayrshires were being milked. Many baboons, near but unseen, were barking loudly and the calls of stately crested cranes (Oh Ann! Oh Ann!) sounded harshly plaintive as they waded through marshy hollows.

This area is densely populated and the locals look quite prosperous. By 7.00 the mist was dispersing and there was much traffic – all of it two-wheeled, cyclists with gleaming milk-churns strapped to their carriers pedalling fast towards Kabale. Twice young men who were about to load their carriers pointed to the mug hanging from my ruck-sack and offered me delicious frothy warm milk. In the several villages en route I was greeted with waves and smiles and shouted questions and made to feel welcome as an amusing oddity – one more daft muzungu. Topographically I was already in Rwanda, the road winding between steep rounded hills, cleverly terraced and overlooking long, wide, flat valleys.

It took me five hours to cover the fourteen miles to the border. At 11.00, in the straggling, down-at-heel village of Kamugsanguzi, I walked past a queue of twenty-seven oil-tankers and trucks, their drivers evidently taking Sunday off in Uganda where prices are much lower than in Rwanda. The ramshackle frontier barrier-gate stood open and there an unpleasant Ugandan policeman, masquerading as a customs officer, beckoned me into his small round tin-roofed hut and ordered me to unpack my rucksack. Pouncing on 200 mini-cigars he accused me of ‘smuggling and illegal import’ and demanded a $US25 bribe. Then he was distracted – fascinated – by those book I had hoped to give Marie. He checked my passport, to confirm the name, then exclaimed that he had never before met a writer of books. We negotiated. He settled for In Ethiopia with a Mule, autographed and personally inscribed. As I remember noticing on a previous visit, many Ugandans are gratifyingly addicted to books.

In the customs building across the track a genuine customs officer was uninterested in my rucksack. The immigration officer, while stamping my passport, warned, ‘Be careful over there, be very careful – they don’t like muzungus.’

The quarter-mile of no-man’s-land is a wide rough track, mangled by truck traffic: no one’s responsibility. Piles of burnt-out vehicles lie on either side, to heat-deformed to be identifiable, relics of the desultory 199-94 civil war – Tutsi RPA versus Hutu FAR.

Three lanky teenaged soldiers, lounging in a tattered tent by Rwanda’s pole-barrier stared in disbelief as mama walked around it. Then I saw the first evidence of this country’s relatively responsible use, since Independence, of foreign aid money. The Gatuna customs and immigration buildings are large and well-built and in comparison to their Ugandan equivalents give an impression of orderliness and efficiency.

At noon on the Sabbath the immigration office was queue-free. At one desk sat a very beautiful young Tutsi woman. When I addressed her in English her male colleague, sitting behind a bigger desk – not obviously Tutsi or Hutu – snarled, ‘She doesn’t speak that language.’ Then he asked, ‘Why do you travel by feet? What are you looking for? What is your career? Who is paying you?

Blandly I defined myself as a tourist who likes walking and pays her own way.

A long pause. Then – ‘You cannot walk to Kigali. It is impossible, it is far. There is nowhere to sleep, no hotels. At this season there is heavy rain. And there is dangerous traffic on this road. I can organize transport to Kigali. Sit and wait.’

I thanked him for his kindness while remaining adamant; my holiday must be a walking tour, I enjoyed nothing else. He became agitated, looked to his Tutsi colleague for support. Briefly she met my eye before saying something dismissive in Kinyarwanda. My would-be protector shrugged, stamped my passport, then released me to combat heavy rain and dangerous traffic as best I could.

This road is quite narrow but well-maintained. I walked on – feeling vaguely unsettled by my introduction to Rwanda – in the shade of ancient trees rooted in high embankments. There was no traffic, pedestrian or otherwise, over the next two miles. At the first roadside hamlet – two small stores, a dozen tin-roofed mud-dwellings – the few visible inhabitants had closed, unsmiling faces. The stranger did not feel welcome. Suspicion hung in the air like fine dust. I didn’t linger. Trekking on, I accepted being in another world. Even to a visitor unaware of Rwanda’s recent trauma its ‘otherness’ would, I am convinced, be immediately apparent.

Then I reminded myself that this area’s trauma long pre-date the genocide. By ’91 the RPA were in control of the north of Byumba prefecture and had closed the Gatuna border-post, forcing all imports from Mombasa to use the far more expensive roundabout route through Tanzania – a serious blow to Rwanda’s economy.

At that stage most of the RPA were Tutsi born and bred in Uganda, the offspring of refugees. The RPA/RPF* loathed the Habyarimana régime but in general were not anti-Hutu, per se. Having fought in Museveni’s army, they had absorbed his Get-Rid-Of-Tribalism ideology and seen for themselves the effectiveness of the system he imposed in 1986. Instead of political parties competing nationally for power there was village democracy, each community electing its own leaders and taking responsibility for its own welfare. (A system now being undermined by the WB/IMF demand for Western-style ‘democratic elections’ and privatization.) The RPA/RPF preferred to think of themselves as Banyarwanda rather than Tutsi, this being the generic term for all Kinyarwanda speakers – Tutsi, Hutu and Twa – whether their homeland be Rwanda, Uganda or Zaire. However, although the RPA saw themselves as an enlightened army of liberation, dedicated to freeing Rwanda from a hideous tyranny, the Hutu peasants saw them (and were vigorously encouraged to see them) as vengeful Tutsi returning to re-establish their traditional domination over Rwanda. By the middle of 1992, 300,000 terrified Byumba peasants had become Displaced Persons elsewhere in Rwanda. Undoubtedly the RPA invasion made it much easier for the organizers of the genocide to present all Tutsi as The Enemy. But – had the RPA not been present to fight the FAR and the Intrahamwe, there would have been no Tutsi or moderate Hutu survivors.

As I trekked on, beginning to feel tired and thirsty, I decided that here and now honesty is probably the best policy. Plainly Rwanda is not at present a tourist-magnet and the immigration officer knew I was lying. To admit to being a travel writer, even if few understand what that means, might diminish suspicion.

I had just reached this conclusion when a young man hailed me from a large, tree-shaded compound on a steep slope high above the road – the first habitation since the hamlet. ‘Let us help you!’ he called. ‘Have food, have water!’ My progress up to that skiddy incline was observed by twenty or so elders – men and women – standing around in little groups wearing Sunday clothes. They ignored my greetings.

Pierre met me half-way, beamingly shook hands, then led me to one of five low, rectangular tiled dwellings, solidly built of mud bricks. His petite bride sat within, expensively dressed, obviously an urban lass – a Bujumbura-born Tutsi returnee, it transpired. Monique showed a friendly interest in the visitor but hesitated to speak English. Pierre’s English was limited: ‘I learn as visiting relatives in Mbarara.’ While his much older sister prepared a meal he went to fetch his mother, my contemporary but semi-crippled by rheumatism. She hobbled in on two sticks, murmured a welcome in French, embraced me with one arm, then rejoined the elders – now settling down to what looked like an indaba, the men and women sitting in rows on wooden benches, facing each other.

For lunch: a plate piled with hunks of stale white bread, thinly spread with margarine, a communal omelette, a communal dish of bone-infested fish stew – more gravy than fish. I was mainly interested in the tea, already milked when poured from a huge kettle. My companions added several heaped spoons of sugar to their enamel mugs; the visitor was given a chipped cup. As we ate Pierre told me he works for an evangelical American NGO in Kigali, where Monique is about to start teaching at a primary school. I got the impression that he had, as we say in Ireland, ‘married above himself’. His bride seemed not quite at ease, perched on the edge of a sagging brown velveteen sofa, being deferential to her new in-laws who in turn were being deferential to her. She whispered a reproof when Pierre began to spit his fish-bones onto the earthen floor; he ignored her.

‘In before days we have nice things,’ said Pierre apologetically, looking around the bare little room. ‘In war days we went gone from shooting and grenades. Coming back, the houses is empty.’ He asked then where I would spend the night.

I explained – at a tea estate-cum-factory a few miles further on, ruined during the war and now being restored under the supervision of an old friend of mine, John Walton, first met in Peru in 1978.

‘Is far,’ said Pierre. ‘Too many kilometres. Stay here and I talk and talk, is good for my English. Is room and bed for you. Tomorrow you foot on to your tea friends, we have matatu to our little new home. In Kigali, you become visiting us again. I go say my sister, make bed.’

Monique and I then achieved a limping conversation in embryonic English and French. Pierre was visible outside, being interrogated – it seemed – by the elders. His mother looked agitated. One man, tall and grey-haired, stood up to speak loudly and angrily to Pierre. Monique leaned sideways to peer nervously through the doorway. Moments later Pierre returned, discomfited, and withdrew his invitation.

Two months ago, this hospitable family sheltered a Kabale-bound Frenchwoman, travelling alone, whose NGO Pajero had broken down nearby at sunset. Throughout the night stones were thrown into the compound, the roof tiles were badly damaged and every window in the hut was broken. I had noticed that they remain broken: glass if very expensive.

‘Our Tutsi father has died,’ said Pierre. ‘Dead in October 1990, they say he like very much RPA. Now hate for him go on. For all our family. Father Tutsi, all are Tutsi. Hutu mother is Tutsi if she marry him. They like reason for attack and make us fear. I have apologies, I like to give you shelter. But mother have right, she have all to protect in this houses.’ Inconsequentially he added, ‘Mixed families have big confusions, from six children you can see three Tutsi, three Hutu.’ Pierre himself has Hutu features but Tutsi stature.

I made understanding noises and left soon after, Pierre insisting on filling my two-litre water-bottle with costly bottled water brought from Kigali. The elders again ignored me as I descended to the road.

Go – giving refuge to a muzungu in distress could provoke the vandalizing of a compound and the terrorizing of its inhabitants. Or was that attack because the Frenchwoman’s vehicle identified her as an aid worker? I have heard that in Rwanda foreign aid workers are popular only among the communities they are aiding – and not always there.

The smooth tarred road (a motorist’s delight but unkind to trekking feet) continued to wind around the bases of intensively cultivated slopes. Beyond the wide flat valley on my left rose forested hills. This is a very beautiful country. And today provided perfect trekking weather: no wind, no rain, no sun until 3.15 when they high pale grey cloud cover dispersed. Then came the beginning of the tea plantation – Rwanda’s first, established in 1946. It covers 8000 level hectares and employs 2000 locals who work six days a week from dawn to noon and are paid piecemeal. Looking at the low, neatly pruned bushes in their symmetrical rows, with drainage channels running through them at intervals in straight brown lines, one would never suspect the extent of the recent war-damage. Soon a large wayside notice directed me to the factory and the last few miles were uphill on a dirt-track through woodland – the ubiquitous bluegums, mighty pines and many indigenous unknowns. Round and round went the track, affording splendid views of other valleys and hills. The variety of birds was astounding; I counted fourteen species, some like jewels being thrown through the branches. From one distant commune across a valley – the little huts invisible amidst banana groves – came the sound of drums and hymn-singing and hand-clapping.

The tea-factory’s domination of this area for the past half-century means that Mulindi is not a typical commune. The large settlement below the summit occupies a saddle between two hills and is a dreary collection of tin-roofed, one-storey buildings serviced by a few mini-shops, hawkers’ stalls and shebeens. The Sunday idlers hanging around the track junction viewed me with an astonishment undiluted by friendliness. I paused to ask which way to the factory but no one understood – or tried to understand – my rudimentary French. I turned right and the track became steeper, climbing between rough stretches of grass behind which stood rows of shoddy shacks. Here a few goats were tethered and hens pecked and children swarmed. Then two young men came towards me and smiled a welcome. Both are Kenyans, employed by the tea company as engineers. When I had introduced myself as John Walton’s friend they asked eagerly when he would be returning from the UK and escorted me to the hilltop. In a battered sentry-box, by the factory compound’s closed gate, sat a soldier whose duty it is to keep out the locals.

My escort explained that I am now on historic territory, the headquarters of the RPA for three years and nine months while they struggled to gain power in Rwanda. Much fighting took place on this site and bullets and shell-cases may still be picked up as souvenirs. The completely destroyed and looted factory has been made as good as new with EU money – in fact, better than new. Given modern equipment, it takes only twenty-four hours for each day’s crop of freshly-picked leaves to be dried, finely ground and packed into sacks ready for export – to be added to those blends that go into tea-bags. However, many of the former workers’ dwellings and their health-centre and school and community-hall remain derelict: bullet-pocked, shell blasted, windowless, blood-stained, aggressively graffiti’d. Paul Kagame’s bunker was pointed out to me and later, as I walked alone across a disused soccer-field on a flat ledge, I found my own special souvenir in the long grass: a military helmet, camouflage green, destined to adorn my study.

Surprisingly, the enormous shed-like factory, with its adjacent colossal stack of firewood (grown nearby by the company) does not give this hilltop an industrial aura. All around are fine bungalows, large and small, set amidst colourful gardens and connected by hedged laneways. Even now, post-war, the general effect is agreeably villagey – as long as one doesn’t dwell on the socio-economic implications of tea-estates …

I am writing this on the verandah of the guest-bungalow, perched on a narrow ledge on the periphery of the ‘village’, bright with flowering shrubs and semi-encircled by towering indigenous trees – old and dignified and busy with bird-life. Otherwise the silence is unbroken. Far below lies a tranquil valley, already in shadow as the sun pours a gentle golden light onto the opposite hills. These seem to be strew with mirrors; my binoculars have just revealed the glinting new tin roofs of huts being hurriedly built with aid money for some of the returned refugees.

It feels odd, on my first evening in Rwanda, to be staying in this bungalow where so much has happened – so many historic confrontations, speculations, gambles taken, decisions made, statements issued – all going to the shaping of the new Rwanda. And now it has reverted to its original role and the normality of this hilltop, the genocide regarded as a mere hiccup, briefly halting tea-production – seems unreal. And perhaps is unreal? Yet this is how things should be: people industriously picking up the pieces and getting on with life.

This has been a taxing day, both physically and emotionally. Not that I expected Rwanda to be emotionally non-taxing. But I am in an odd mood this evening – really rather an absurd mood. The contrast between Rwanda’s natural beauty and its present atmosphere has thrown me. Atmosphere: meaning ‘mental or moral environment, pervading tone or mood’. I think back to 1968 when I trekked through Eastern Turkey by way of taking healthy exercise while pregnant. One day I walked through a region that made me feel as I do this evening. It deeply disturbed me though I didn’t know why. Back home, a little research revealed that I had been traversing an area marked by one of the worst atrocities of the Armenian genocide. There, half a century before my journey, the Turks had flung thousands of men, women and children into deep ravines and left them to die – some quickly of their injuries, others slowly of starvation. That experience taught me that an awareness of psychic stains on the atmosphere is not dependent on foreknowledge, is not imaginary or in any sense subjective.

kigali, 20 january

A late start this morning: until 9.00 no one was available to whom I could say ‘Good-bye and thank you’. Last night there was a postponed New Year’s staff party, to which the Rwandan Director kindly invited me – but by then my bed beckoned.

While descending to the main road I was overlooking miles of tea flecked with bright colours as scores of pickers moved amidst the waist-high bushes, delicately picking the end buds and their two tiny adjacent leaves. Demanding work, on which depends Rwanda’s reputation for exporting only the highest quality of tea. Men, women and children (older children) are employed here, the women most numerous.

Down in the valley, I walked for hours along the edge of this plantation, meeting many pickers carrying their morning’s harvest to the nearest collection point. It is obvious that this immensely valuable foreigh-exchange-earning crop does nothing to alleviate local poverty – rather the reverse. The wages paid are worth much less than the food that could be grown on Mulindi’s rich soil. Moreover, the right to use a given plot of land – which right may be passed on to the next generation – greatly enhances a peasant’s status. The government’s cash payments, in exchange for expropriated land, cannot compensate for this loss of status.

Eventually the road swung away from the tea valleys and climbed quite steeply towards the pass near Byumba town, winding through a landscape of heart-stopping loveliness – abundantly green, some slopes wooded, others cultivated, all apparently uninhabited. But only apparently; the peasants’ small huts are usually concealed by banana groves. Given the pivotal significance of this road, for Rwanda, Burundi and Kivu Province, there was surprisingly little traffic: no private cars, only two NGO vehicles, a few massive trucks – all coming from the port of Mombasa over a thousand miles away.

Soon after 3.00, life took an unexpected turning, as I guessed it sometimes (often) would on this rather dotty journey.

Flashback to my London-Nairobi flight. Beside me on the plane sat a Baptist missionary of American parentage, born in a remote corner of Zaire in 1926. He has lived there ever since, apart from three years at an American theological college where he ‘felt like a gorilla in a zoo’. Mentally I labelled Matt ‘not the worst sort of missionary’. He speaks three of Zaire’s innumerable languages, in addition to Swahili, French and ‘just enough Kinyarwanda to get along’. Moreover, he is so pro-Zairean that he cannot forgive the US government for its backing of Mobutu throughout the Cold War. He told me that when the Banyamulenge had taken Goma the requisitioned his huge mission compound as a barrack. For two months he remained nearby, then saw his precious buildings being set on fire when Kabila’s troops moved on. ‘I quit then – I hated quitting but my kids and grandkids are all in the states and wanted me out. Now things are quieter I’m going back to see what can be salvaged and check out our guys there.’

Matt was flying on to Kampala to pick up his vehicle to drive to Goma, staying in Kigali overnight. As we parted on the plane he said, ‘May see you on the road!’ And so he did, this afternoon, as I approached the military road-block outside Byumba town.

Matt braked with a squeal, backed rapidly, leaned out to grin at me and asked, ‘Have you heard the news? My guys in Goma reckon there’s an invasion of Kivu due soonish. The Zairean army aims to retake the whole province before February. OK, so we can laugh at that. But maybe Mobutu’s foreign buddies will do the job. You’d better get shifting if you’re so keen to see Bukavu again. Don’t waste time walking, come to Gisenyi with me tomorrow. Maybe the Goma-Bukavu ferry is running again, maybe not. No matter – I’ve good friends can fix you a ride on the Gisenyi-Cyangugu brewery barge. Then you’re thirty minutes walk from Bukavu. Or less, the rate you seem to go if you only left Kabale yesterday morning.’ He opened the Land-rover’s passenger door. ‘Hop in, throw your gear in the back.’

I didn’t hesitate. Of the 285 passengers on that flight from London, almost certainly only two were heading for Kivu. When Fate seems to be intervening so directly it’s best to pay attention. Anyway, two soldiers had stopped their jeep half-an-hour before to warn me I’d not be allowed to continue on foot beyond the Byumba road-block.

From the pass – one of Rwanda’s highest points – the road descends around the precipitous flanks of uncultivable mountains. Alas! Matt is a horribly fast driver; we covered the forty-five miles to the outskirts of Kigali in thirty-five minutes, during which time I learned a little more about my companion. In 1896 his missionary grandfather settled in Kenya, then became a pioneer bringer of the gospel to the Belgian Congo, directly supported by both President ??? and the unspeakably vicious King Leopold. (At that point I thought, inter alia, how odd it is that Mobutu so closely resembles that monarch in personality and behaviour.) Subsequently Grandad was awarded all sorts of honours, royal and presidential, for his successful christianizing endeavours. I intuited that Matt has been saddened by his progeny’s declining to continue those endeavours. He believes reconciliation in Rwanda is ‘no way ever going to happen’, not for the reasons commonly offered but because too few Rwandans have been reborn.

Tonight Matt is staying in a missionary hostel and I am staying in the Gloria Hotel, paying US$20 for a cramped windowless room, unfurnished apart from the bed, with a waterless bathroom – and nobody brings buckets. As Rachel warned me, prices are, by African standards, very high in Rwanda.

In a nearby bar (where this is being written) I felt a pang on again seeing bottles of Primus, brewed in Bukavu and recalling all those happy days on the patio of No. 19 and the shore of Lake Kivu. If I do get back there, I’m going to miss the RAR unit (especially the junior R) most dreadfully.

Here I have a table to myself, beside a long picture window overlooking a jumble of rusty tin roofs. Mount Kigali is visible across the crowded valley, changing colour – from grey to blue to umber – as the sun declines. This big bar is as yet uncrowded and quiet, the scattered pairs of groups conversing in low voices, the few lone drinkers looking gloomy. I find myself wondering, ‘Who is what?’ – a morbid but inevitable reaction to the shadow of genocide still darkening this country. Of course it’s not now p.c. to acknowledge the physiological differences between pure-bred Hutu and Tutsi; we are supposed to deny the evidence of our eyes and go along with the reconciliatory RPF assertion that the Banyarwanda are ‘one people’. Which is true, culturally; all Rwandans speak the same language and share the same traditions and customs. Yet it’s plain to the detached observer that at some time in the distant past the Tutsi’s ancestors migrated from some region (Ethiopia? Somalia?) where people are much taller than the Hutu and have straighter noses, thinner lips and longer fingers. At the end of the nineteenth century, when the various colonial powers hi-jacked physical anthropology (then a new discipline) for their own reasons, the Germans – Rwanda’s first colonizers – classified the Tutsi as ‘Hamitic’ (more like ‘us’, therefore ‘superior’) and the Hutu as primitive Bantu. So they were not surprised to find the Tutsi ruling over the rest in most regions, though not yet in the north-west where the Germans helped them to get a grip – if not a very tight grip.

After World War I the Belgians took over Rwanda and Burundi (then run as one entity) under a League of Nations Mandate. In pre-colonial times, it was possible for a Hutu who had accumulated a certain number of cattle to climb the socio-political ladder and gain Tutsi status. This flexibility – though the transition was rare enough – prevented the evolution of a Hindu-type caste system. It also ensured against the evolution of a Hutu élite, capable of disputing Tutsi domination. Then, between 1926 and 1933, the Belgians put a stop to upward mobility. Every Rwanda, from infancy to senility, had to carry a pass immutably identifying him or her as Tutsi or Hutu. The colonists also established indirect rule, as so many of their ilk were wont to do. But first it was necessary to smash the tradition whereby the Mwami (king) appointed three chiefs to administer his territories: a Tutsi with responsibility for gathering taxes and recruiting warriors, a Tutsi in charge of cattle and grazing rights, a Hutu in charge of matters agricultural. By concentrating authority in one hand-picked regional chief, the Belgians eliminated these ancient and healthy checks and balances. And all Hutu chiefs were dismissed.

Through their over-indulged puppets, the Belgians ruled with sickening cruelty and few Tutsi protested on behalf of their enslaved fellow-Banyarwanda. Meanwhile, the colonists’ missionary allies – mainly Catholic with the White Fathers in the lead – exacerbated the situation by going along with the official educational policy: only Tutsi were deserving of schooling. Before World War II, Hutu were excluded from all Church schools, then the only schools in rural areas. However, clerical attitudes changed dramatically after World War II. This missionaries then recruited came from the less privileged layers of their own society – and from the French-speaking provinces of Wallonia, which made them more sympathetic towards the wretched Hutu peasants. By the mid-’50s an increasing number of Hutu were graduating from the Groupe Scolaire at Astrida (now Butare). But still all civil service and private sector jobs were reserved for Tutsi; only the Church offered the Hutu a livelihood. It also allowed them an opportunity to agitate against discrimination. They took over several Church publications, with clerical approval, and began a political campaign (with clerical guidance) that was to end, very bloodily, with the ‘revolution’ of 1959-62, the departure of the Belgians and the inauguration of the Hutu Gregoire Kayibanda as first President of the Republic of Rwanda. That ‘revolution’ was closer in spirit to a genocide. Uncounted thousands of Tutsi died, other thousands saw their homes burned down and/or their cattle herds stolen. By 1961 about 120,000 had gone into exile, leaving the Hutu and the Church in charge of the newly-independent Republic.

My ‘physical anthropological’ survey of the bar’s customers was inconclusive. I remember Rachel’s noting the fact that generations of mixed marriages have blurred visible differences. And naturally, given the percentages involved, Hutu genes predominate. However, one of the young bar-tenders was unmistakable Tutsi: tall and slender with an oval face and large luminous eyes. Had I seen him in London I would have assumed him to be an Amhara. While I was buying my third Primus we got into conversation. He is the son of ’59-ers, as they are known: a returnee from Kinshasa where he learned English while working in the American Embassy.

‘It was fine and dandy,’ said he, ‘to be able to come home last month. The Zaireans turned against us after Kabila got going. They fired all Tutsi from their government service.’ (What government service I wondered …) For this young man ‘coming home’ was, in fact, his first experience of Rwanda.