8. ‘THE MADAM IN THE VEHICLE’
Rwanda is presenting me with, inter alia, a professional ethics problem. Various aid workers are being hospitable, informative, helpful – even allowing me to accompany their local staff on day-trips to hilltop projects. Inevitably I have reservations about some of those projects but I must avoid ungratefully embarrassing any NGO by identifying it. Therefore this chapter, though based on my daily notes, is not a transcription of my journal in chronological order.
A Rwandan might be identified thus: Aphrodis Emmanuel Munyurabatware from the cellule of Nyakibingo in the sector of Ruharambuga in the commune of Kirambo in the prefecture of Gikongoro. In 1960 Rwanda’s chiefdoms and sub-chiefdoms were replaced by eleven prefectures, each administered by a préfet and sous-prefet, based in the main town. A burgomaster and councillors, appointed by the government, control each commune. Junior officials (responsables) oversee the cellules of ten or so homesteads (rugas). There are no villages; a commune is made up of hundreds or thousands of rugas (a hut or huts in a small, usually hedged compound) scattered on several hillsides. On a high flattish hilltop stands the Commune Office, a long, one-storey, solidly constructed building flying the national flag. From here the burgomaster and his councillors administer their territory. The communal police are accountable to the burgomaster; all over Rwanda, during the genocide, they supplied the Interahamwe with weapons, transport and every sort of encouragement including free beer. (Because the national gendarmerie was completely politicized – merely an arm of the MRND – there was no police force avialable when the RPF began to govern in July 1994.)
At some little distance from the Commune Office, dispersed over the hilltop or on slightly lower ledges or connecting saddles, is the Parish: a large Catholic church, possibly one or two smaller Protestant churches, two or three schools, a health centre, perhaps a (doctorless) cottage hospital, sometimes – depending on a commune’s size and accessability – an imposing convent and/or a seminary. All Parish buildings are European-style, many were the scenes of massacres. They symbolize the wealth and power of the Catholic Church which by 1930 had secured a tight grip on Rwandan society, its authoritarianism bringing nothing new to the peasants’ lives. But now things are changing. The leaders of all the Churches disgraced themselves before, during and after the genocide and Christianity may find it hard to recover its old influence –despite the heroism of a minority of nuns and clergymen.
When the First Hutu Republic took the baton of power from the Belgians in 1961 it ran on without faltering. The Catholic Church vigorously supported the new government and its Parishes continued to prosper, as they did after Habyarimana’s bloodless (almost) coup of 1973. At first his dictatorship made little impression on the majority, yet as time passed it did bring certain benefits for everyone. In 1962 the Republic’s per capita income was the third lowest in the world. By 1987 Rwanda had overtaken sixteen countries, medical care was steadily improving and school attendance had risen to 62 per cent.
For decades Rwanda was the international donors’ model protégé. The foreign aid workers then tripping over each other in Kigali found the country very agreeable indeed: clean and neat, stable and well-organized. Habyarimana was admired for eschewing any messy experiments with democracy or (God forbid!) socialism. The hard-working peasants knew their place and kept to it. Those Tutsi who had refused to run away, despite the pogroms, were allowed to be economically active though discriminated against politically. When Rwanda suddenly became a butcher’s yard too many ex-pats couldn’t believe that the MRND) and its allies had planned what was happening.
During the previous five years, outside influences had been pushing Rwanda towards economic disaster. By 1987 coffee was bringing in 79 per cent of the nation’s export earnings. Two years later coffee prices plummetted on the world market, though not in the shops, and Rwanda – among several other small countries, but more than most – was devastated. Immediately after came the World Bank/IMF SAP, already mentioned. By 1993 Rwandans were asking how often the world’s poorest populations must ‘structurally adjust’ to still worse poverty while the richest imposed globally applicable rules to suit themselves. This abrupt and severe increase in rural hardship, combined with faction-fighting among the rapacious political élite as their ‘cake’ shrank, contributed significantly to the moral collapse that left space for genocide.
Over the past two years UNICEF has registered almost 26,000 family reunifications, yet more than 94,000 ‘unaccompanied children’ (their official de??igation) remain in centres or foster-care. These centres, supported by foreign aid, not called ‘orphanages’, that is too defeatist. Of course many children know their parents are dead – often they have seen them being killed – but the under-fives can give no indication of why they were found astray as toddlers or picked out of some ditch as babies. Others only know that in the general panic they somehow became separated from all their family. Some NG0s run specialist teams of ‘tracers’ (Rwandan workers) who are now searching for their relatives with renewed energy, feeling that since the mass-return in November ’96 their chances of success are greater. Tracing is a formidable task, demanding limitless persitence as clue after clue at first looks promising, then proves to be false.
Like most humanitarian endeavours, this one is fraught with complications. By now many children – in a centre for more than two years – have, inevitably, become institutionalized. Their lives are secure, ordered, hardship-free; they have three meals a day, water comes from nearby standpipes (perhaps even frcm taps), adequate clothing is provided, schooling is provided, a bunk-bed is provided for each child (or one between two toddlers). Their minders are, on the whole, kindly and there is a town as background for their social life, limited though it may be, Among the older age group – say ten to fifteen this institutionalization can cause severe readjustment problems, especially if they are being reunited with recently returned relatives who may themselves be having readjustment problems. Life is tough on the hills. Food must be cultivated by the sweat of one’s brow – literally – and if it happens twice a day you’re lucky. Water must be carried long distances up muscle-taxing gradients. Fuel must be collected from the forest. Bed is a pile of banana fronds on a mud floor (probably damp in the rainy season) and you share a thin blanket with two or three others. Garments are scarce and ragged and – because of the water problem – filthy. School may be too far away or too expensive – anyway an extra mouth to feed means extra limbs are needed to cultivate. Also, there are no bright town lights (only firelight, after sunset and that not for long), no taped music being played in bars, no casually pitying ex-pats to stand you a fizzy drink … Some teenagers soon run away from rigors they can’t cope with – often physically can’t cope with, life in a centre having so softened them.
One morning I set off in an NGO vehicle with two young Hutu women tracers, a Tutsi driver – a ’59-er returnee from Zaire – and Annette, a slim, silent, expressionless fourteen-year-old who had seen no member of her family since May ’94. Now a ‘found’ aunt, her dead mother’s sister, had agreed to give her a home in a sector of a commune bordering on Burundi. She wore the centre’s uniform, a simple sky-blue frock, freshly washed and ironed, and a pair of blue plastic sandals to match. Her luggage was a heavy wooden trunk of Belgian provenance, stuffed with donated garments and toys and knick-knacks. I thought it strange that she came alone to the Landcruiser, dragging her trunk behind her. Strange that no friends were there to see her off, wish her well – it was early, before school time. But our ways are not their ways …
The track was very rough and on the town’s outskirts Annette, sitting in the back between the tracers, suddenly vomited all over them. As they mopped up, Louise, the English speaker, explained, ‘She wasn’t in a vehicle for two and a half years, since the truck from a camp in Tanzania.’
The Landcruiser climbed slowly up and around one hill, two hills, three hills. On the second and third I noticed something puzzling: much fertile land uncultivated. All over the slopes and level ledges wild vines are choking banana groves, coffee bushes have grown to trees, weeds and grasses stand four feet high, there is an abundance of grazing but no cattle or even goats. Given the land shortage, and endless talk about Tutsi returnees having problems with Hutu squatters, I had visualized every plot being taken over. Pre-’59, many Tutsi lived in this prefecture so they and their progeny could hardly be accused of squatting had they resettled hereabouts in ’94 on their return from Burundi after the RPA victory. Later, an ex-pat who, unusually, speaks Kinyarwanda, told me he intuited the post-genocidal vibes had deterred such resettlements. And Hutu from the grossly overcrowded hills near Kigali feared to take over these abandonded ruga so close to the Burundi border. However, one can now see, dotted over the slopes, small patches of newly-dug brown earth where some recent returnees from Zaire have begun their struggle to reclaim the land.
On the third hill we were overlooking Burundi, a mile or so below us and quarter-way down we could drive no further. A narrow pathway ran through banana groves, some plants liberated from weeds and vines but many dead or dying. For twenty minutes we saw nobody and passed only one tiny ruga. On most hills Rwanda’s over-population is not evident; invisible people beaver away far from the paths.
The second pathside hut was Annette’s aunt’s home: a three-roomed mud shack, its minute windows unglazed but wooden-shuttered, its roof of red-brown tiles. (These are a pleasing Belgian innovation.) The door was padlocked so we sat and waited. Then abruptly Annette stood up, rushed around a corner and could be heard vomiting again.
‘It’s nerves,’ remarked Louise.
Soon after, a youth emerged from the bananas, barefooted, ragged, dripping sweat. Yes, he knew where his mother was working, he’d fetch her. Half-an-hour later she came toiling up the steep slope below the hut – small, thin, worn-faced, a December returnee from a Tanzanian camp. She hesitated, stared silently at the tall fourteen-year-old with burgeoning breasts, well-groomed hair, a smart frock, new sandals., This was not the eleven-year-old peasant child she remembered. Then she stepped forward and briefly embraced her niece: a shy embrace but intense. At once Annette’s expressionless mask was discarded. She smiled and wept and as they embraced again I chanced to notice their hands – similar hands, but aunt’s work-coarsened, Annette’s sleek from easy living.
Much talk followed but we were not invited into the hut. Then came form-filling in triplicate; each copy of the document had to be signed by Annette, her aunt, Louise and a witness – an elderly emaciated man summoned from that other pathside ruga.
As we all strolled back to the vehicle half-a-dozen small children and a toddler (terrified of me) appeared out of nowhere and tagged along. All these recent returnees were relatively healthy on their arrival home, said Louise. They are no longer so.
The toddler has ringworm all over his head. A four-year-old’s hands and forearms are covered in monstrous warts. Other small children have open sores and angry-looking rashes. How, I wonder, are their adults adjusting, after so long in well-run (albeit militia-bullied) camps? One has to be careful not to exaggerate the ‘comfort’ of the camps, yet they did provide regular food supplies and more and better medical care than the indigenes living around them could ever hope for.
As Annette’s cousin shouldered that heavy trunk – with difficulty – I noticed its patchwork of faded labels recording how often it had travelled by sea in colonial times. And that was it. There were none of the lingering farewells we would indulge in, though the tracers were obviously fond of and concerned about Annette. Wordlessly she walked away, without a backward glance, into her new – but really her aunt’s old – life. Her aunt’s home is a two-hour walk from the hilltop amenities.
We went then to the next hill to check on the well-being of a nine-year-old boy reunited with his maternal grandparents three months ago. This did not involve descending all the way to valley level; these twin hills are, as it were, joined at the navel. Hereabouts no vehicle can go above cycling speed, which slightly moderates my frustration. Soon the Landcruiser had to be abandoned again, to my joy, and our walk took us almost to the bank of the frontier river. However, in this border area the driver is not too happy about being left sitting unarmed in a stationary vehicle that might tempt any anti-NGO militia who happened to be around. In Burundi it seems vehicles are easily and quickly ‘transformed’. Or they might simply burn it …
The boy was not in his grandparents’ ruga – or anywhere around. Both were evasive; so were the three men repairing their thatch. Gently but firmly the tracers probed: at which point I saw why two go on such missions. Together they can to some extent represent ‘authority’ as one African woman could not do in a ruga full of men or not unless she was very exceptional. I tactfully left them to it and walked down to throw a stone into Burundi across the narrow river – not that I’ve anything against Burundi, just to prove it was a mere stone’s throw away.
Eventually it transpired that the missing boy was so seriously disturbed his grandparents (who themselves seemed quite disturbed) couldn’t cope and transferred him to an uncle on the other side of the hill. It was hard work finding uncle, to-ing and fro-ing up and down and around that hill from ruga to ruga, seeking directions from stressed-looking people who viewed us with some suspicion. Uncle is a sullen, hard-faced character. He prevaricated at length before admitting that the boy had run away; one felt he did not regret losing him. If he really had run away … In any event, he has disappeared and there is nothing to be done about it. An NGO has tried to help him and can devote no more resources to a search very unlikely to succeed. The sun was setting – slipping into a crimson cloud-lake – as we got back to base.
Next morning, soon after dawn, we were off again in another directions with a different driver, a Tutsi survivor. Soon we passed a mass-grave marked by a new monumental gravestone. I would have photographed it but for the fact that among those 7000-plus lay our driver s parents, paternal grandfather, four siblings and numerous nephews and nieces. He survived because trading in Burundi at the time.
We drove far to find a family of five orphans, reunited with a maternal uncle last September. Normally follow-up visits happen after a month or so but this routine was disrupted by the November/December crisis.
Approaching this ruga, I could sense my companions’ apprehension – and they had reason for it. The eldest boy, aged fifteen, ran away to Kigali. Uncle rejected the fourteen-year-old because he was lazy (fate unknown). The eight-year-old has gone to his grandmother and the two girls, aged ten and twelve, have been retained but were working too far away to be summoned. Or so uncle said; he was being aggressively non-co-operative.
‘We can’t ask too many questions,’ explained Louise. ‘That way we could annoy people. For tracing to succeed, we depend on help from the whole community.’
Next stop: Granny’s remote ruga to find the eight-year-old. A two-hour search took us along some alarmingly narrow tracks, never meant for a vehicle, overlooking a deep valley where communal rice was being sown. (Most valley floors are not cultivated in family plots.) Then the driver very slowly forced the Landcruiser through jungly vegetation so dense that the windows had to be closed to protect us from thorny branches. Here I suggested, ‘Isn’t it time to walk ?’ But Louise and Felicité demurred, complaining of aching legs after the previous day’s two brief ambles. However, the vegetation soon won and we left the vehicle two miles from Granny’s squalid hut-shed.
At one end of the dwelling decaying vegetable refuse was piled high and hens scratcted and pecked avidly all over it. Beside that pile, on a tattered straw mat, a young woman lay naked under a threadbare, filth-encrusted grey blanket, She was malaria-delirious, tossing and turning, moaning and trying to throw off the blanket – kept in place by a tiny girl with hideously burn-scarred legs, A missing gable wall left the structure open to all weathers and Rwanda’s nights can be very cold. For the visitors low stools were brought from a pitch-dark inner room. On an unsteady bench against one wall sat six little boys – including our quarry – using machetes to peel manioc taken from a mound at their feet: hard work for small hands. None can afford school fees. Granny was draped in scraps of fabric so worn you couldn’t guess at the garment’s original identity. A small woman, haggard and slightly wild-eyed, she had an absess on one ankle. A middle-aged man joined us, his right arm missing from the shoulder and his left hand from the wrist. (‘A survivor’, whispered Louise, ‘they left him for dead.’) Two women followed, their ages indeterminate; before realising that some of the boys were their sons I had assumed them to be in their late fifties. Both looked slightly Tutsi in different ways; they are in fact ‘Hutsi’ – half-and-half.
This indaba continued for nearly an hour. The eight-year-old, a cheerful-looking lad, gave long answers to the tracers’ questions and seemed genuinely content to remain with Granny. I could see why; as he spoke she looked at him with love, She has lost her only daughter, his mother – she needs him, Despite that ruga’s acute poverty, he is lucky.
As we returned to the vehicle, Louise observed that to her generation increasingly frequent intermarriages had made the Tutsi/Hutu distinction seem irrelevant. Left to themselves, Rwanda’s peasants didn’t have the inbuilt prejudices of, for example, the Northern Irish, to whom intermarriage was anathema – and potentially dangerous. The Rwandans do share a bonding culture; ‘We are all Banyarwanda’ is not merely an expedient RPF political slogan though there is an understandable tendency to dismiss it as such. Consider the gathering in that bottom-of-the-pile ruga – Granny a Hutu, the married man a Tutsi, one ‘Hutsi’ woman the widow of a Tutsi, the other wife to a Hutu who joined the Interahamwe and became a killer of Tutsi. Louise who filled me in on all this, succinctly summed it up: ‘Our genocide didn’t come from what was inside people, it came from what leaders put into people.’
I am comforted by many accounts of Hutu adults now helping parentless Tutsi families, giving them emotional support as well as practical assistance. As we went jolting along the main track, Louise pointed down one slope towards a solitary speck of UN blue amidst a patch of beans, cabbages and baby banana plants. In that tarpaulin-roofed bender live six orphans, aged four to fifteen, who are successfully feeding themselves, with some guidance from Hutu neighbours, off their family plots. Their hut was looted and burned but they hope soon to build another with NGO aid. When the eldest sibling, a sixteen-yearold girl, was traced to them last month they rejoiced greatly to have a surrogate mother.
On one hilltop we passed a trendy modern basilica, painted bright blue; it is bullet-marked and weed-surrounded, all its windows and doors sealed with tin sheeting. ‘It must stay closed,’ said Louise, ‘thousands died in there.’
Here as elsewhere, only small children showed friendliness towards me though the Landcruiser is well-known and the tracing team’s mission understood. Several adults uneasily asked Louise, ‘Who’s the madam in the vehicle?’ She explained to me, ‘Some will be fearing you’re an HRFOR monitor!’
The last ruga on our list, quite close to the town, was also inaccessible by vehicle. Half-way up an overgrown precipitous slope ten people occupy a tiny hut that seems about to slide into the valley. These returnees from Tanzania are severely malnourished, the worst case a two-year-old boy not yet able (or not wanting?) to walk and responding to no stimulus. His father is too feeble to stand without help, his bag-of-bones grandmother was slumped in a corner of the hut. A little family land is available but no one has the energy to clear and cultivate it; all depend on a few banana plants urgently needing attention. ‘We’ll organize an emergency feeding programme,’ said Louise.’ ‘Supervised, or some neighbours might grab their rations. After a month on high-energy biscuits they should be able to fend for themselves.’ I wondered, ‘Is she being over-optimistic?’
Most indabas take place outside the huts; sometimes stools are provided, sometimes not. I got the impression this was a measure of how welcome the tracers were, or how much resented for their nosiness.
Rwanda could do with many more goats. There is ample grazing, the bovine population having been so drastically reduced, and goat meat would provide desperately needed protein for children – though one has to admit it’s more likely adults would eat them. I wish too (when in a maternalistic mood) that someone would try to persuade all Africans to drink goats’ milk, one of the staple peasant foods in so many countries. Louise shuddered at the thought. ‘But it smells!’ she protested.
During the genocide thousands of Tutsi homes were burned, shelled or otherwise demolished. Other thousands, abandoned by the Hutu refugees, were soon appropriated by returning Tutsi exiles; more than 400,000 had returned from Uganda, Burundi and Zaire by November ’94. House-building was therefore high on the RPF’s ‘Government of National Unity’ agenda and for obvious reasons was a ‘project’ that greatly appealed to NG0s. (Photographs of smiling families moving into their new homes – provided by kind people like you – are a fund-raiser’s delight.) For practical reasons the government favours villages as a feature of the new Rwanda. If you want to provide piped water and sewage for everyone (maybe even public telephones and electricity, one day), it makes sense to create compact villages. But the Banyarwanda have never lived in villages and, despite their traditional subservience to Authority, are resolutely refusing to do so now. (Incidentally, nearly 70 per cent of the rural population had access to safe drinking water pre-genocide, an achievement unmatched elsewhere in Africa.)
In one commune I was shown 192 dwellings built scarcely twenty yards apart, as specified by the Housing Ministry. These were completed two months ago but 191 remain empty. The other is occupied by a tragic young woman and her apathetic toddler. She is the Hutu widow of a Tutsi; he and their three small children were killed in her presence. Then she was gang-raped: the toddler is the result. Logically she too should have been killed; for genocidal purposes the wives of Tutsi counted as Tutsi. Looking at her I wished she had been killed. She never speaks, doesn’t try to survive – Hutu neighbours bring her food once a day. But with what’s left of her humanity she loves that toddler. When I appeared – a strange apparition, to her disordered mind threatening – she seized the little fellow and clung to him and stared at me with a mad pathetic defiance.
I’m not sure I’ll want to renew my visa at the end of one month in this country.
Later my companion Casimir (a Tutsi aid worker) explained, ‘It’s not only that people are against the new idea of living close together. Coming back from the camps they’re afraid of being obvious targets for anyone wanting revenge – with those shiny roofs and beside the motor-track. It would be too easy to attack and wipe out villages and get away quickly. Most will only feel safe living in the old way, hidden on the hills, hard to get to. I say to them, “Wouldn’t you be safer in a group, not just one ruga by itsself?” But they can’t seen it that way, maybe they’ve too many memories of group massacres. Crowding into churches, schools, hospitals, Commune Offices didn’t save the Tutsi. Many survivors don’t understand how the refugees were forced to go to camps by the organizers. They think all who fled killed. But I tell them I believ the killers are the ones didn’t come home –ran away instead with their families into the middle of Zaire.’ (Casimir is a ’59-er from Uganda.)
It is disconcerting to see so many empty new houses where all over the nearby hills are two-man-tent-sized benders, made of interwoven sticks and banana fronds, roofed with the UN tarpaulins given to each returning familly and often sheltering up to eight people. More than 35,000 returned to this particular commune in November and December.
Tin roofs are given to NGOs by the UNHCR, which imports them from Nairobi at considerable expense. The government opposes this arrangement, arguing that a valuable local skill (tile-making) is being lost and anyway tiles are cheaper – in fact cost only the makers’ time and energy, plus fire-wood for baking. And would could be bought from the government’s own plantations, thus circulating aid money in Rwanda instead of spending it in Kenya. No of course tiles are coming to be seen as inferior, old-fashioned – and some people are demanding tin instead of wooden doors. The UNHCR insists that given the need to house thousands rapidly, tin roofs make sense. There is however no shortage of labour here; Rwanda swarms with jobless young males. The only real advantage of a tin roof is for rain-collection, yet none of the ‘Shelter Programmes’ I have seen includes guttering – not an expensive extra, nor is the tar-barrel to go with it. All these shining metallic sheets are so offensive I wince each time we come upon a rash of them – and they won’t look much better when rusted. In contrast, the long-lasting red-brown tiles merge perfectly with the landscape
In another commune we visited a site on which a score of returnee men are working quickly and cheerfully to build themselves new homes with well-made, sun-dried mud bricks. Casimar’s NGO is arranging to transport their tin roofs from Kigalia and is itself paying for the wooden doors and tiny shutters, to be made by a local carpenter. Some WFP boffins are considering a scheme to provide these men with free food while they build and Casimir voiced his doubt about t his. ‘Is it sensible?’ Lood how they are now, they must have food enough or they couldn’t work so hard at such heavy labour. If the WFP comes along with hand-outs they could begin to think they should get wages too – instead of working voluntarily, independently. That you you set up more of this dependency we’re cursed with. Why not leave them as they are, happy and proud to be building their own homes? Anyway most donated food is sold at high prices to buy banana-beer. Or sometimes – not so often – to buy more palatable food.’
Topographically this was an unusual site, a long, broad, grassy ridgetop, the nearest thing I have seen to a plateau in Rwanda. ‘Here used to be many cattle,’ said Casimir. ‘Tutsi cattle – none left. Most cattle were killed too, then eaten. People enjoyed many big feasts in those days. The ones not killed they took to the camps, loaded in FAR trucks. You’ve heard looting was part of the plan? That was smart! Permission to loot – official encouragement to loot – got thousands joining the Interahamwe. Very poor idle young men. Then they were given beer to make them keener to kill. Often rich local businessmen donated beer – their contribution … Everything was looted from the Tutsi – and from the Hutu “enemy”. Money, livestock, household goods, clothes – everything. And immediately the confiscated land was used or “rented out” by the commune’s officials. You were asking me about the neglected land – I think it was neglected sometimes because it was Tutsi-owned, making people superstitious about using it. A few Hutu have admitted to me they felt that way.
Casimir confirmed that many survivors survived simply because they could afford to pay off the Interahamwe. The maimed man I met in ‘Granny’s’ ruga was one such. He promised to tell two Interahamwe where his cash was hidden if they took him to hospital; and arm and a hand had to be amputated but he kept his life at the cost of a mere RF10,000.
To me this aspect of the genocide seems peculiarly dreadful; another proof that the killings were far from being ‘an upsurge of ancient tribal hatred’. The bought-off militia were of course betraying their ‘cause’; they should have disdained all cash offers and got on with the killing. Their failure to do so concentrates the mind, very unpleasantly, on the economic impetus behind the genocide. Most Tutsi peasants were no better of than their Hutu neighbours, yet what little they had could be possessed by their killers. Is it reasonable to deny, as some do, that over-populaation made easire the organization of the genocide? A frightening thought, when one looks ahead, globally.
Elsewhere, I visited ahousing project specifically for parentless children – a modest project, run by a small NGO.
Over-emotionalism is not one of my flaws yet among those chidren I more than once came close to tears. For a young family to be orphaned is under any circumstances tragic, but normally, in Africa, a supporting network of relatives and friends remains. For many of theseTutsi orphans, there is nobody left. Everyone they or their parents ever knew is dead. The combination of their utter destitution and their joyless, haunted faces shattered me. And their terrible aura of hopeless loneliness was accentuated by their physical isolation as they struggled to build new homes on remote plots.
The first family on Angeline’s list (five children, the eldest a girl of fifteen) live thirty minute’s walk from the motor-track. Their present home is a leaking round thatched hut no bigger than many African poultry-huts – barely high enough for me to stand up in. Their possessions are: one battered dechi-type saucepan, one ladle, one blanket (donated) spread on banana-fronds. Nothing else. Not even one spare garment between them. They use peices of wood as hoe-substitutes. Theirs is a Catch 22 situation. They are too small and frail to cultivate the three family plots and must remain too frail while they are so malnourished. Neighbours sometimes help but themselves have little surplus time or energy. The building of their new three-roomed shack has been delayed because the young man hired by the NGO to do the job – he comes from the nearest ruga – fell ill two weeks ago. Now he is back on the job, helped by a bevy of small boys enlisted as voluntary labour. An unexpectedly urban note was struck by a cocky young man wearing new blue jeans, a stroped anorak, a green baseball cap and trainers. He sat on a camp stool cradling on his lap a giant ghetto-blaster with its arial fully extended. Happily this machine was not working. When we arrived he remained seated and ignored us. In turn Angeline and Eugene – her team-mate, also Hutu – ignored him. He is this cellule’s responsable and takes it upon himself to ‘supervise’ NGO-funded building in the hope of being able to extract a ‘fee’ from some naive foreign aid worker. ‘He should be in prison,’ Angeline said afterwards. ‘He was a killer.’
For these simple dwellings, the raw materials are elemental: earth, water, wood. The earth is dug on the spot, a few yards from where the framework of thinnish bluegum or bamboo poles has been erected; the poles are cut in and shoulder-carried from the nearest plantation. (Every commune has its state-owned plantation.) A major task on most sites is the fetching of water to pour into the mound of earth which is kneaded like dough – but rather more vigorously – until its consistency is precisely right. Then large wodges are slapped into oblong spaces between the poles, starting from ground level. A final smooth coating of mud is often applied to the floors and exterior walls. But that’s optional; if you’re too weary and underfed and demoralized to bother ou just move in as is … The end product looks crude, yet observing the young builder in action I could appreciate how much skill is involved. A hoe to dig the earth and an axe to cut the poles are the only tools used. He worked intently, his hands sensitive, moulding and balancing each wodge of mud as it went into its space. This was no dreary mindless job like diring a crane to construct a prefab skyscraper. The ‘primitive’ dwelling was his creation, its worth and durabilitiy entirely dependent on his personal skill. He looked absorbed and content, like a man enjoying job-satisfaction.
Two months ago the NGO gave five goats (two half-grown) to this family. When Angelina asked to see them it transpired they are being looked after by the responsable’s mother, Domina, allegedly because they might be stolen from the children. There was something wrong with this story; the fact that the children lack the strength to cultivate does not mean they are incapable of herding and caring for five goats – ample grazing is available on their own plots. An agreeably long walk took us half-way round the hill, then steeply down to Domina’s ruga. She is a widow, with a harsh voice and hard eyes. In a filthy cramped corral close to her tiled white-washed dwelling she keeps a cow, a yearling bullock and a calf. We crossed the small reeking-of-amonia yard where Angeline yelped with dismay as her dainty court shoes sank into liquid manure; they will never be the same again. The goats were confined in a pitch-dark lean-to, the door padlocked. Reluctantly, Domina opened it. They all looked poorly, especially the younger ones; a bundle of fodder – coarse grass, freshly cut – lay on the pellet-strewn floor. I diagnosed an urgent need for sunlight, lest they develop the equivalent of rickets. At once Domina picked up the note of criticism in my voice and became openly hostile. The usual long discussion did not take place. Crisply Eugene told her that the children’s house is almost complete, the goats can then be stabled at night in the tiny hut and that’s where he expects to find them when he returns next week.
At noon, when we stopped between Sections to share a thermos of tea, the silence was broken only by bird-song – a veritable orchestra of bird-song, but on these field-trips binoculars are of course verboten. Their use might confirm the worst suspicions of commune officials or soldiers about the spying role of NGOs. Here we were looking down on a thousand feet of almost sheer cultivated land, rising directly from a wide, flat, marshy falley. ‘How do people dig and plant and harvest on such gradients?’ I wondered aloud.
‘This slope below us’ – said Eugene – ‘in past times would not be used for crops. With cultivation the soil is loosened and soon you have bad erosion.The soil is our only wealth, we have no minerals. We should be using much more terracing, but with us it’s not a traditional skills. Before, our farmers took care to rest their land. Now it must all be in use all the time and is losing fertility.The EU and other funding agencies try to make us use cheical fertilisers – they arrange demonstration plots to show us how much more we could grow. But our farmers are wise and have doubts. They see their soil hasn’t enough organic material to take in much of those artificial fertilizers – they leach away. More animals giving more manure would make more sense. Those demonstration plots taught our farmers more than the EU experts and advisors ever learned!’
‘Anyway,’ said Angeline, ‘UNICEF calculated ten years ago that the average annual farming family’s income was £187. It’s surely less now. Even if chemicals worked, who could pay for them? Our government doesn’t have the foreign exchange to hand them out free.’
‘These problems can be solved,’ said Eugene. ‘I believe in our farmers. They have to be very smart cultivators – and they are! If they’re not pushed into doing stupid things they’ll come up with solutions.’
En route to the next commune we passed two large level polts conspicuously uncultivated amidst miles of flourishing bananas, sweet potatoes, manioc, beans, tomatoes. Obtusely I asked why so much fertile land has been left to the weeds. I should have realized that these are mass-graves, as yet unmarked. Some communes have by now erected massive headstones recording the date(s) of the massacres and the approximate number buried together – 6000, 7000, 8000 … In Kigali, on the first anniversary of the start of the genocide, 100,000 bodies – collected from temporary graves within the city and surrounding communes – were ceremoniously eburied.
The present population of this commune is over 46,000, living in ten Sections. Since November, 8442 have returned. The burgomaster is very proud of his exact figures and I don’t doubt them, given the Rwandan heritage of efficiently-run Commune Offices. This Tutsi burgomaster is a returnee from Zaire and Angeline commended his dedication to the peasants’ welfare and his unusual willingness to free NGOs from red tape.
We spent the afternoon driving many miles to check on the welfare of goats donated to four orphened families still living in their parents’ looted homes. Such families are exceptionally numerous in this commune where many children stayed on the hills while both parents worked in Kigali, returning at weekends to cultivate. Of these four families, two were concealed by Hutu neighbours until the militia moved on, impatient to get to the next looting point. The other two hid in the bush and were lucky. ‘Here they didn’t use dogs and were not so thorough about killing children,’ said Angeline. ‘I don’t know why.’
In some communes, in other Prefectures I have visited, only ten or fifteen Tutsi survived out of twelve or fourteen thousand.
We found all the goats in excellent condition; three had recently reproduced, the rest were heavy with kid. Descending from these hills, we sould see the northern shore of Lake Muhazi very far below; on the map this long narrow lake looks like some strange, many-legged insect. Reeds grow densely around the edges and pollution from a nearby ‘unregulated’ sugar-refinery has killed most of the fish.This was once a popular Belgian mini-resort complete with a little quay for pleasure boats and asmall guest-house and bar/restaurant, now closed. Nearby is an enormous four-storey red-brick seminary, grimly prison-like and still in use though it looks deserted. There is little sign of life around the hilltop Parishes in this area. As we passed several vandalized wayside shrines with empty niches where once stood the Sacred Heart, the BVM or some ‘protector’ patron saint who had failed to protect.
Next morning donatile and Floride, both Tutsi medical workers, escorted me to other hilltops. This was a day with a halo round it. Giti, the first commune visited, prides itself on being one of the two communes (out of 143) unstained by genocide. Marking the ‘border’ stands a large new notice showing a sketch-map of Giti and proclaiming in Kinyarwanda, French and English – ‘This commune did not commit genocide’. Our Giti-born driver told us the burgomaster deserved all the credit ‘for saving his people from sin’. One would have expected some more complicated explanation. But there is ample evidence, from all over Rwanda, that the ‘success’ of the genocide did indeed depend on the local authorities’ encouragement and co-ordination of the killers.
Here, as elsewhere, the main tracks are lined, for miles, by cleverly coppiced bluegums, the new shoots tinged rose-pink and wine-red. In one Section a labour-gang of some 200 ragged men and women were digging long trenches to plant more trees – ‘donating’ free labour to the State. This form of tax (umuganda) already existed and was hated in the pre-colonial times. The Belgians and their Tutsi surrogate rulers abused it even more ruthlessly and after the Revolution it was abandoned – then revived by Habyarimana in 1974.
His new régime also demanded a water tax, a health tax, a market tax and school fees, the last optional.) Umuganda quickly became central to the MRND’s methodical development of Rwanda. In theory, each peasant (of both sexes and all ages over fourteen) had to contribute only two days a month or a half-day a week. However, the government was soon claiming that Rwanda’s pubilc-spirited citizens felt such enthusiasm for improving their country that they were volunteering to do extra time – a lot extra … Umuganda maintained the motor-tracks and footpaths; built Commune Offices, health centres, schools andprisons; cleared the bush for enormous forestry plantations; dug trenches for gravity-fed water systems and for drainage and anti-erosion ditches. The burgomaster and councillors decided what needed doing and when and by whom. (The burgomaster was a government apointee, his loyalty to the MRND unwavering.) One consequence of umuganda is a country visibly better off, environmentally, than its neighbours with far superior public buildings in the rural areas.
The Churchs and foreign NGOs and donor institutions praised umunganda. They say it a a sensible use of an underemployed population and as proof that the industrious peasants deserved Rwanda’s annual US$20 million of aid money, being willing to play their part in escape from backwardness. Few foreigners bothered to scrutinize umuganda’s ‘voluntary’ component, yet by the mid-’80s it was, blatantly, forced labour and becoming more so – more forced, more laborous – and increasing being exacted to cultivate the Big Men’s farms. In 1990, when Habyarimana reluctantly agreed to the formation of opposition parties, the MRND’s grip was slightly loosened and before there began a countrywide boycott of all umuganda tasks that were of no immediate benefit to the peasantry, like the repairing of motor-tracks used only by the personal vehicles of the élite.
Then, as Gérard Prunier records, the genocide led to ‘a “rural” banalisation of crime. Killings were umuganda, collective work, chopping up men was “bush clearing” and slaughtering the women and children was “pulling out the roots of the bad weeds”. The vocabulary of peasant-centred agricultural development came into play with horrible double meaning.’
Now umuganda is being used (and probably abused) by the new government to help reconstruct this devastated country.
As Donatile remarked, communal life is all high tension at present. Even by Rwandan standards, the prefecture of Rural Kigali has become alarmingly over-crowded, so many Tutsi returnees settled here in 1994 believing it to be the ‘safest’ region. Also, the recent Hutu returnees arrived too late to plant and need donated food (not always available) until next season. In most cases they have yet to re-possess their land, now being used by others – often Tutsi. The arrangement is that those who have cultivated plots may retain them until after the next harvest but must then give them back to the original owners. An apparently equitable arrangement, but it may not seem so to those on the ‘giving back’ side. Inevitably there will be disputes about the definition of ‘original’ owners; that could mean the Tutsi families who were terrorized into exile a generation ago. In Floride’s view, everything will depend on the burgomasters’ determination to make this plan work and enforce law and order while it is being implemented. Thus far – all my NGO minders tell me – there has been surprisingly little overt friction. The general consensus seems to be that most Rwandans have no stomach for further volence.
In a large health centre-cum-small hospital, recently restored by my minders’ NGO, most of the beds were empty – an in Kayove and for the same reason. In many communes excellent work I being done by nutrition officers. Here a Tutsi returnee from Zaire teaches women and girls how to balance a family’s diet even if the food available is very limited, how to cook without losing nutrients, on what to wean babies, how to cater for old people when they have lost all their teeth. Behind the health centre rabbits are bred and children taught how to look after them and adults brain-washed to overcome their distaste for eating them. Donatile longs to see every family keeping rabbits; a healthy young doe can be bought for about RF850, a buck for less and away they go … But then he sighed and referred to the old problem of peasant conservatism – which certainly contributed significantly to the famine death-toll in Ireland 150 years ago, though it’s not now p.c. to mention this.
In all the sixteen health centres I’ve visited, AIDS-education posters (USAID-funded) are prominently displayed, conveying their messages through graphic picture-stories with the minimun of text. In Kigali, AIDS isnow the major cause of deeath; by 1990 33 per cent of the sexually active population tested Positive. No one can give me a more recent figure but it is feared the returnees from the camps will spread the infection on the hills where the ’90 figure was 3 to 5 per cent. Otherwise, the main causes of death are malaria and intestinal and respiratory diseases. For reasons nobody understands, malaria has increased rapidly during the past fifteen years and spread to altitudes where it was previously unknown.
Many other clever and colourful health-education posters decorate the walls of long verandahs where, on infant vaccination days, scores of mothers queue for hours. The stern white-coated doctors – very obviously ‘authority figures’ – process the babies are though they were inanimate objects, never glancing up at a mother’s face, concentrating on bottom after bottom after bottom. By now I’ve observed three such days and been dismayed by their quietness, apart from indignant yells as the needle goes in. It isn’t natural for a gathering of African women to be so unsmiling and silent.Each women carries an exercise-book carefully wrapped in cellophane: her baby’s edical record. At a small table, a few yards from the doctor, sits a clerk who fills in the details, stamps the date, signs the entry – and away goes mamma.
Rwanda has thirty-four hospitals and 188 health centres; 80 per cent of the population live within three miles of a ‘health facility’ of some sort. But nearness to a facility is small consolation if you can’t afford to use it. And, despite Rwanda’s remarkably rapid reconstruction, no hospital or health centre is functioning now as it was before the quadruple disaster of collapsed coffee prices, the SAP, civil war and genocide.
Overlooking one health centre from a nearby ridgetop is a long, red-brick, two-storey seminary – now derelict, all its windows broken, its doors removed, every fitting looted, the floors and walls still darkly stained. I didn’t ask, ‘What’s the story?’ I don’t want to hear any more of those stories.
On most hills we have to walk a little distance and it worries me that my young Rwandan women minders find these paths so difficult. Sometimes a male has to help them up – or down, if the incline seems perilously steep. A generation or two of motorized urban living has cancelled out all the ancestral centuries of coping with suc slopes. Now they seem daunting – alien and disagreeable. Which is sad.
In another southern prefecture Fonsie was my minder on two day-trips to border communes. Mbarara-born Fonsie is energetic, competent and diplomatic – diplomatic, that is, when dealing with local officials who are trying to cheat his NGO. I’m not sure his attire is very tactful; a Museveni T-shirt is unlikely to win him friends among the militia-influenced returnees.
Theses communes’ Shelter Programmes are umuganda labour. On level ground beside a little stream work-gangs pack mud into moulds cut from scrap metal, then turn the bricks out to bake in the sun. Next they are head-carried to the building site some three miles away where skilled men, paid by Fonsie’s NGO, construct the houses. I shall always remember watching 150 brick-laden men and women processing silently along a tree-shaded track in single file, their bare feet making no sound on the red earth. Fonsie is quamless about umuganda. ‘In a poor country,’ said he, ‘there is no other way to get things done. And peasants need organizing.’
We drove on then to a plantation where another work-gang was cutting poles, closely watched by two commune overseers. ‘You have to be careful here,’ explained Fonsie, ‘or they try to cut extra poles and slip them to friends. Wood is valuable.’ I said nothing but thought it might be quiate a good idea to give them a pole each at the end of the day’s work. But then, I have never understood about economics. Those poles must be carried five miles.
Fonsie’s NGO is also dealing with returnees resistant to becoming village-dwellers. In this region, he said, many families don’t want to settle and furnish new homes until reunited with relatives still missing; they wish to be free to move off in any direction at a moment’s notice sould a clue materialize and are reluctant to leave homes unguarded. One local burgomaster is trying to persuade everyone to move simultaneously into a village by suggesting that there should be a big party, with limitless banana-beer, to celebrate their taking up residence – a party of course thrown by the NGO involved. I am puzzled by this novel resistance to the will of Authority. Perhaps it’s a healthy sign that a mould has been broken – one of the moulds that so worried Pius. Or if not broken, at least cracked.
How are the returnees affected by the sight of so many ruined, burned, demolished homes among the overgrown crops? Their own and others … Some of the ’94 Tutsi returnees from Burundi vengefully attacked deserte Hutu rugas in their region and looted whatever the refugees had left behind. Several of my NGO minders have commented on ‘the alarming apathy rate’ (Fonsie’s phrase) among the recent Hutu returnees, especially the women. ‘It seems’, said Fonsie, ‘like as if they were able to avoid dealing with memories in the camps. Then back where it all happened they’re re-traumatized, can only sit around looking at the weeds – and wouldn’t you be the same.
It is I suppose possible that umuganda, as work-therapy, will incidentally help some of those returnees. If left to themselves they might continue to just ‘sit around’, memory-paralysed, looking anguished, crumpled, enervated. In Kigali I met an ex-pat who has trained fifteen women to provide counselling services on the hills. They are finding that theTutsi survivors, and those Hutu who did not flee, are by now less traumatized – on the whole – than the recent returnees. They helped each other, as soon as the genocide was over, to recover from shared horrors – talking at length about their experiences, however dreadful, and hugging and consoling each other over cups of tea or offee or bottles of beer. In contrast, many refugees remained under the influence of those who had instigated them to kill and were kept in a state of terrorized confusion. The government has been trying hard to provide for them a calming atmosphere, a safe psychological space inwhich to regain their emotional balance. But for some it may never be possible.
Fonsie and Pierre (the driver) thought we should picnic at a ‘famous tourist spot’ on the prefecture’s highest hilltop. This is a long narrow ridge with Burundi on one side, very far below – the drop dramatic, down a grassy escarpment – and on the Rwandan side a deep forested valley. One can’t imagine many tourists using the approach track in its present state but here the Belgians planted a long avenue of sypresses and set up three attractive little thatched rondevals with half-walls of bamboo. Two magnificent golden-brown eagles with white tail-feathers were circling nearby below eye-level – then soaring up, gliding over the ridge, again swooping low. Fonsie agreed that here I could safely take photographs, but he was wrong.
Soon I had enraged two men drinking Primus in another of the roudevals, by seeming to aim the camera at them – when in fact I was aiming at an eagle. (Of course unsuccessfully.) The Rwandans camera-phobia is unique in my experience, outside of Muslim countries. These men were, it transpired, VIPs: the prefecture’s RPA Commanding Officer and the commune’s burgomaster, both Tutsi. The former was an unpleasant character, stupid and arrogant, immensely tall but beginning to put on flesh. He is a returnee from Burundi, who recently took great umbrage because Fonsie declined to give him a lift in his NGO vehicle. He failed to appreciate how dangerously compromising it could be were a particular NGO to be associated in the popular mind with the RPA. Moreover, there is a strict government ban on NGOs giving lifts to any Rwandan undre any circumstances.
These omnipresent NGO vehicles – large, powerful, polished, costing at least twenty years’ worth of Rwandan wages – contribute hugely to the ex-pats’ present ‘image’ problem. Most citizens remain unaware of the government ban and can’t read the typed notices, in Kinyarwanda and French, stuck on the vehicles’ back windows. It can only seem heartless – positively cruel – when ex-pats and their Rwandan colleages, travelling in almost empty vehicles, refuse to help frail old women or malnourished children as they toil uphill loaded with water or firewod.
Descending to the Parish, not far below, we were followed by the C.O.’s mlitary jeep. An umuganda gang was returning from a work-site and marching purposefully towards the large open space outside the Commune Office where they joined hundreds of others sitting on the ground. ‘This is a good burgomaster,’ observed Fonsie. ‘Here he comes to discuss with everyone the commune’s needs and projects. He has brought Museveni’s idead from Uganda, he understands how village councils work. Here that idea could help reconciliation but our people need time to get used to it. They’re only used to burgomasters as dictators. Museveni’s village assemblies, electing their own committees with real responsibility for decision-making – to Rwandans that’s a strange notion.’
In this commune Fonsie had to deal with a young responsable who had eaither got his sums wrong or defrauded a carpenter. We all sat in another rondeval, at one end of the trading centre, beside the roofless ruin of a fire-blackened dwelling once substantial. The aggrieved carpenter had been awaiting us but it took forty minutes to locate the responsable who arrived looking half-scared, half-defiant. Three other men became verbosely involved and during this lengthy indaba I strolled down the track questing about for banana-beer. These hilltop trading centres, their rows of little shops and stalls free of any commercial advertisement – even for Coca-Cola – remind me of Communist countries before the free market virus attacked them. Even among beer drinkers, there is little nicotine-addiction in the communes, apart from the elders’ long pipes, popular among both sexes and smelling rather like my mini-cigars. In general Rwanda seems more cigarette-free than the average African country, probably because most people can’t afford to smoke – though Rwanda grows some tobacco. Or perhaps because the previous puritanical régime discouraged smoking? No doubt the Thatcher-inspired BAT is evennow planning to change this healthy situation.
Driving back to base (the carpenter paid, the responsable chastened) we talked about one of the main sources of dissension between the government and foreign NGOs. The former resents well-qualified Rwandans being lured away from its service by NGOs offering much higher salaries, but there’s a certain illogic here, as Fonsie pointed out, because the government also advocates ex-pat experts being replaced by skilled Rwandans. And the pool of skilled Rwandans is at present very shallow.
‘Why,’ I asked Fonsie, ‘was the old régime so on-the-ball about health care and so neglectful of education?’
‘It’s easier to dictate to ignorant people,’ said Fonsie, ‘and the Church ran more than half the health centres. That’s why family-planning didn’t takeoff until the Pope’s visit in 1990. Before that, our bishops were forever rabbitting on about “natural methods”. When the Pope left the “evils of contraception” out of his sermons here the bishops got the message. They’ve kept quiet since and allowed their health-centre staffs to give advice and gadgets. They haven’t said the gadgets are OK, theyjust pretend not to notice. Already that’s making some difference though not enough.’
Rwanda’s population has gone fromtwo million in 1940 to mroe than seven million now, with ten milion expecte by 2002. Which makes the educational scene all the more scary since agriculture cannot possibly absorb such an increase. Pre-genocide, some 60 per cent of children attended woefully inadequate primary schools, barely 6 per cent went on to the secondary level and less than 1 per cent graduated from a university.
Next morning – in the same commune – George, a young Canadian, invited me to accompany him to a health centre-cum-thirty-bed-hospital restored by his NGO. (The militia looted most health centres and hospitals and in many cases damaged them structurally.) After various unforeseen (by George) delays, this work was to have been completed the previous day. And so it had been, but the shoddy workmanship and blatant cost-cutting infuriated George. Also, extra space has been devoted to storage and there are only twenty-four beds – the contractor’s arbitrary modification. Poor George felt thwarted and guilty because his contract has ended and he was going honme next day, leaving an imporant task unfinished. I watched him coping well with his anger and being consoled by the driver-translator. ‘Be happy, George,’ said Jean. ‘These men are bad fellows, you have worked your best, now I’ll fight with them.’
As yet, only the dispensary is open; there a semi-literate nurse-assistant prescribes simple remedies and gives injections. What most bothered me were the scores of hypodermic needles dumped on the grass at the edge of the compound – though several small children, including the nurse’s, play nearby. When I drew these to Jean’s attention and he reproved here she merely looked puzzled.
Later, George revealed the details of his travail. This was a complicated story, involving three building contractors whom he suspects of working in cahoots though ostensibly they are rivals. One can see how tempting it must be for the locals to take advantage of young, inexperienced ex-pats. Especially when dealing with contractors on the make, no amount of dedication compensates for an aid worker’s wetness behind the ears. In most jobs, new recruits learn while subordinate to senior staff. In the expanding aid world, NGOs often have no choice but to give a huge amount of responsibility – an unfair amount – to young people who may never before have left home. Older people are not, on the whole, willing to live for long periods in places like Rwanda, Angola or Mozambique.
As an NGO protegee I have of course been witnessing the worst of rural poverty andpost-genocidal misery. However, it has cheered ‘the madam in the vehicle’ to observe also how many families have ‘got it together again’ in less than three years – their plots well tilled, their homes in good repair, theirdonated clothes sometimes verging on the fashionable, their children certainly not strving. My Rwandan minders, being intimate with the communes they operate in, are able readily to distingush between the returnees and others.Some returnees are among the more affluent families for reasons into which, I am advised, one does not enquire. This belies a large brightly coloured poster (touching evidence of the RPF’s striving for reconciliation) which is displayed in most schools, health centres, Commune Offices. It depicts a border crossing point – on one side of a bare hill covered with UNHCR tents, on the other a forestedhill overlooking a village of identical new tin-roofed dwellings. An emaciated, ragged, barefooted refugee family has just passed the barier pole, very small bundles on the parents’ heads. They are being joyously welcomed by a well-fed, well-dressed, well-shod commune family who live – we deduce – in one of those new homes. The text is in Kinyarwanda, French and, significantly, English: ‘Banyarwanda, welcome Home, in peace let us rebuild a new Rwanda’.