KIBUNGO HILL

Francine is the wife of Théophile Mpilimba, the head local councilman in Kibungo, where she runs the village cabaret-bar—an establishment so modest that it has no sign—in a small house adjoining her own. The cabaret walls are of clay and straw, the floor of beaten earth, and there is one tiny window. In the back, cases of Primus beer contend for space with sacks of potatoes or beans and bottles of oil. There are benches along the walls where patrons can sit when it rains; in good weather, stools await them just outside the door. The usual drink is urwagwa, a strong, tart banana beer, or ikigage, a less tasty beer made from sorghum. The receptacles for these beverages are lined up behind the bar.

Banana beer is made without a still, according to a time-honored recipe. Bananas are buried for three days in a pit to become overripe; the juice is then pressed out and mixed with sorghum flour, which activates the fermentation that in four days produces an alcoholic drink somewhere between sweet wine and brandy. It must be drunk during the following week, before it inevitably turns too sour. The urwagwa of Kibungo was once the most famous in the region, and Kibungo was one of the most fertile hills, thanks to the alluvial soil along the river. That was before the genocide. One hillside belonged to the Tutsis, whose herds flourished on pastures descending all the way into the valley, and the other slope to the Hutus, who produced most of the alcohol and bean crop. Today these lands have lost two thirds of their men, the rare livestock are scattered among the bushes, and Francine often has no alcohol to sell.

The village sprawls over a flat area at the summit of the hill. At the entrance to Kibungo, brick buildings—a small church, a few schools, the town hall—encircle some magnificent umuniyinya, palaver trees in whose shade people are invited to sit during public assemblies or civic announcements. Other umuniyinya on the outskirts of the village are more commonly patronized by people taking naps.

On the town square, dashing among the houses and jockeying with goats for space on the grass, a swarm of scamps playing soccer kicks around a ball of foam-rubber tied up with strings. No dogs lounge around the gardens, the war having killed them or driven them all off in packs, and the few chickens are preyed on by feral cats. The path leaving the village descends to the river, passing cattle pens made of tree trunks bound together with vines and Hutu hamlets whose inhabitants (aside from the kids) no longer visit the village, except to sell their urwagwa.

Denise, an eighteen-year-old Hutu, lives in a house near the river with her sister Jacqueline, two little brothers and sisters, and her baby. Her parents and four older brothers never returned from the exodus to Congo. Denise proves very hospitable and considerate. She talks about her happy adolescence on the hill, the choir, parties at school, boys. She touches on the sadness of her life now, how she became the “back-up” of her baby’s father, a wealthier farmer who lives two hundred yards down the hill, because she could no longer hope to find a real husband. She sends the children to the communal school without accompanying them into the village, and goes every week through the forest to the market in Nyamata to sell fish.

The view from the yard around her house is a striking panorama of treetops and, in the valley, the verdant expanse of the Nyamwiza Marsh, the refuge described by Jeannette and Francine. In spite of this obvious proximity, Denise claims that she neither saw nor heard anything during the massacres, no longer remembers where her family was in April 1994, and has received no news of their exile. She withdraws into silence at the very mention of the genocide. All her Hutu women neighbors react in the same way.

At the far side of Denise’s manioc field, the path plunges down to end at Akonakamashyoza, a small island of reeds and the mythological juncture of the Nyabarongo and Akanyaru rivers, over which glide slender black pirogues. It is there, fishermen claim, at the mingling of the two sacred tributaries of the White Nile, that during the reign of the Tutsi kings two processions were held on the day after the death of the reigning monarch: the procession of the Living King, the heir, walking in the sunlight, followed by the procession of the Mummy, the dead king, in the moonlight.

In mid-afternoon in Kibungo, when everyone returns from the fields, women go into the gardens to shell beans and keep an eye on the cooking pots and little kids. The men stride purposefully off to the cabaret. At Francine’s place, there are few requests for commercially bottled beer because it is expensive. Patrons with reasonable funds buy a bottle of urwagwa, into which Francine pokes the stem of a reed. The men drink and pass the bottle around, along with cigarettes. The most impoverished customers go behind the bar to drink a swallow straight from the jerry can, with a longer straw, under Francine’s benevolent eye.

Later, the lowing of cattle is heard at dusk. Among the cowherds who return and join the drinkers is a boy, Janvier Munyaneza. Janvier looks after his older brother’s cows and those of a neighbor, which is why he has not gone back to school. After he has penned up the animals and picked off their ticks, he takes his place at the bar. He doesn’t drink alcohol yet, and with a greedy smile, accepts the proffered Fanta soda pop. His shyness is typical of Rwandans. Sitting amid a group of teenagers and children, he watches the adults drink and tell their stories late into the night. There is a sadness in his eyes that never leaves him, a melancholy confirmed by the hesitation in his voice from the first moment he speaks.