KIGALI, NEW HISTORY AND OLD TERRORS

December 2013

The journey from the source of the Nile to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, lasted more than a week. From Gisovu Prison the hills had been tough, but we found friends in the villages along the way and, when we didn’t make camp at the banks of the Nile – now more recognisably a real river – we found places to stay with the local people. It had not always been easy and, for the first time, Amani’s presence on the journey had felt like a real boon; it was Amani who negotiated the stables for us to sleep in on the final night before we reached the city, while Boston lurked just out of my field of vision, muttering murderously that the village chief was a backward, illiterate brute.

Sometimes children from the villages followed us on our walk and, though we knew they were there, they managed to remain totally unseen, concealed in the banana fields that often flanked the river’s brown torrents. ‘Muzungu!’ they goaded us. It was colder than I had anticipated, and the rain, when it came, came in wild, concentrated bursts, flurrying down from the steep escarpments and mountainsides all around. On the fifth night it stayed for hours and, in the darkness, Boston, Amani and I had to abandon our camp at the edge of the river and scramble for higher ground.

On the day we arrived in Kigali we had walked more than 53km – an epic march, and completed entirely in flip-flops; after ten days of travelling, my feet were so blistered and swollen they no longer even fitted in my boots. The day had been spent wading through the stagnant water of the paddy fields, an early reminder of how people across Africa depend on the Nile for agriculture. Boston, wearied by the day – not to mention his constant bickering with Amani – was arguing vehemently that we should give up and spend the night in a village, but the thought of an actual bed in a Kigali hotel spurred me on. Finally, limping, we left the paddy fields behind and entered the western suburb of Nzade just as darkness was falling.

When we reached it, central Kigali was throbbing; this small, hilly city had an air of the tropics and, in stark contrast to the rest of Rwanda, it never seemed to sleep. I had flown into the city only ten days before, but that felt like a lifetime ago. Though we found a place to stay, the only room we could find was a dormitory at a youth hostel, Discover Rwanda, in the heart of town. As we carried our packs into the bare room, to be faced with rows of naked bunks, the look on Boston’s face was implacable. I got the feeling he would have preferred the cow sheds and swamped riverbank that had been our bed for the past week. Still, I was grateful for a few home comforts. Ten days walking the riverbank had taught me some stiff lessons about my body, and a hot shower, cold beer and a decent meal were the restoratives I needed.

In the morning, I set out to explore the city. I’d promised myself two days of rest here, while my body recuperated. I was going to need it. Much of the time I’d have to spend provisioning for the journey ahead – new boots were a must, and I intended to find somebody who could stitch new pockets to my rucksack as well – but Kigali has a unique part to play in the history of the Nile, and I wanted to explore that while I was here.

Kigali is the boom-town of Rwanda. Twenty years ago, this was the centre of the genocide, but today it shines like a beacon in the heart of central Africa. On the day I had first arrived, I’d been intrigued to find it clean, orderly and fresh. Its broad avenues were green and leafy, and gated mansions adorned the hilltops amidst lush trees and vegetation. A city of a million people in a country of only twelve million, life in Kigali is the polar opposite of the village life that dominates much of the nation, and it feels metropolitan in a way no other part of Rwanda could match. In two days here, I was to eat Chinese, Italian and Indian meals, and there were moments when, as the glistening sheen of glass-plated banks and shiny Land Cruisers rolled by, it would be easy to forget that this was the scene of one of the world’s greatest tragedies.

It was a stark contrast to the image I first had of Rwanda, one cultivated by movies, books and news bulletins. Just the name of this country invokes images of darkness, machetes and death; it has become so synonymous with the genocide of 1994 that it was difficult to balance my preconception with this gleaming, up-and-coming capital city. But it was on my first day in Kigali, before we had set out for the source of the Nile, that I got my first inkling of the way this country has forcibly pulled itself up from that dark episode, the nadir of its history. There was an element of truth in Boston’s observation that Amani towed a kind of party line; moving on from the genocide, I was to discover, required a kind of collective decision, an effort to make amends and work together – and this could only be achieved by a form of coercion.

On the day I flew into Kigali and first met Boston, the city was unusually quiet. The hustle I had expected from this capital city was non-existent. Cars didn’t cram the roads, horns didn’t blare at intersections; the shops were all shuttered up and the people in the streets barely whispered a word. I strode through the strangeness with Boston and whispered, ‘Is it a national holiday?’

‘Of a kind,’ Boston snorted, and rolled his eyes towards some bushes on the edge of a small park. ‘Look.’

Behind the bushes, a group of men were all holding automatic rifles.

‘Police,’ Boston said, ‘in plain clothes. It is umuganda.’

Umuganda, Boston explained, was a custom particular to Kigali itself. On the last Saturday of every month, the entire population of Kigali is required to devote itself to the city’s upkeep. For one day a month, business in Kigali comes to a stand-still and every man, woman and child turns out to sweep the city’s streets, tend its parklands and hedges. It is a remarkable feat of civic co-operation, but as Boston directed my gaze to the police guarding over the boda-boda taxi drivers tending the park, I understood it as something more: here was a great leveller, Hutus and Tutsis both being forced to work for one common goal, on the streets of the city they were obliged to share. In the quest to reach some form of reconciliation, the government was using every tool at its disposal – and force has always been one of Africa’s most effective methods.

‘They don’t have any choice,’ said Boston. ‘They’re like prisoners.’

It was not the last time we were to see the way the government exerted its influence on the population in an attempt to find a resolution to its recent bloody history. Between Gisovu Prison and the first suburbs of Kigali the perfect paddy fields had been tilled by prisoners. Agents of the genocide, dressed in orange and pink boiler suits, these prisoners were both the convicted and the accused – and here they were, in hard labour, twenty years after the atrocities were committed. Some had been captured, some had handed themselves in – in what was, I suppose, a mass-assuaging of guilt – but it was evident, in every corner of Rwanda, that those events of twenty years before still defined the country. In a village three days back along the river, Amani had introduced us to a local pastor. The pastor had welcomed us with a feast of cassava, bananas, beef and hot milk – a platter of delicacies compared with the provisions we were carrying – and, as we ate, he told us all about his work in peace and reconciliation. Like Amani, the pastor was a Tutsi, and had lost close friends and family members to the extermination of 1994. As he spoke, Boston grew incensed at what he saw as Amani’s one-sided tour. The current policy, he exclaimed, was for the country to engage in an act of wilful amnesia, and simply forget the truth of what happened. But Amani fixed him with a look. ‘How would you feel if your mother had been gang-raped and beaten to death in front of your eyes as a ten-year-old boy? That’s what happened to many people.’ In these circumstances, Amani suggested, forgetting was just one of many useful tools in moving on. These were the kinds of questions that Rwanda grappled with daily. How do you judge and sentence half a population? Is forgiveness a real possibility, and how can we collectively put paid to the past? In this context it was not so surprising to be watching Kigali’s citizens being forced to sweep the streets. It seemed, in that moment, as much an act of collective penance as it was a scheme to force co-operation. On the surface, Rwanda has turned itself from a country destroyed by hate and racial violence to a seeming paragon of virtue – but, like Amani’s insistence that the country has made accommodation with what happened here, it is all a façade. The orderliness of Kigali is the result of heavy policing and arbitrary arrests. Human rights are commonly flouted, boys regularly abducted by government officials and families torn apart. In Kigali, you can go to Chinese markets and African bazaars, stay in luxurious hotels and visit glistening modern banks – but while the country has taken several steps forward, the hearts and minds of its citizens seem yet to have caught up.

‘I want to see the crocodile,’ said Boston, his face breaking into a half-deranged smile.

He had been talking about it all morning, as we traipsed from one market to the next on still-swollen feet. At the back of a bazaar where cheap new imports from China were being sold alongside second-hand European goods, I had found a small tailor’s shop, where a one-eyed tailor hunched over a fake Singer sewing machine and fixed two new pouches to the sides of my rucksack. For the few minutes’ work he had charged the exorbitant sum of $15 – he had clearly seen me coming, but it was worth it. This was the last place in Rwanda I would be able to get them attached. That was one of my first lessons about Rwanda – outside Kigali, there is virtually nothing. It is as if the entire economy is built around creating a surreal urban veneer that bears no relation to the rural reality.

The crocodile Boston was intent on seeing was on show at the Natural History Museum of Kigali. A sixteen foot monster, it had been killed in April 2012 and the taxidermist tasked with preserving it – badly, as it turned out – had discovered a pair of shoes and a woman’s hair braids inside. ‘A man-eater,’ Boston kept saying, clearly quite taken with the idea. It reminded me, unnervingly, of the stories he had told about his great grandfather, the cannibal king.

On this occasion, I was happy to give in to Boston’s whim. There was another reason to see the Natural History Museum, one more closely aligned with my own quest – the building used to be the home of one Dr Richard Kandt.

Richard Kandt is not a name as famous in the pantheon of great African explorers as Burton, Stanley and Speke, but he holds a special place in my heart, and he felt especially important to this expedition. It was Kandt who first explored the Nyungwe Forest and, in 1898, declared it the true Source of the Nile.

Kandt was born in Posen, in latter-day Poland, in 1867. A physician by training, he had explored swathes of German East Africa around the turn of the century and, in 1908, been appointed Resident of Rwanda. Residents, of the time, were effectively government ministers asked to take up residence in another country – and their duties often amounted to a form of indirect rule. It was in this capacity that Kandt had founded Kigali itself. His name has lived long in the memory here, and he is still, more than a century later, a feted citizen.

Kandt’s house sits atop a suburban hill and is one of the few original colonial era buildings in the city. As we entered the museum, to be faced with racks of toy dinosaurs in what passed for their ‘Evolution Exhibit’, I tried to picture it in the days when this was the official German residence. That was the thing about the early African explorers – many of them were officially appointed colonialists, traders, merchants, doctors and bureaucrats. Some had long titles and family histories, while others were misfit chancers who saw Africa as a way to make their name and, hopefully, pocket lots of cash on the way. I was saying as much to Boston, but his eye had already been drawn to the racks of bad taxidermy that surrounded the museum’s prize exhibit. The crocodile certainly was huge, and its glass eyes looked as callous as its man-eater reputation deserved, but there was something almost pathetic about the way its body had been mangled in its preservation.

‘Exploration’s changed,’ I thought, drifting through the exhibits. ‘Now it’s a pauper’s game.’

It wasn’t, of course, the only way it had changed. Before I set out on this expedition I had been asked, more times than I care to remember, about the idea of exploration. The question of what it means in the modern world isn’t so easy to answer. To some, the very idea seems archaic – and, in a world of Google Maps, where every valley and hillside has already been plotted, the traditional age of exploration is certainly gone. But exploration has always been about more than pure discovery, or of being the first to do something. The famous Victorian explorers were, of course, not the first into Africa; Africa is a continent where mankind has lived for longer than any other, and when Stanley found Livingstone he was doing so in a land where civilisations had existed for millennia. In the modern era, it is more important than ever to acknowledge this fact. There is a certain romanticism attached to the Victorian explorers, but the truth is that their motivations were not really so clear-cut as we would like to think. Livingstone was, first and foremost, an evangelical missionary, Stanley an egomaniac journalist and mercenary whose talents for self-publicity knew no bounds. John Hanning Speke was a glory-hunter with no reservations about making bold and often unfounded geographical claims, while Richard Burton had more in common with a 1970s hippie than a classical adventurer; his desire to immerse himself in cultures was most often expressed in relentless fornication. Kandt himself was one of a breed of explorers working at the behest of their governments. Their missions were officially sanctioned exploits – all part of what we would come to know as the Scramble for Africa, as Europe’s colonial powers sought to carve up the newly discovered parts of the world.

As I wandered through Kandt’s old residence, part of me knew I was on a different kind of journey from the ones I had grown up reading about, but our journeys did have some things in common. Like them, I was here exploring people. Constantly in flux, constantly evolving, there is always something new to discover about people – and I was here to bring home stories of what life was like in corners of the world that do not always make it into our headlines. I had this, at least, in common with the heroes in whose footsteps I was following.

I stopped to linger over a photograph in the hotel lobby that depicted the house as it had originally been, back in Kandt’s time. In the frame a grand bungalow sat alone amongst the bare hillsides, with only a few wattle huts for neighbours. The Kigali of Kandt’s time, I realised, was little different from the country we had been walking through – but, whereas that country had remained in the past, Kigali had somehow contrived to join the modern world.

‘Boston,’ I said. ‘Are you done?’

Boston was positively slavering over the thought of the crocodile, and it took some moments before he looked up. ‘Let’s hope we don’t meet any further north.’

Kigali’s Genocide Memorial Centre is not far from the place where Kandt used to live, and it is much more than a museum. When we arrived, Amani was waiting for us at the gates. Eager as ever, he took my hand in an enthusiastic hello.

The Memorial Centre stretched before us, and there was no denying its beauty. The air was heavy with the scent of eucalyptus, and the gardens of the hilltop were vivid and bright, their flower beds perfectly arranged. Colourful birds – western citrils and mustard yellow canaries – darted around in the trees. Somewhere, as Amani began to tell us of this place, I heard children playing.

‘It has been open ten years,’ said Amani, ‘and that was ten years after the events. It is all here, everything that happened.’

He was speaking about a record of the genocide. I already knew that one of the principal aims of the Memorial Centre was to bring together the testimonies of all those who had survived, and taken part in, the atrocities – as well as taking part in the Gacaca trial process, the traditional community courts whose role had been to try those accused of involvement. But it wasn’t until we reached the foot of the Memorial Centre building, a piece of modern architecture seemingly at odds with the natural surroundings, that I understood that Amani meant something different as well. Outside the building, which looked somewhat like an English crematorium, were a series of large concrete slabs inscribed with names. Trellises and decking served as a path between these great stones. We followed it in silence, finally reaching the centre’s exterior wall which was dominated by a single, vast brass plaque. Here were inscribed hundreds of names written in a list that was still incomplete, petering out half-way down.

Amani was not being his usual energetic self, and now I understood: the Memorial Centre is not just a museum to memories of the genocide: it is a mass grave, a site of genocide itself.

‘There are a quarter of a million victims buried here,’ he explained. ‘We can collect only a fraction of their names.’

Inside, the centre was black, the only lights those illuminating the laminate display boards recounting individual stories of those horrific months. Boston and I followed Amani from room to room. In one, banks of bleached skulls glared at us, each one of them wearing the wounds from bullets and machetes. In the next room, nothing but thigh bones, stacked from floor to ceiling. With only our footsteps to break the silence, I slowly understood that the graves we had seen outside were only a fraction of what the Memorial Centre could show, and even this was only a fraction of the people who lost their lives in 1994. Death on a scale like this is hard to absorb, even when you are faced with it so starkly.

In the next room thousands of portraits stared at us. These, Amani told us, were the images of those who had died: men, women, and children. Most of them were smiling. These were photographs taken at Christenings, weddings and graduations. Some were classic portraits, gazing to one side like posed Victorian sittings, while others were taken from afar, in the background an object of pride – a new car, a motorbike, a young couple in front of their first home. As I stared, I saw Boston focusing on a picture of a mother who held her new-born children, and a man in a shiny, black suit.

All of them were dead.

Beside me, Amani was unusually still. ‘Just walk around,’ he said. ‘See it for yourselves.’

A video, which showed indescribable scenes of murder on a constant loop, masked Amani’s quiet exit. It wasn’t until an hour later, shell-shocked by what we had seen, that Boston and I emerged from the Memorial Centre, back into the glorious sunshine, to find him sitting on a bench beneath the eucalyptus trees. He looked emotionless, and the only noise was that of cicadas.

That night, I got to thinking about this first staging post of our journey. If ever there was a place to give life to the cliché of Africa’s dark heart, it is here in Kigali. I sat in the incongruous surroundings of an Indian restaurant and, as I looked into the eyes of the waiter, the diners, and the people who passed outside, I understood in a way I hadn’t before that every one of them had been there. Every one of them was a survivor or a perpetrator, locked together in uneasy accommodation. There is a sense in which Kigali and Rwanda have worked a miracle in forging a way ahead. Coercion, recounting, memorialising, and even a kind of ritualised forgetting, have all been components of that – but the scars remain fresh, twenty years on, and in some way they’ll remain fresh for the twenty to come.

Across the restaurant, at the bar, Boston was propped up with a drink, engaging some locals he had just met with one of his tall tales. I caught his eye across the restaurant. ‘We have an early start,’ I mouthed at him – but, right in that moment, he didn’t want to know.