Rwandan politics! ... (a bus backfires and I walk through a work crew)

I’m leaving Rwanda a little bit early. I’m fine, not in danger. If anything at all, I might be in danger of being in danger. At risk of being at risk, maybe, but that’s all. And the same could probably be said for little old High Point, NC, not to mention most of Africa most of the time, but anyway. A little explanation.

A couple of weeks ago it looked like the excrement was really hitting the A/C here, politics-wise. Presidential elections are on August 9th, and the president has no intention of losing. It’ll be a “selection”, not an “election”, as I’ve heard some people laugh about it.

But the ones who laugh about it are in the minority. At times you feel the uneasy tension, everyone talking in whispers, everyone seeming to be waiting for something to happen. Soldiers line the streets of Kigali. Even if you were oblivious to any tension before, after getting an eyeful of AK-47s at every street corner, you have to start wondering what you’re being protected from.

The other day I heard a big bus backfire in the city. A big, sudden, exploding pop. I was in downtown Kigali, right by the main roundabout. Kigali is not normally a quiet city by any comparison, but the shocking snap of a bus backfiring can pierce through any city noise. And it sounds a lot like a gun blast. That was an interesting experience, how the crowd around me ducked and gasped, the electric terror, the looks on faces that said, finally, it’s happening.

Would I have seen this same reaction in New York, in Chicago? In Kampala? I don’t know. Maybe I’m finding evidence because I’m looking for it, but I don’t think so. It’s hard not to feel that events like that are little windows into the nervous national psyche.


(I’ve often wondered, if you came to Rwanda without any knowledge of its violent history, would you notice something different about the mood of the people? Is there really something in the air – a shell-shocked reticence, a scarred psyche – even though the physical scars of the country have healed? It’s either really obvious and unmistakable and true, or it’s impossible not to imagine it. And people who have been here a long time, even other East Africans, talk about Rwandans as a very reserved and guarded people. Strangely secretive, somehow. And on the street you see an unusual amount of missing limbs and eerie scars – machete marks, you have to guess. I stand by my observation that there’s something different, something still wounded, about the people as a whole. After all, the rate of PTSD once reached 40%. Deep wounds like that heal slowly.)

So what’s making people nervous this month? To give the long story short of it, the summarized version: a former Rwandan general narrowly survived an attempted assassination. He claimed it was the government out to get him, and then a journalist was assassinated who was investigating the government’s role in the shooting of the general. His newspaper was closed down – a couple of other papers have been closed down – a couple of opposition political parties have been shut down leading up to the elections, one candidate was jailed for “promoting the genocide ideology”, which unfortunately seems to be the catch-all accusation for anyone the government wants to snuff, and this candidate’s American lawyer was jailed under the same pretense when he came here to defend her. Also, there have been a couple of deadly grenade attacks on city crowds by some opposition groups who disapprove of the gov’t’s attempts to crack down on, say, freedoms of press and speech and assembly.

(No first amendment in Rwanda. It’s a pseudo-democracy, at best – but maybe for the best. It’s a police state, no way around it, no doubt about it. But it’s a police state that the vast majority of people approve of – here’s an obvious difference between American and Rwandan priorities – after seeing what they’ve seen, as a rule, they know that peace is fragile and they’re more than eager to give up a few civil liberties to ensure security. I wish I had as much time to write about it as I've had to think about it.)

So maybe there is something to worry about. But, the last couple of weeks have been pretty calm. Sometimes it feels like there’s a volcano boiling up right under the surface – and there’s plenty of nervous folks here more than willing to tell you so, and why – but other times it feels like there couldn’t be a more quaint and quiet place than this hilly green country the size of West Virginia.

Anyway, the powers that be at UNC have decided that it’s probably not best to wait around until August 9th to see which one of these impressions is true. Better safe than sorry, and I have to admit they are probably right.

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And now a little uniquely-Rwandan story for you all:

I was back in the Northern province this weekend, in a part of the country called Rulindo district. At dinner Friday night I happened to sit near the mayor of Rulindo district, a very friendly guy, and he came over and started talking to the visitors like a good politician would. I told him I thought his district was beautiful, but he assured me I hadn't seen the most beautiful parts, so he invited me to accompany him and his assistant - whose title is "Coordinator of Good Governance in Rulindo District" - on a scenic tour of the district on Saturday. Of course I agreed.

They kept talking about the terraces. They wanted to show me the terraces. We would turn a corner on a mountain road and see some sort of pretty, orderly, cultivated plot, and I would say ahhhh terraces, and they would say nooooo not yet! and so we kept climbing higher and higher around these bends.

I've always felt Rwanda to be crowded. There are so many people, so many huts, so many footpaths and pedestrians even deep into rural country. But up here - high in the mountains - when we finally found THE terraces, I saw an openness, an emptiness, for the first time here. They were right. It was beautiful. Check out the pictures.

























And so we continued from our first panorama on our way to the next, and I saw the group of workers that had been building these thousands of terraces and the roads in the area. A hundred guys at the side of the road with pickaxes and shovels, mostly dusty and grumpy-looking in their blue dungaree jumpsuits. The mayor and posse told me that these guys - these hundred-odd, normalish dudes - had confessed and been convicted of genocide crimes. They had served their few years in jail and now were being put to work as a way to pay back their country.

And turns out our next panorama was right by that work crew. So I got to step out of the pickup and walk through this crowd of killers (and yet normal Rwandan men) who simultaneously stopped working, stood up, leaned on their pickaxes and stared at me.













Because I knew what they had done, I guess I expected them to be like ghost men. Vacant, haunted stares. Angry and wrinkled, oozing hatred - I don't know. But what really surprised me were the ones who smiled and waved and cheerily said "Good afternoon!" or the ones with those goofy, floppy felt caps some men here wear.

They all have probably killed a lot of people. They are also in a lot of ways the average Rwandan man - one of a certain background and age bracket. If it shocks you that these men convicted of genocide are paying their debt to society by building roads with shovels, remember that at one point in the late nineties Rwanda had over 92,000 people awaiting trial for genocide crimes. It is not a stretch to see why they have abolished the death penalty. And why Rwanda has such good roads.