by Ben Sehene

Special to G21

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Ben Sehene

SOMEWHERE IN RWANDA - The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. - L. P. Hartley: The Go-Between

1 -A week passed before I was ready to go back to Rwanda. I was going with F. And the journey began badly. We were giving a convalescing RPF soldier a lift to the rebel headquarters at Mulindi, but as if that wasn't enough, we had to look for him and F couldn't remember his address. So it was not until mid-afternoon that we were able to leave.

We left in a hurry, driving as fast as we could in order to reach the Gatuna border post before it shut down for the night. We were driven by a taciturn, nervous and unsteady driver called Juma. I was rather worried by his erratic driving. But the prospect of driving at night through a country at war was even more worrying. It was completely dark when we reached the Rwandese border at Gatuna. And, to our horror, it was closed.

It seemed useless to bribe the somnolent but compliant guard, because the barrier was fastened with a huge padlock, and the person who had the key had apparently gone to Kabale several kilometres away. But F was a shrewd and dynamic businessman, always prepared to take a gamble. He was not one to brush aside a problem, he would dwell on it. He would brood over it and become distracted as if doing mental arithmetic even as you talked to him. And soon he would come up with a solution. Soon he was engaged in discussion with the guard. From several minutes of palaver it transpired that the man with the key could be somehow reached. At the sight of money, it turned out that the man had not yet left for Kabale.

We drove into the no-man's land, across the makeshift bridge which had been erected in place of one blown up by the Rwandan army (FAR) in 1990 to prevent an RPF advance. At the Rwanda border, the RPF guards knew F -- who for a longtime had put his premises in Kampala at the disposal of the RPF -- so they let us through without any hustle. We had intended to spend the night at Mulindi, but we found that the entire RPF administration had already moved to Kigali. So we drove to Byumba.

Rwanda seen during the night was silent and featureless. The beams of our headlights cut through the black night like twin tunnels of light streaked with insects and dirt. Beyond the beam of our headlights, at the end of every curve in the road, I fancied an ambush. I remembered James Fenton's golden rule in Indochina: Never be on the roads after dark. Each time, the roadblocks along the road came as a relief. I have never felt as safe as I did that night, with African soldiers.

We spent the night at a dark RPF guest house manned by two sleepy soldiers. Byumba, at an altitude of about 2,500 metres above sea level, is chilly at night. In the darkness the guest house was shrouded in mystery, something, a shape, suggested a grand black mansion set against a luxuriant black garden. But morning revealed a gutted, pockmarked house in a littered, overgrown garden.

Then began the journey down to Kigali, past reforested hilltops of pine and eucalyptus, past abandoned villages set in banana plantations and a patchwork of well-tended fields rich with crops. The fields were often set upon terraced hills, the work of many years. Now they lay abandoned like fruits of wasted labour. Rwanda was a nation that had abandoned its land and many years of effort.

All along the road there was a continuous trail of devastation. Roofless houses, their rusted iron roofs caved into burnt out interiors. Collapsed houses lying in piles of overgrown rubble. This was not the indiscriminate destruction of war, but the surgical and systematic destruction of communal violence, destruction among neighbours. In some villages all houses were intact, w hile in others, particular houses had been destroyed without damage to the ones next door. Tutsi families had been dragged from those houses and hacked to death by their Hutu neighbours. Then they had destroyed the houses, either by burning them to the ground or by blowing them up with grenades, and sometimes they had even levelled the ground where the houses had stood. As if by destroying the Tutsi's houses, they hoped to erase the memory of their victims and all trace of their crime.

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2 - As we approached Kigali I felt elated at the prospect of seeing my birth place, a place of myth whose name had always made me quick with longing. And, like all places of myth, I knew it would not quite measure up to expectations. But nothing had prepared me for the ugly, deserted war-torn city we drove into that morning. A city of empty, looted shops and houses, and the interminable trails of ragged returning refugees. For the traveller arriving by air, the refugees might have appeared like columns of black ants. They walked in single file, carrying their belongings on their heads. We kept passing these lines of ragged returnees, as we tried to figure out our way through the littered streets, strewn with war rubble.

Kigali had been the heart of darkness, the epicentre of a genocidal cataclysm. There were spent ammunition casings, paper, concrete chunks, shards of glass, clothing, carcasses of abandoned then scavenged vehicles, broken furniture, packs of stray dogs and the occasional human skull or femur. When the s hards of glass caught the mid-morning sun, they looked like ice.

There were dugouts surrounded with sandbags on many street corners or at strategic points throughout the city. The shell-marked streets spoke of the recent drama, of the butchery. Many buildings in Mateus, the commercial centre, were gutted, their iron roofs gnarled and ripped up by exploding shells, the walls bullet-riddled. And those that were intact had been looted clean. There was little traffic but the numerous RPF roadblocks around the city that managed to create a resemblance of traffic jams. The young soldiers came up to the car and politely asked for papers then asked you where you were coming from and going to. You never told them where you were really coming from or where you were going. You did not say you were coming from Uganda because if you did the soldiers would start searching your car. Sometimes this took ages and cars piled up behind the barricades.

Kigali is a slum, of dust-brown mud-brick houses, scattered over several hills. In most of the residential areas the roads are not tarmaced, they are just dust. There is dust everywhere you look, dust on roofs, dust on trees, dust in the hollow of satellite dishes, dust in your nostrils, dust on your tongue, dust in your spit. Then when it rains the dust coagulates into mud, a viscous brown sludge that has vehicle wheels spinning helplessly, digging in deeper and deeper.

On the narrow roads that crisscross Kigali it was hard to find one's way without a map. We got lost several times trying to find our way to a place called Remera, where the RPF was presently headquartered. The young soldiers at the roadblocks were of no help to us because most of them were also newcomers to Kigali, they were either born in Uganda, Burundi or Zaire; the sons of Tutsi refugees who fled the violence in 1959.

Much of the traffic was comprised of speeding military convoys and other military vehicles or madoadoa ("patches") - RPF commandeered vehicles of the former regime, UNAMIR, or aid agencies that had been painted an impromptu camouflage. Most were dilapidated vehicles full of soldiers and driven by inexperienced drivers. Their brake-lights had been systematically eviscerated to elude sniper fire. And on Kigali's narrow winding roads, they were cause for some spectacular accidents. All the accident black spots were littered with madoadoas. I think in those initial days, the RPF lost more soldiers to car accidents than it did at the peak of the war.

In Remera, the first person we met was D, an acquaintance of mine from Toronto who had returned to Rwanda to work with the RPF. I was impressed by him, he seemed to know everyone on the street and most of them by name. He was bursting with enthusiasm, and was eager to show us the scenes of massacres, the places where the looting was still taking place, to take me to see my niece S who read the news in English on the RPF Radio Muhavura - which was now Radio Rwanda.

As the morning advanced, the prevailing chaos upon which D seemed to thrive, began to impress itself upon us. Kigali was like a Bujumbura bis. Wherever one looked, there was a crowded car with Burundi number plates. The Tutsi refugees who fled to Burundi in 1959, now driven by mounting insecurity in Burundi had been the first to arrive after the fall of Kigali, those from Uganda would arrive much later. The refugees from Burundi drove around and around the city all day, sightseeing. When they met friends or relatives, they stopped to embrace, guhobera, in the middle of the road tying up the traffic. There was a lot of guhobera in those days, it was like a form of congratulatory accolade. Even people that had met earlier in the day, would embrace when they met again the same day. The prevailing atmosphere was one of triumphant homecoming.

There was a sense of the unreal about being in Kigali. It was as if what was going on around me was actually happening to someone else. I was completely disoriented and, from time to time, I caught myself turning around at the sound of people speaking Kinyarwanda, just as I had always done in Kampala, Nairobi or in that transit hall at Cairo airport. For the first time in my adult life, I was in a place where everyone spoke Kinyarwanda. It was eerie.

3 - The returnees from Burundi - t he Bar-undi , as they were called - were busy grabbing shops and houses, looting cars, furniture and household appliances left by the dead or those who had fled to Zaire or Tanzania. The facades of many shops and houses carried this notice written in chalk o r charcoal l etters:

Iyinzu yara fashwe -this house has been taken.

Kigali was a free-for-all, there was looting, called kubohoza, everywhere, at the embassies, government offices, the warehouses, schools, shops. All that had not been looted by the fleeing Hutus, was now being looted by the returning Tutsis. D had acquired an expensive, black leather set of furniture, and had taken over a beautiful bungalow. And almost everyone was involved in the looting except the RPF soldiers who just stood by and did nothing, since no formal orders had been given.

But, on the other hand, RPF officers drove around in expensive looted cars, occupied opulent mansions or had set up their relatives in one of the appropriated shops. And the RPF civil administration was also busy auctioning off stocks of tea, second hand clothing, cooking oil and other imported goods left by the former administration at the bonded warehouses in Gikondo.

At the warehouses, I watched labourers imported from Uganda, grunt under heavy bales of tea, while loading several trucks. There was a shortage of able-bodied men in Kigali, many either being dead or in exile. In those days it was almost possible to do anything. Like the absurd case of a returnee family which was squatting in the S wiss embassy.

Contrary to the returnee civilians, the RPF soldiers (Inkotanyi), were very disciplined. They were the most disciplined African army I had ever seen. Inspite of many loosing their entire families in the genocide, they had not carried out the revenge killings, rape and pillaging many had predicted. The Hutu leadership had for a long time demonized the RPF soldiers 'the Inkotanyi have fangs, pointed ears and a tail, and they kill wherever they pass,' they used to tell the poor Hutu peasants.

Now at the roadblocks, old men, women and children, seeing the polite young RPF soldiers for the first time, were going up to them with questions. 'Was it true they had fangs, pointed ears and a tail? Would they gouged people's eyes out?' The fact that these peasants had believed this propaganda, goes to show their ignorance and credulity. The same credulity with which they had accepted to gang-rape, pillage and hack their neighbours to death. For the returnees, the Inkotanyi were heroes. In bars people bought them drinks, and no one drove past an Inkotanyi without giving him a lift.

The Inkotanyi were very popular with the girls, there were always several girls lingering around every roadblock. [TO BE CONTINUED...]

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BEN SEHENE says of himself: "I am a Rwandan writer, born in Kigali, Rwanda in 1959, of Tutsi parents. At the age of four my family was forced to flee into exile. I grew up and went to school in Uganda. In 1984 I immigrated to Canada where I started writing in 1988.In 1994, I was living in Paris, France when the genocide begun in Rwanda. And I undertook a journey back to my country of birth in the midst of the genocide and civil war about which I was to write a book (in French) called: Le Piege Ethnique (The Ethnic Trap)."