WHERE WERE YOU WHEN ...

IN REHANA'S WORDS

Monday, 2 December

I can’t believe that in my last post I complained about a year’s worth of ogling poverty. I take it back. I forgot that we had genocide tourism waiting for us in Rwanda. It took us a while to engage anyone about it; we had to gather our courage.

In the meantime we looked warily at everyone over the age of 20, especially the men carrying machetes. At our first campsite in Ruhengeri men sheared the grass around us with scythes and machetes. It was unnerving.

In preparation for this trip I downloaded books about every country we’re visiting. For Rwanda, I bought Jacques Pauw’s Rat Roads and put off reading it until we were in Kisoro, our last destination in Uganda. Jules started reading it when we were already in Rwanda. It made her weep.

It was horrible listening to the policeman beating the woman at the border (Jules describes it in the previous post). I should have said something, but what? I didn’t say anything; does this make me complicit? 
My only excuse is that border posts make me nervous; is that a good enough reason to say nothing? The assault stopped before I left the police office where all my details were being written laboriously in a big ledger.

My second impression of Rwanda was how clean it is. Plastic bags are banned and people are required to clean the country on the last Saturday of every month. Only a dictator can pull of an edict like that, but it looks unbelievably, impossibly good. There are gutters without a fallen leaf or loose stone and rivers and canals without plastic chokeholds. And this is Africa!

Minutes after we crossed the border we saw a sign pointing to the Virunga Lodge. Marta, the Italian travel agent who had sent us to the island in the middle of Lake Bunyonyi, told us we should go there for the best view of the volcanoes. 
We saw four of them from the lodge’s terrace – two were open, one’s tip was covered in clouds and one was half covered. I had never seen a volcano before, and I very much doubt that I am going to see a cluster of four again.

We tried to have a drink on the lodge’s terrace, which would have enabled us to gawk for a while, but we couldn’t afford it. I’ve been gobsmacked by prices since we started on this trip, but Virunga Lodge took the cake – it charges $1 200 per person per day.

We drove to the entrance of the Volcanoes National Park, hoping to find a campsite outside. But there were only lodges, and they all wanted much moocha. 
We retreated to the Red Rocks Backpackers in Ruhengeri. We camped in a clearing surrounded by a mielie field where we could see five volcanoes from a distance. We never saw all at the same time – the rainy season is not conducive to volcano watching.

Red Rocks Backpackers mielie field was a sweet place to be

When the sky cleared we had a great view of the volcanoes from our campsite

Julia the pied piper on a walk in Ruhengeri

Lots of evidence that the volcanoes do blow up from time to time

We had to leave when this mzungu truck with 24 hard-drinking Brits rolled into our campsite

Our next destination was Gisenyi on Lake Kivu. I kept seeing figments of genocide memorials in the corner of my eye – there were several gardens of remembrance in towns and villages that we drove through and signs pointing to other monuments.
But we decided to first soak in Rwanda’s beauty – its people and landscape. We’re still nervous of older men but the women and the children are stunning. I hope that the widespread practice of fake braids never catches on in Rwanda, black women with natural hair are tres elegant.

The skies above Lake Kivu were mostly covered in cloud and the lake was silver most of the time while we were in Gisenyi. When the clouds lifted the lake went blue and we broiled in the heat and the sparkle of the water. We spent four nights in Gisenyi but never saw the Nyiragongo Volcano, which glows orange at night.

We camped in a parking lot with an incredible view of Lake Kivu

A Bradt guidebook suggested a trip to the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo was a thing to do in Gisenyi. We took motorbike taxis to the centre of town. For the first time on this trip we were one each on a bike (with the driver of course) and had to wear helmets!
We’d been skirting the border for weeks: sometimes been within driving distance and a few times we could have walked. We passed another refugee camp as we drove into Gisenyi. The ring of volcanoes appeared to be ringed by UN camps.

My fear of border officials and Rwandan brutality receded for a few minutes in Gisenyi as I took photos and video footage of the tide of humanity crossing the border. They came into Gisenyi from Goma (yes, we were metres away from the town where war raged a fortnight ago) carrying empty bags, sacks, plastic tubs and buckets and walked back home bent under the weight of produce and other goods.

There were also some beautiful, bourgeois Congolese women swaying empty handed to the border, their eyebrows plucked and penciled in to create questions in their glances.

Another 200m and Jules would be in Goma. We never crossed over

Empty bags coming in to Gisenyi, heavily laden walking back to Goma

Elegant Congolese women with burdens on their heads

To recover from our ordeal of watching women weighted down by the burdens of warfare and the accidents of their birth, we retreated to the Serena Hotel’s private beach. One day is one day - I am going to spend a month in every Serena Hotel in Africa.
We cowered in the shade of canvas umbrellas on the bright green lawn, too intimidated by the heat to laze on their loungers at the glittering waterside.
I like the way we travel: stay in the cheapest lodgings and hang out at the luxury spots. Sip the expensive drinks slowly but imperiously beckon waiters, practising our bourgeois skills.

The beach at Serena Hotel, Gisenyi

The public beach in Gisenyi

For the first time on this trip, we camped in a parking lot. We had access to Inzu Lodge’s fantastic toilets and showers and their huge lapa where it was hard to relax in their uncomfortable chairs.
One night a group of mzungus, one of them South African, pitched up in the lapa with a projector and a white sheet. They proceeded to watch The Gods Must Be Crazy. Jules and I cringed in embarrassment and slunk off a few minutes after it started.

The mornings at Inzu Lodge were noisy; we were woken early every day by the chants of the night fishermen rowing in to the harbour, the angle grinder at the building site across the road and people’s loud conversations in the street alongside the parking lot. 
We didn’t have a tree to park under and by 7am our tent was as hot as a sauna.

The night fishermen setting off on in their rowing boats at sunset

They chant melodiously as the row out into the lake

Sunset on Lake Kivu

Lake Kivu was hard to leave so we went to Kibuye, where our room at the Catholic-run Home St Jean opened onto a balcony overlooking the lake.
At Kibuye, a small slumbering town, the lake is frilly and there are small inlets around every corner. It was windy and cool every day.
I kept putting on my costume every morning but couldn’t find the courage to take it for a swim.

The view from our room at Kibuye

So tempted, so chicken

Today we left the beautiful lake and drove 30km on axle-breaking roads to a genocide memorial in a small village, Bisesero. It was hard to reach. BRC got us there on awful rocky roads made slippery in the rain in one hour and 10 minutes.

We were silent during the drive. The beautiful terraced hills and the lake inlets were an irritation; this was no time for beauty. As we got closer and lost (not one signpost till the entrance), we had to stop and ask for directions. 
I got the grille as older men walked to our window to help us find our way. Were we going to see what they had done 20 years ago? Were they survivors or perpetrators? How do you tell the difference?

A skinny young man with a locked leg limp met us at the entrance to the memorial. He introduced himself as Mucho Matthias (Rwandans use surnames first), pointed to a shed a few metres below and said “we start here”. Julia overtook him as he limped slowly downhill and reached the open door of the shed. She went in, came out whitefaced and said “there’s skulls in here”.

The shed had layers of shelves made of sheets of corrugated iron, held up by gumpoles and filled with orderly rows of 1 000-odd bleached skulls. The very first one I saw as I came in had two perfectly round holes in the temple. 
“Bullet holes,” Matthias said. He pointed to the skull alongside which had a hole in the temple with fractures radiating to the sides. “Clubbed to death.”

He lifted a wooden club hanging from a hook on a gumpole. It was about 80cm long, with two thick nails hammered in and bent so the nailheads protruded from the rounded top. I held it. It wasn’t very heavy; it must have taken considerable force to kill with it. 
The men we’ve watched shearing grass with machetes lift their arms high before they swing it across lawns. They could become great golfers or …

As I walked down the shed the stupid thought in my head was how amazing it was that, inside our bodies, black and white people’s bones are equally white. Then I spotted a few brown skulls. “They were burned to death”, Matthias explained.

Julia had reached the end of the shed. She turned and looked at me, her eyes wide with fright, tears pooling in them. I could see how I felt. Enough, we had been at the memorial site for three minutes and we had seen enough.

I forced myself to show respect and followed Matthias to the end of the shed. The shelves at the back had an assortment of long and short bones. Matthias said people were still finding bones in the neighbourhood and bringing them in.

As I walked back to the entrance I noticed a cluster of small skulls, dead young children. I didn’t linger to find out whether they’d been shot, clubbed or battered to death with rocks.

I was too dumbstruck, too respectful to take photos inside the shed

Fortunately for this griefstricken genocide tourist, the memorial was being renovated, so there wasn’t anything else to see. We went to a little office where Matthias showed us a book of interviews with survivors. The interviews were in French but the photos that accompanied them told us the story. Everyone had dead eyes.

The Tutsis at Bisesero fought back when their Hutu neighbours and relatives came for them. They climbed to the top of a hill and repelled their would-be killers with spears and stones from April to June 1994. 
A contingent of French soldiers came to see their plight and left without lifting a trigger finger. The genocidaires called in the Rwandan army and in three days they killed between 50 000 and 60 0000 people from the nine communities around Bisesero.

As we drove away we were silent again. It got worse for me; I had flashbacks of some of the horrors I had seen when I visited six German concentration camps in 10 days in 1995. A whole lot of questions tumbled into my head. I couldn’t ask Matthias for answers, I was struck dumb by the skulls. I’ll save them for the next memorial.

They're still harvesting bones in their heartbreakingly beautiful fields

IN JULIA'S WORDS



The road that leads to Bisesero through the concertina rift-hills of western Rwanda is a bitter argument. So much for the constantly repeated line that Rwanda has “such wonderful roads”. There are some, yes, but they’re only – some of – the main ones.
Rehana and I win the 30km argument about an hour-and-half later. We arrive to find that Bisesero’s memorial site – for the 9 communities which had been living these steep mountainsides, those torn, ripped, slashed, crunched, raped, etcsavageetc in that fiercesome bloodbath of Rwanda’s 1994’s genocide – still under construction.
There are two flights of concrete steps: one leads up the slope to brick buildings still having their insides finished; another flight leads down the slope to a large shed made of rusted corrugated iron.
A mid-30ish man called Mucho Mattias – who walks with an artificial leg – mutters something I don’t quite get and limps us down the hill to the iron shed.
I am irritated, not having the foggiest of what the shed is about, or exactly his role. Is this the makeshift “reception” for the memorial? Is he a guide whom we must pay?  Will craft-sellers have their stalls set up inside and be bugging us to buy? Is this a shed for tools to which we’re being guided?
As I arrive at the shed, another younger man unlocks the padlock and swings open the door. I peer inside and see in the dim light the cold facts of mass death: 1 000+ skulls lined neatly on rickety platforms about (my) head-height; and in the shed’s furthest gloom piles upon piles more parts of hacked humans, mostly their leg bones.
It’s the kind of horror vision that just sits on the inner front of my own skull as if memory is a sheet of still slate. Like a snapshot, devoid of depth or movement, the sight of the rows of skulls in that dark corrugated-iron shed. 
My imagination rebels and animates the vision, but it’s only a macabre vision of them jiggling around to the soundtrack of “Dem bones dem bones dem, dry bones”, edged with the kind of nervous hysterical giggle you get in the face of indigestible unerasable throat-choking stomach-stabbing horror.

With Matthias at the entrance to the Bisesero Genocide Memorial

It is said that somewhere between 50 000 and 60 000 Tutsis living here, who crowded in self-defence on the highest rockiest hilltop, were killed in that crazed short frenzy. It is said that they denied their would-be genocidaires for a few weeks, repelling them successfully with rocks and arrows – until the Hutu army's big guns came.
It is also said that bodies are still being retrieved and added to the pile of bones from the worked fields.
There is nothing else for us here. Mucho Mattias declines to take us to the hill’s top where the tens of thousands other human remains await some kind of internment. The other buildings are still under construction and the reception building he takes us to is devoid of information besides a book in French with photos of the dead-eyed witnesses and a list in tiny print of the names apparently applied to these bones when they were still apiece and of the living.
I felt so for these two men who hang around the would-be respectful trappings to the irredeemable direst of human achievements, limping stray visitors prepared to take on the road’s rude arguments to swing open the door to the iron shed of death. One of them is a survivor – he couldn’t have had more than a handful of years to his name when he witnessed this human harvesting.
We leave them in the newly falling rain to fight again with the “road”, and they resume the posture of the nothing-much-doing in the fearful nothing-at-all.

STILL JULIA'S WORDS

6 December

Rehana and I are in a room at the Golf Eden Guest House in Kigali. The room is small, dingy, with just-doable mattresses and a bathroom nearby that sometimes has hot water in the handheld shower. 
The main plus about this guest house is location location location – it’s a quietish place overlooking Kigali’s only golf course.

The view from our guesthouse stoep

Unimpressed with the damp spot on the wall behind and the sagging mattress

We both hear Rehana’s cellphone beep around midnight but turn over and snore on. So it is not until morning that Rehana reads her first sms: “Mandela has passed”.
“Shit,” I say. “But what a mercy too, poor old codger.”
“Shaarghaaah,” answers Rehana (she can't talk in the mornings).
I go to find Domina, the dominatrix of the part-grungy establishment, to find out whether she’s fixed the geyser and can we at last have a warm shower. It is fixed, Domina confirms; and I mention Mandela’s death to her.
She falls against the wall clutching her breasts and mutters some mystical phrases (she’s a reborn Christian).
“Are you going home?” she asks.
“No,” says Rehana. Her arms may be crossed across her heart, but her eyes are dry. Travella continua.
As before when BRC has needed attention, fixing the latest problem is (at least) a two day affair. 

Removing bits and bobs to make space to extract the clutch plate, which needs replacing

Yesterday Jameel – a brinjalesque Ugandan – spent the day at his shanty garage replacing the clutch plate. We spent about 7 bum-numbing hours sitting on the plastic chairs at a nearby grungy bar called “Guinness and Sister” reading books on our Kindles (I “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, Rehana “Obama’s Wars”).

Today we are due back at Guinness and Sister for most of the day while Jameel replaces the oil filter – HOPEFULLY the solution to the bluddy oil leak that’s plagued us for months. We drive there with “Bring back Nelson Mandela” and “Usilethela Uxolo Nelson Mandela”” blasting from BRC’s speakers. People stare at us in wonder; I have no clue whether they know about Madeeeeebs’ passing (or “going home”, as the Nigerians say), but I feel again like a proud, let-it-all-hang-out South African.
January, the manager of Guinness and Sister, understands immediately when Rehana asks him to put Aljazeera on their TV so we can watch the coverage of Mandela’s death.
Settling our poor sitting-wrecked bums again on our plastic chairs, we tune in to interviews with Murphy Morobe, Ali Bacher (eh?), Ahmed Kathrada and others interwoven with the Arch at prayer and live footage of Soweto and Houghton grievers with minimentories documenting Mandela’s liberation story.
“Aah, I was there!” I yelped at footage of the 1990 gathering at Soweto’s Soccer City stadium, remembering Johnathon Dorfman and me, the only sweaty pink faces we could see in the packed crowd.
“Eee, I was there!,” peeped I as footage of the 1994 inauguration came on screen, remembering how Dorfy, Nan and I had set off from Joburg at 6am to be sure to get a good spot and had remained for hour after many sweaty hour as the cram began and learning (at last) the meaning of “Phantsi!!”.
In short, those days: how the retelling of Mandela’s story touches upon mine also and unlaces thrilling memories.
My former freedom fighter is animated beside me, now grinning, now berating the coverage. Rehana asks, “So who in today’s cabinet can we credit with integrity anywhere near Mandela’s?”
We scratch our chins and watch some more. No one comes to mind. “Discipline” in the party seems to demean the standing of even those who could be seen to have more cred than most – like Trevor Manuel – we kind of conclude. And Kader’s dead.
“Forget the South African government”, sighs Rehana. “Who in the world does?”
We scratch chins again, but my chin is feeling worn and I give up quite soon without a suggestion. I can only imagine how jealous Obama must be as he says his piece about the place in the ages that Mandela has secured and which he can only admire from so far below he’s liable to get a crick in his neck looking up. Will post-president Obama even secure a guest spot on the Simpsons?
Of course, there’s clay upon our hero’s boots. But today’s not the day to place it on his newly star-dust feet. 

The "R" and "L" confusion followed us to Kigali. A sign on a spares shop

We meet an accomplished Canadian-born young Rwandan woman called Dianne for lunch; Jameel is kind enough to drop us off at the restaurant as BRC is still being repaired.
“I feel like I’ve lost my grandfather,” she says. Her biological ones are long dead. I tearily agree. Rehana, red-eyed (but that’s a TB med side-effect, not weeping), nods her agreement.
Finally we are reunited with BRC; Jameel too is lamenting Mandela’s death and planning to move to South Africa as soon as possible (Inshallah).
We lose our way a bit getting to the hotel which promises fast internetie near our iffy guest house. And it is here, looking online over a selection of today’s memorial covers of Mandela’s death from every corner of the world, that darling Rehana has a proper wet-season sob.
A dude with a keyboard and a fiesty woman singing her high-heels off at the hotel play several Brenda Fassie and Yvonne Chaka Chaka numbers. Rehana and I dance with something between glee and nostalgia, the two of us alone on the dance floor. Rehana dances “The Bart”; as usual, I can’t follow the steps. Both of us are wet-eyed, alive with the death of Madiba, and with his magic.
Last night (7 December), we continued our Farewell Tata celebrations with the sweetest gathering of a handful of fellow in-Kigali-town South Africans. There was Gertrude and Dudu and Mary (she’s from India), and later Heidi, Priya and Viresh (the last two from the SA High Commission) joined in. It was a fine mix of memories and hilarity, where the conversation veered bubblingly from impassioned views on today’s SA, to heartfelt reminiscences of where Madiba touched our lives. 

Some of our small crowd that gathered to celebrate Madiba

An unexpected and very happy spinoff from this gathering was that Priya and Viresh rescued us from our dodgy dive and have installed us in a spare room of their very palatial home. 
For lunch today we ate Priya’s Cape Town curries – finished off with a touching milk tart – and I got to jolly around with their two young daughters. I’ve missed that. It feels extremely fine, right now, to be a citizen of the complex called South Africa.

IN REHANA'S WORDS

Friday, December 6

I guess I have ink in my veins after all. I wept for Madiba at 7pm, while I was watching a Guardian slideshow of newspaper and magazine covers. Around the world, editors had prepared memorial front pages and supplements paying tribute to what many called a “colossus”.

For the first time in my life, I have some respect for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror – their covers were magnificent. My favourites were the New Yorker with its stylized cover of a young Madiba with a neat parting in his hair and a Portuguese newspaper that had a clenched fist on its entire front page. The covers made me realise what a huge loss this was, so I wept for the first time today.

I had hoped that Madiba would die while we were away from home. His death is a huge story I am glad to miss. I hate crying at the office and I probably would have done so when my colleagues’ frenzy got too much. I’d probably cry with rage when the foreign media got the best seats in the house at his funeral – which is guaranteed to happen.

Having recently had lung problems, I’m glad Madiba didn’t have to struggle much longer. He was taken to hospital shortly before I began battling for each breath, I know how difficult that is.

It’s hard to mourn with so few shoulders to cry on, although all the Rwandans we’ve spoken to today have been very sorrowful for what they regard as their own loss.

We were lucky to have him.