Rwanda: a thousand hills and a million deaths
Monday, August 9th, 2010After a 32-hour bus ride from Dar es Salaam – which was pretty trying but not terrible by African standards – we arrived in Kigali at around lunchtime last Friday and spent the next five days in Rwanda. The country is small, doesn’t have a wealth of tourist sites, and the primate tracking is more expensive than elsewhere in the region (e.g. $100 per person to track golden monkeys in Rwanda and half that in Uganda), so that’s why we didn’t devote much time to it.
Of course, Rwanda is most famous for the 1994 genocide, when the majority Hutus slew a million minority Tutsis in 100 days of madness. Sixteen years later, the country seems to have made good progress in moving on, but numerous memorials across the country ensure that the local people will never forget it. We visited the Kigali memorial which I would describe as chilling, and even sickening. Seeing the skulls of some victims and photos of hundreds of bodies strewn on the ground was very moving, but the saddest and most powerful part for me was seeing photos of lost children, accompanied by profiles which would say things like:
Age: 6
Favourite food: rice with sauce
Best friend: his Mum
Cause of death: hacked to death with a machete
After leaving Kigali, we headed south to Butare and from there we got to experience the justifiably famous Rwandan countryside. Rwanda is known as the Land of a Thousand Hills, and it’s extremely apt, since rolling hills dominate the landscape of virtually the entire country (even Kigali itself is built on a series of hills). I thought the most beautiful stretch was between Butare and Nyungwe NP, where tea, coffee, rice and wheat plantations dotted the hills in all directions.
We had gone to Nyungwe to track black-and-white colobus monkeys, and we saw one on the road on the way there. Then once we arrived at the park HQ, having been offered transport by two very friendly Swiss families, we baulked at having to get further transport to a different area and then having to pay $140 to track them, so in the end we decided to turn around and head back to Butare. We started flagging down anything going our way and wound up hitching with a wealthy local couple and then a Red Cross worker, so it was a nice experience to chat with some local people. The conversations were in French, but other than this there is just as much English spoken in Rwanda these days, making it hard to know what language to start a conversation with. Under President Paul Kagame, who doesn’t speak French, the country is deliberately moving away from its francophone past (as a Belgian colony) and traditional Central African relationship with francophone Burundi and the DRC towards an alliance with British colonies Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania as part of the East African Community agreement.
From Butare, we returned to Kigali and then headed west towards Gisenyi, which is apparently a pretty fabulous place if you pay $150 a night for a hotel on Lake Kivu with a private beach. But if you prefer to pay $15 instead, you get a pretty dodgy room in a dirty and child-beggar-ridden town, and after walking down to the lake and looking at it for 15 minutes you are more than ready to leave. This being our experience, we left Rwanda behind and headed to the DRC.
Nick