Tale of a man’s good news name and a burning country

You probably know how to say “good news” in Kirundi, the main language they speak in Bujumbura. If you don’t, I’ll tell you in a minute. You know, the strange events there in the past few days happened to remind me that my second language, after Luganda, was actually Kirundi.

This was because most of my neighbours in the village where I grew up, some 15 kilometres northeast of Kampala, were Barundi.

My first girlfriend, however, Rosa Nyanzira (‘Road Girl,’ probably born on a roadside), acquired when I was just about four or five, was actually a Mnyarwanda.

But then, there’s very little difference between Kinyarwanda and Kirundi. So, mutual intelligibility was assured.

In fact, Kinyarwanda and Kirundi are just two varieties of a huge cluster of mutually intelligible languages spread over the Great Lakes region.

Apart from these two, some of the representatives of the cluster appear as Kijinja, Kiha and Kihangaza in Tanzania, Rufumbira in Uganda, and Kihema and Kinyamulenge in the DRC. 

My friend, the eminent and controversial linguist, B. K. Kiingi, has suggested that we should regard the cluster as one language, called “Lunyanja/Kinyanja”, since they flourish around the lakes (nyanja/nyanza).

The “ki-” bit in the names of the languages is affricated in pronunciation, like the ch- in “church”.

But what mostly went through my mind as I watched the bizarre goings-on in Bujumbura, that beautiful little city, coquettishly perched on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, was a poem I wrote many years ago. It is called “Chad’ 90”, and it was based on the frequent, often violent, changes of regime in that country.

But of course such events have had their counterparts in other countries, including my own, and Burundi.

I will quote it here in prose form, as I don’t think my editor will allow me the luxury of a verse layout. As you read, you may want to recall those vivid images of civilians jumping atop military tanks and other vehicles as they celebrated the short-lived “liberation” (read coup) by General Niyombare.

Here, then, is “Chad ‘90” in prose, with the short paragraphs representing its three verses.

“We’re free, we’re saved again! We ought to cheer and dance, embrace our grimy ‘boys’ and sing our leader’s praise.

“We thank and welcome Your Gunjesty. But, sir, we’re sick and tired and hungry. There are corpses awaiting burial. A saviour every year can easily break a looted, raped people’s soul.

“Every liberation leaves fewer and fewer of us. When the next saviour comes, as he surely will, our bones may be the only welcome he gets.”

In Bujumbura, the “next Saviour”, though a bit of a déjà vu, came within a matter of hours. Niyombare and his fellow conspirators had made several fatal errors. The most important of these was failure to realize that Burundi was no longer the little outpost where any spear-or-gun-toting warlord did what they wanted.

No, sir:  Burundi is a full-fledged member of the East African Community, with clear governance expectations, and coups d’état are not part of these. Indeed, it appears that these expectations are what the East African leaders had wanted to underline to their colleague, Pierre Nkurunziza, the man Niyombare tried to putsch, when they invited him to Dar es Salaam.

Lack of this East African awareness is also what had deluded Niyombare into thinking that if he blocked the runways at Bujumbura Airport, he would prevent Nkurunziza’s return. He forgot that we have open borders and free movement of people across them.

But the story is far from over, and the rapturous welcome that Nkurunziza received on returning to Bujumbura should not deceive him into assuming that all is well. East Africans should be particularly concerned that the dubious governance processes that led to the attempted coup are leaving “fewer and fewer” of their fellow citizens in their Burundian homes.

Those closely following the developments there must have noted that intimidation by a shadowy group of alleged regime supporters has recently forced well over 100,000 Burundians to flee outside the country. The group calls itself “Imbonerakure” (meaning, to my Kirundi-speaking mind, “those who detect from afar”). I don’t know why it reminded me chillingly of the “Interahamwe”.

Since I laid my cards on the table right at the beginning of this piece, the reader will not be surprised at my sustained interest in Burundian affairs.  But my stake goes deeper than my East African concerns and my linguistic membership of the Kirundi-speaking commonwealth. I keep mentioning to my friends that I don’t know of any Ugandan south of the Nile who doesn’t have a Rwandan or Burundian blood relative. I have several among both communities.

But wait. It is a little more formal than that. Did you know that Barundi, like the Banyarwanda, are officially mentioned in the Ugandan Constitution among the 56 “indigenous” communities of the country? I dare not arrogate to myself the legal expertise to interpret the implications of this.

Common sense suggests, however, that if a Burundian feels uncomfortable in Bujumbura or anywhere else out there, they should feel free to take a ride to Kampala and claim their community membership there.

A well-trained physical education lecturer, like Pierre Nkurunziza, might even find himself earning a better salary at Makerere than in his present job. After all, Uganda is fast following Kenya into a middle-class economy status, while Burundi is perennially described as “impoverished”.

Even more intriguingly, a member of the Ugandan Barundi community could run for the Presidency, without the shackles of bothersome term limits, since they don’t exist there! I will not venture into speculations of what Ugandans should do if they feel that some of their relatives are getting a raw deal out there in Bujumbura.

Oh, I nearly forgot to tell you what we call “good news” in Kirundi. We say: “nkuru nziza.” Seriously!

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and literature in East Africa.