Ubuntu: At home in the hills of Rwanda

Before the inviting tinkle of breakfast cutlery summoned us to the table, before we climbed into our field clothes, before the sun climbed out east, we’d jog down the sloping face of the hotel’s beautiful backyard that dipped into Lake Muhazi, about 40km east of Kigali, Rwanda.

The morning jog along the Ikiyaga cya Muhazi set the pace for the day; the stretch of the waters, the morning music of strange, unseen birds was a refreshing combo, and so was the thought of breakfast: the choicest of yellow banana and peanuts and yam and other treats whose names I can no longer summon.

In the wind, which was really my mind playing the album, came Masada, a song by the Ivorian singer Alpha Blondy.

“ … and rise up with the birds from the East and clean up my sins … witness Jah rising sun now from Masada.”

Muhazi Lake hotel would be home for four days in August 2014. It’s the place we repaired to after a hot, dusty day in the hills that dotted the countryside. Our mission in the Central African nation was to document an ambitious plan by the Rwandese government to steer farmers towards a more diversified crop system.

While most farming in rural Rwanda is dominated by banana and other traditional crops, the government hoped farmers would adopt maize. To incentivise them, the government, through its agriculture ministry in partnership with financial institutions, principal of which was a Kenyan bank, would finance the roll-out.

A THOUSAND HILLS

We got off the plane at Kigali International Airport to a white sun. Heat rays shimmered off the asphalt, but there was a cool air breathing down. A man named Jeanne (a name we later found to be in high circulation everywhere we went) waited at the arrivals section. He welcomed us with a wave as he opened the door for the drive into Kigali.

You won’t find a jollier, more patriotic man; Jeanne might as well have been working for the tourism department. As soon as the vehicle got on the highway, he began on a rundown of the attributes of his city.

In halting English sprinkled with some Swahili, Jeanne spoke of the friendliness of the people, the ubuntu — the oneness — that spread across the land. He pointed out important places, some of which he insisted we couldn’t go back home with, that we cannot have been to Rwanda at all, if we didn’t visit.

Though he would get round to it, it struck me that Jeanne hadn’t insisted we go tour the Kigali Genocide Memorial — that solemn place that memorialises the terrible genocide that took place in 1994 when a staggering one million Rwandese were slaughtered in the worst case of ethnic hatred anywhere. Jeanne, we discovered, as we would keep discovering during our stay in the country, looked instead to the sun and its promise.

“Karibu magharibi tunaenda” (the hour is nearing sunset), he said as we drove into the hotel where we’d spend our first night. We didn’t plan to sightsee on our first day; tomorrow we would be heading east, heading to work.

Kigali came to us as billed. The in-flight magazine on RwandAir had gushed about the possibilities, the agrarian beauty of the city, the Phoenix spirit, the promise. And the hills. Kigali was truly the city of a thousand hills. The hills overlooking the city stood in wooded, fierce-yet removed, pride.

NEAT TO A FAULT

The trees watched from the distance like sentries, as if protecting Kigali from invaders. They also gave the city a rural air. And yet Kigali was completely modern, a city on the rise; urban but not yet in a rush to burst.

The sidewalks — some cobblestones — were well maintained, and the roads that zipped across the city were airy and neat to a fault. Rwanda, after all, had galloped ahead of other countries in keeping at bay the menace of plastic bags. You could pick a pin off the asphalt.

We would be back in a week, and as we settled in for the night, Kigali flickered with lights, a city marching on to its own beat.

TO THE EAST

Early morning, we struck out for the east. Our work would concentrate on the eastern district of Kayonza. In the back of the all-terrain vehicle that took us to the remote villages of Kayonza, the land rolled away parts hilly, parts flat. But always there were bananas, groves of them. They rose from the earth like toadstools, trying to make up for the absence of trees.

There were hills, but they stood stark, shaved of all trees.

It was part of the legacy of the terrible genocide. The land had managed to heal itself back, but the scars were there. Talking with the farmers and the young people in the places we travelled, there was warmth, resilience and the hope that things could only get better.

As it almost always happens, work became life, and now we were family. It helped that Kinyarwanda — the official language — rolled out in familiar cadence. More than once we had to decline invitations to lunch; the Rwandese, it occurred to us, had planned to overfeed us.

Even in the far-flung villages, miles away from the capital, order persisted. You couldn’t walk to the local shop, the boutique (all shops were boutiques), and buy aspirin without a letter from the doctor. Whenever the police pulled us over, there was little verbal communication: the driver simply produced his licence, the officer would signal for the windshield wiper.

IMPERILLED BEAUTY

Most houses in rural Rwanda are built of mud, plastered mud. The houses stood long, in imperilled beauty. Someone had taken time to work the walls and the floor, and the doors were open. Out in the farms, farmers dug pits and covered the maize seed; rain was pushing in and would soon pour upon the land. And our days were thinning.

On the last day in Kayonza, a hot day that caused sweat to pour over us, we called in early. The work was done, but there was one last thing that we had to do.

The ATV laboured up the road, the jerky motion throwing us back and front and sideways. We pulled up outside a polite house plastered in khaki. There was a raffle — what in Kenya is commonly referred to as the merry-go-round.

The lady of the house had won herself the prize of a heifer. We needed to see this. The local pastor was there, and he wore a brittle Nyerere shirt, but he had the voice of a pastor. He was full of humour too and in between the thanksgiving service served a couple of jokes. We caught it in the translator’s voice.

What we needed to see was the Peacock dance, that most famous of all jigs in Rwanda. There wasn’t much colour to the version, but all the important parts were there: the wavy movement of the hands, the parting of unseen water.

It was a good dance and the pastor took part in it.

The daughter of the house, a shy beautiful girl who smiled behind her hand, was told to go into the room, emerging from it with a bunch of banana yellowed to correctness. It was a gift for us because, the lady of the house explained, Kenya and Rwanda were not too far apart. And if among us was an unhitched man, negotiations for a bride price could begin.

We were in the very heart of ubuntu. On the morning of our departure, I walked down to the lake. I didn’t jog, choosing instead to walk the length, soaking in the sounds and air in long drags.