The fear we sow today is the violence we reap tomorrow

This is a story of the unpredictability of life in Africa. PHOTO | COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • To destroy a country simply because one community thinks it is superior to the other is the height of human folly.

  • The mistakes African leaders and citizens continue to make are quite basic.

  • What is in ethnic difference? Nothing really beyond a lack of appreciation of that difference by the other. At base we are all human.

As Africa proves the optimists wrong, as the continent throws away the opportunity that many hoped it would grab in the 21st century to progress beyond internecine wars and under-development, one is left wondering whether this is merely an intractable problem that can still be resolved or a curse.

One wonders how a continent that is so blessed with an abundance of natural and human resources struggles so much to just maintain peace and allow its people to prosper.

How does one account for the madness of the perennial violence in more than half of African countries? How has violence managed to shadow Africa for so long since the end of colonial political occupation?

One gets some answers to these enigmatic questions in Gael Faye’s book, “Small Country” (2016/2018). The narrator of the story in this book offers glimpses into the tragedy of a modern African country/city/community, the disaster of the fickleness of African existence.

UNPREDICTABLE

This is a story of the unpredictability of life in Africa — one moment (really years) one is living a calm, comfortable and promising life; the next moment war in a neighbouring country dismantles all that serenity and scatters the family to the four winds.

This is a story of a happy childhood, of a boy growing up in peacetime Bujumbura. An expatriate French father, a Rwandan mother, a younger sister, friends in the neighbourhood, and workers at home, is the family that Gabriel grows up in and with.

Like many children his age — 10 years in 1992 — life is about playing in the neighbourhood, going swimming, cycling, stealing a neighbour’s mangoes, pretending to be tough chaps guarding their turf etc.

It is a world of dreams, a world in which the children may hear and sense that some things aren’t right but still trust that all is well.

Thus, one day Gabriel and his sister get an explanation from their father about the “difference” between Hutus and Tutsis, a difference based on physical appearance but which relies on features that do not neatly fit on all people in Burundi or Rwanda.

This is why, when the children can’t confirm that all Hutus are short and have wide noses and all Tutsis are “extra-skinny” with long noses, the myth of ethnic difference is shattered. They find it more disturbing when calling one Hutu or Tutsi at school becomes it is some kind of an “insult”.

In fact the narrator describes the atmosphere in the society as “becoming stranger by the day”, because the children discover that the seeming certainties of the adult world aren’t factual all the time.

It is this estrangement, this turn of events in which what has always been normal or the accepted becomes distanced, alarming, uncertain, that sows the seeds of the violence, destruction and death that follows.

CHANGE

When the ways of everyday life change and some inexplicable enmity happens, not because there is some serious external force altering things, but because individuals have chosen to change the way they relate to those they suppose are different from them, violence and death tend to follow not so far away. Somewhere in the process lurks history. And this is the case with Gabriel’s family.

Gabriel’s mother has family in Rwanda. As Rwanda degenerates into an orgy of violence started by the then government seeking to kill Tutsis, who were presented as mortal enemies of the Hutu ruling elite Gabriel’s aunts, uncles and cousins in Rwanda feared for their lives.

When the Tutsi led Rwandan Patriotic Front marches towards Kigali, the killings by the government army envelope the country and consume Gabriel’s relatives. The peace that Gabriel’s family had been living in is destroyed, never to be regained.

For when the mother discovers the horror of the death of her relatives in Kigali, she goes back to Bujumbura a shattered woman. She cannot live with the trauma. She loses her mind and ends up in the drinking holes of Burundi, seemingly looking for her dead relatives.

When the violence comes too close home, and the houseboy, Prothe, is killed while another worker, Donatien, disappears, Gabriel and the sister are evacuated to France, which is where this story begins as Gabriel ponders ever returning to Burundi.

But what would he be returning to Burundi for? To bid his home country a proper farewell considering he had left in a hurry, chased by the drums of war? To find his lost mother? To look for his friends? Or does he travel back out of mere curiosity?

LESSON

Miraculously he finds his mother — a woman who had lost her mind, and spends her days drinking alcohol. The discovery of his mother offers him a purpose, a reason to stay on in Bujumbura, to try and nurse his mother back to life.

Gabriel’s tragedy though, is the misfortune millions of Africans all over the continent. It sometimes feels like a curse of a continent that is unable to decide what it wants. Too often Africans blame some other force, an external agent, for their hardship.

But the story of “Small Country”, as it carries one from Gabriel’s childhood happiness and innocence to the violence and senseless deaths brought about by bad political decisions, leaves the reader in a very sad mood. It is a story of very avoidable decisions and actions.

To destroy a country simply because one community thinks it is superior to the other is the height of human folly. For, as Gabriel discovers when he goes back to Burundi, the rebuilding of a destroyed country depends too much on the magnanimity of others, in this case NGOs and external donors.

Yet, the mistakes African leaders and citizens continue to make are quite basic. What is in ethnic difference? Nothing really beyond a lack of appreciation of that difference by the other. At base we are all human. A Hutu feels just as much pain as a Tutsi when violated.

The elusive peace in the Great Lakes region of Africa will only be attained when the citizens of these countries acknowledge their shared humanity as opposed to the superiority of one over the other.

This is a lesson that has to be repeated here in Kenya.

The writer teaches literature at University of Nairobi. [email protected]