I am proud to say that my father was a respected voice in these sessions. He was usually the elder who spoke last, and his words therefore carried a great deal of weight. One case in particular stands out in my memory. The dispute was fairly typical-one man had planted a crop on a piece of ground that another family had claimed. A gacaca was called and the usual grievances were aired. Even a child like me could see that this was a case of a small misunderstanding that had blossomed into a full-scale war of pride. When two people dig in their heels against one another like that it takes quite a bit of mutual humbling for things to be put right again.
For whatever reason my usually imperturbable father was a bit out of patience that day. Perhaps the silliness of the case or the small-mindedness of the people concerned had finally gotten to him. When it came his turn to talk he stood up and motioned for the two warring neighbors to join him. They all walked out, with me trailing quietly behind, to the place on that particular hill where the disputed crop was planted. My father, in addition to being an elder, was also respected as a man who had a memory for land claims that went back generations. He saw at once that the crop had indeed spilled over onto the neighbor’s land, but also that the majority of the field was where it should have been. There was no clear villain or victim.
“Listen, you two, ” he said, motioning with the blade of his hand. “This is where the line is. Respect it from now on, and respect each other as well. I don’t want to hear about this again.”
This was a vivid lesson for me.
My father spoke with the same kind of gravitas each January, on New Year’s Day, when relatives from all over Rwanda were invited to a feast at our home on the hill. This is probably the most important day in the entire Rwandan calendar, even bigger than Christmas. Most people here identify themselves as Roman Catholic or Protestant, but we tend to emphasize New Year’s Day as the time for extended families to come together and give each other presents and wish one another bonne année. It is also a holiday to reflect on the events of the past and one’s hopes for the future, a fulcrum balanced on the tip of time. The meal served is always a belly buster. We would slaughter a bull for a feast of beef, and there were side dishes of beans and corn and peas and bananas, and, of course, banana beer.
After the meal was over my father would call me and my brothers and sisters to sit around him. He would give us all a verbal report card on our progress throughout the year of becoming good men and women.“You need to work harder in the fields, ” he would say to one. “You are doing well in school, but you must show more respect to your older brothers, ” he might say to another. As a good helper to my mother, and a quiet kid in general, my assessment was usually a kind one. Some parents might disagree with this discussion of a child’s failures and accomplishments before the entire family, and I would agree that in the wrong hands it can be hurtful. But my father showed us the same compassion on these occasions as he showed in justice on the grass. His aim was never to embarrass us but to encourage us to do the right thing. Looking back on it I can say that I grew up knowing where the lines of good behavior were drawn.
My father had a favorite saying: “Whoever does not talk to his father never knows what his grandfather said.”He was trying to express the linear quality of wisdom. His morality was not something that he made up on his own; it had been given to him by his own father and his grandfather before that, a mixture of Hutus and Tutsis stretching back hundreds of years to the time out of memory when our people had migrated to this hilly triangle between lakes. My father’s sense of justice and kindness did not know ethnicity.
He often told us stories to make his thoughts clear, and one of my favorites was about the Rwandan concept of hospitality. We are a nation that loves to take people into our homes. I suppose our values are very much like the Bedouin of the Middle East, for whom sheltering and defending strangers is not just a nice thing to do but a spiritual imperative. Rwanda never had a hotel until the European colonists arrived. We never needed one, because a traveler between towns could count on having a network of people-friends of family, family of friends-with whom he could stay. We do this reflexively. Here is the story my father told me to illustrate the point:
A party of hunters was chasing a wounded lion through the valley. The lion tried to take shelter in a man’s house and the man decided to admit the lion, even though he was putting himself at great risk. The lion recovered from his wounds and was set free. And so if a man can keep a fierce lion under his roof, why can he not shelter a fellow human being?
Rwandans are expected to offer shelter to the distressed, no matter what the circumstances. I took this lesson as gospel, and I grew up believing that everybody felt this way.
TWO
WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, there was an afternoon when people came to our house carrying spare clothes in their bags. My father seemed to know some of them, but not all. There must have been a dozen strangers in our courtyard. They were frightened and apologetic.“Don’t worry, you’re safe here, ” I heard my father say. “Relax and have a drink.” There was one strange boy about my age. His shorts were filthy. There were cuts on his feet, as if he had been walking a long way. We looked at each other from across the courtyard.
I asked my mother what was happening, and she told me that there was trouble in the capital city. The white men who had been in control were having problems. Some bad things had happened, and these people who had come to visit us were trying to get away from bad men. They would be staying awhile.
We all slept outside that first night, and it was a bit of an adventure to be under the open sky. The adults smoked tobacco and talked in low voices.
On the second night I asked my father why we were sleeping outside and he told me the truth: “Because if somebody comes to burn the house down we will not cook to death inside it.” The people who had come to stay with us were known as “Tutsis, ” he said, and there were people roaming about who hated them. It was hard for me to understand because they looked just like us.
I understood years later that our guests that November week had been fleeing widespread massacres in the wake of what was called the “Hutu Revolution of 1959.” It was also when the tactic of burning down the enemy’s houses was pioneered. Those who tried to protect the Tutsi were considered targets as well. To shelter the enemy was to become the enemy.
History is serious business in my country. You might say that it is a matter of life and death.
It is a rare person here, even the poorest grower of bananas, who cannot rattle off a string of significant dates in Rwanda ’s past and tell you exactly what they mean to him and his family. They are like beads on our national necklace: 1885, 1959, 1973, 1990, 1994. Even though this nation is dirt poor and our school system does not match the standards of the West, we might be the most knowledgeable people on the globe when it comes to analyzing our own history. We are obsessed with the past. And everyone here tries to make it fit his own ends. But this is not something of which we should always be proud.
George Orwell once said, “He who controls the past, controls the future, ” and nowhere is that more true than in Rwanda. I am fully convinced that when so many ordinary people were swinging machetes at their neighbors in that awful springtime of 1994 they were not striking out at those individual victims per se but at an historical phantom. They were trying not so much to take life as to actually take control of the past.
Rwanda is sometimes called the “Switzerland of Africa, ” and with good reason. Not only do people here tend to be quiet and reserved, like the Swiss, but our country is also a mountainous jewel tucked into some of the loveliest real estate on its continent. It is an aerie of high hills and grassy meadows and river valleys tucked between Lake Kivu to the west and the plains of Tanzania to the east. The entire region occupies an area no bigger than the American state of Vermont. It is so small there is usually never room for the name “ Rwanda ” on most maps of Africa and the word must be printed off to one side, sometimes with an arrow pointing to the pebble that is my country. But there is abundant rainfall and mild weather and black loamy soil that made it one of the richest spots in Central Africa for the growing of food and the herding of livestock. The good returns on small-scale agriculture therefore made it an attractive place to settle. And near the year 1500, at the same time that the arts and sciences were beginning to flower in Renaissance Europe, a distinct nation of people began to emerge in Rwanda under the banner of a dynastic king that everybody called the mwami.