IT FELT rather uncomfortable to be South African in a remote market in Rwanda a year after the horrific genocide in that country in 1994.
An old man selling veterinary medicines gave me a piece of his mind about allegations that the leaders of mass killers, known as the Interahamwe, had enjoyed support from South Africa.
I told him what I had heard the new Rwandan ambassador to Pretoria, Ben Karenzi, say, addressing the SA Institute of International Affairs, just before my departure.
“I understand there are Mafia arms dealers who do this.”
The old man was not impressed.
“Then why are they above the law?”
He spoke perfect English, no doubt learnt in exile in neighbouring Uganda to which waves of waTutsi had fled since Belgium gave independence to a government dominated by the majority tribe, the waHutu. The era ended after the the exiled army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) raided their host country’s armoury and came home to stop the genocide against waTutsi and moderate waHutu.
I had entered the “land of a thousand hills” on a minibus taxi from Uganda’s western town of Mbarara, through a back road border that, the driver told me, RPF soldiers had used. It was the first of many times my way through a checkpoint was smoothed by showing a letter Karenzi had written for me.
I had visited the Africa’s Great Lakes Region, as a backpacker in neighbouring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). The countryside of volcanoes, lakes ‒ of course ‒ and thick forests oozed with agricultural productivity in the “shambas”, as village plots were called. The land carried many people. Hundreds upon hundreds of people took food to and from the markets on roads and pathways.
This time, in Rwanda, the scenery was the same as in eastern Zaire but there were fewer people.
About a million had been killed in the genocide and millions of the killers and their kin had fled the RPF over the Zaire border, where they regrouped in a large UN-run camp in the border city of Goma, nestled between the active volcano, Nyiragongo, and Lake Kivu.
On my way there, a boy boarded the minibus taxi. He showed me his school and said, in a matter of fact way: “I have no teachers; they were all killed.”
In the camps of Goma, people got on with their lives, living in shacks made mostly of blue and white tarpaulins. Part of the UN survival kits. Far from having the manner of machete-wielding killers they were alleged to have been, they appeared placid and missing home. Of course, it would have been unwise for them to set foot back into Rwanda.
They made requests such as: “Please visit my sister in Cyangugu” and “my mother in Butare”.
Back in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, the prisons were jam-packed with genocide accused. Also placid, almost in a daze. I walked among them through the courtyards along a path filled with crowds of people. Destination: the clinic run by a doctor, trained in the US. He was grateful that, unlike in some other prisons, this one did not have cases of people who needed leg amputations because of gangrene that manifested in the crowded conditions.
On my way out, prisoners in their pink uniforms formed a song group. They hoisted a flag with an unexpected logo: Boy Scouts.
Who would have thought that the movement I had been introduced to as a cub in Empangeni was strong in Rwandan society?
Then came the requests: “If you’re South African, please tell Nelson Mandela about us. He must understand what it’s like to be in prison.”
Meanwhile, the new government in Rwanda decided it should leave some of the massacre sites as the RPF found them after flushing out the Interahamwe.
They were in places you would imagine people would be safe from rampaging killers: in churches and their outbuildings.
I took a trip to one such place south of Kigali where a reburial ceremony of some genocide victims was scheduled to take place. It was going to be a big day and many diplomats, journalists and government people made their way to a Roman Catholic mission station at a place called Nyagatare.
The scenery was so like home: the hills, the church buildings that were similar to Mariannhill Monastery and the wild dagga flowers (not the weed, but an orange flower in KwaZulu-Natal, a white flower in Rwanda).
Two tall Tutsi women, wearing colourful wrappings and flip flops, walked in front of me. I heard one of them shriek at the doorway of an outbuilding before I set on eyes on what she had just seen.
An entire room was filled with the brown-coloured bones of people who had been butchered with machetes. There were clean cuts in their heads. Many were babies. Old pieces of clothing were lying around among them, no doubt the very clothes they had been wearing when the Interahamwe struck.
A sombre ceremony was held in a graveyard outside the church. Coffins were lowered into the ground. All eyes turned on Paul Kagame who quietly spoke to the people around him. I got a quick glimpse of the man who had led the RPF rebels from Uganda and today is a somewhat controversial president of Rwanda.
A young woman, Anastatia, told me that although she was young, she and her boyfriend had taken in orphans.
It was the most normal thing to do in post-genocide Rwanda. Everyone was looking after genocide orphans.
The sombre atmosphere lifted for a moment when a New Zealander ‒ probably one of the many aid workers in Rwanda at the time ‒ came and quietly congratulated me on the Springbok’s 1995 World Cup victory over the All Blacks.
It was a moment of humanity in one of the most inhumane settings.
The Independent on Saturday