Bujumbura to Kigali

The whole time we were in Burundi we didn’t realize we were an hour behind TZ, so when we woke up to our phone alarms at 6:30am to take the bus to Rwanda, it was really 5:30am. A fortuitous oversight, because we arrived at the bus station way too early and so met an incredible man named Negro, driver of the New Yahoo! Express to Kigali.

Negro (pronounced like the Spanish) has a magnetic personality: he is compelling, convincing, and ultimately irresistible. His eyes bulge out when he looks at you and the intensity of his stare and earnestness in his voice command you to listen. His demeanor – the way he walks, his gestures – are effused with power and control. This is a man who knows what he wants and how to get it, and he is exceedingly proud of his job as driver.

After helping us choose the best seats and good-naturedly posing for a picture for my African bus collage in the predawn light, Negro invited us to breakfast at everyone’s favorite Bujumbura café: Boulangerie Trianon. After breakfast we set off on our six-hour trip and Negro put on the first of many cassettes, all of which were excellent, from American country to French folk to Tanzanian Bongo Flava to Burundian gospel. He constantly joked with the passengers, shouting out friendly barbs and bugging his eyes out at them in the rear view mirror, drawing many a laugh. He spoke sometimes in Kirundi but more often in Kiswahili flavored with French.

As we climbed the gorgeous green mountains north of Bujumbura, Anette and I were awestruck at the scenery – endless huge-leafed banana groves, jungle-like vegetation creeping over the houses, and at the higher elevations, blue-leafed trees fluttering like aspen. The houses seemed sturdier and the people a bit wealthier than those we saw along Lake Tanganyika on our drive with Yusto. A difficult life of backbreaking labor, indeed, but a feeling that the people of these mountains belonged in this setting, like Sherpas to the Himalayas.

Overladen bikes struggled uphill or sped downhill past us, and groups of women walked along the road in brilliantly colored fabrics, looking much more like the “waswahili” women of the Tanzanian coast than the city girls of Bujumbura who dress in European fashions. They were the quintessential picture of Africa, carrying everything imaginable on their heads: baskets of cotton, bunches of bananas, bundles of firewood, four-foot stacks of Africa-red bricks, huge bails of newly cut grass, all with a hoe held over their shoulder and a baby slung on their backs. We felt like we were seeing an Africa untouched by time, here in the middle of the continent where few wazungu tread.

We crossed into Rwanda under strict security and Negro told us to put our camera away because people here are still sensitive to outsiders taking pictures. As we stood in the long line waiting for our visas, Negro came up to us and asked for our passports, then disappeared into the Rwandan immigration office. Five minutes later he reappeared with a big grin on his face and handed us our newly stamped passports.

We were now driving on the best highway we’d been on in Africa: perfectly paved and signed, painted with center and side lines and even adorned with curbed sidewalks (a very Western notion) in places. The hills of Rwanda looked much like Burundi, but the stone and brick houses even wealthier, with terra cotta tiled roofs that could have been Italy. Bright billboards sponsored by USAid and the EU dotted the road, attesting to Rwanda’s progress since 1994. It is clear that many countries, in their guilt, have given hundreds of millions of dollars to Rwanda since the genocide.

We stopped for a 15-minute break and Negro took us to a local eatery where we had our first taste of manioc ugali. Ugali is the staple food of East Africa, usually made from boiled corn flour. We found the manioc version much stickier than the corn, but ate happily while Negro fussed over us, making sure we used the proper right hand technique to scoop up chunks of ugali, and ordering the kitchen staff to cut our meat into bite-sized pieces. Just like at breakfast, he refused to let us pay.

Shortly after lunch the Rwandan police stopped our bus and two other vehicles on a downhill slope. The officer insisted on giving us a ticket but he let the two trucks go, piquing Negro’s anger. The two began to argue in loud Kinyrarwanda and Negro became furious when the officer wouldn’t rescind the ticket, so he promised to have him reprimanded. The officer cheekily replied, “no problem, no problem,” in English, and then a female officer who had joined the scene said something that clearly crossed a cultural line. Negro immediately opened his door to get out and confront her, and all the passengers defended him by yelling at her and banging their hands against the windows.

Indignant, Negro drove off with his ticket, but he soon veered off the road to the local police station, where he parked his bus and went to set things straight. At first we were skeptical, thinking it was just going to be a futile battle of egos, but upon reflection we realized that Negro was doing something that took a lot of courage: standing up to the system because he felt he had been wronged.

It took an hour and a half of waiting in the hot mid-afternoon sun, but nobody complained; we sensed that everyone respected Negro as much as we did. When he came back and triumphantly took his place in the driver’s seat, explaining how he had made the officers so afraid that their skin changed color and they rescinded the ticket, everyone roared with laughter and applauded his efforts.

For the next hour as he barreled down the highway with one hand on the wheel and one hand gesticulating wildly, eyes bugging out in the rear view mirror, Negro boisterously recounted the events while the passengers shouted out their approval and delight. And so we reached Kigali with one less African policeman comfortable in his corruption, thanks to the magnetism of a man named Negro.

Tourists & Thieves

One of the best things about being in Burundi was the feeling that we were exploring a country that few white people ever go to. There is only one tourist shop in all of Bujumbura, and as there are no organized groups of young white travelers or old white retirees, there are no street peddlers who make a living by selling kitschy African trinkets. Due to the lack of tourism, petty thieves haven’t had a chance to hone their pickpocketing skills, something that we discovered on our first walk around Bujumbura’s central market.

Despite the density of people at the market, we wandered through the crowds with ease; no one was pushing or shoving. There was obviously an order to the chaos, so when a man suddenly ran right into my chest and didn’t apologize, I knew something was up. I kept my eye on him as he ran back past us and waited dancing (yes, dancing) on the corner until we came by. As soon as he closed in again, three of his friends appeared out of nowhere and tried to grab us, so I immediately pushed the lead guy backwards with my forearm. Surprisingly, this was enough to dissuade all four of them, and they took off running down the street.

More amused than flustered, we reflected that things might not have gone so well had one of them had a knife, so we resolved to avoid physical contact if thieves approached us again. Sure enough, an hour later, the same scenario began to unfold. This time I acted earlier - I cursed the approaching thief to his face and told him to get lost. While this succeeded in avoiding physical contact, Anette thought my methods too crude, and rightfully so: the F-word is understood all over the world, and a two-meter tall white man shouting it in the streets of Bujumbura is sure to attract more unwanted attention.

By this time, the word was definitely out that two white people were walking around and around the market just begging to be robbed, so we began to make our way back to the hotel for lunch. Before we got there, a few more thieves decided to try their luck…

Two guys came up alongside us as two others snuck up behind. We stopped as soon as we felt their presence and the two from behind kept walking past us. The two beside us, however, stopped as if on cue and simultaneously rested a leg on a cement block, pretending to watch life go by. They looked like hapless FBI agents who had just been caught tailing Tony Soprano, so I walked up to them and greeted them loudly in Kirundi, but got no answer, just downcast eyes. Then I said “Amahoro muhira?” (How is everyone at home?) and one man reluctantly turned his face to me and answered. Then I asked him in Swahili, “Are you a thief?” and he answered hurriedly, “No, no, I’m not a thief.” And that was the end of that comedy.

After lunch we took a walk in a different part of town and were no longer troubled by thieves. However, we became furious when we passed a sign for an NGO that proclaimed: “Providing hope to the hopeless.” As we stood in the street venting to each other about the hopelessness of such organizations, a taxi drove by with the word “nigger” (not “nigga”) emblazoned proudly across its windshield. It was one of those moments that catches you off guard because it is so unexpected and so culturally wrong by your parameters, and it is the unfathomable icing on the cake in a day full of thieves, poverty and thoughts of why Africa is the way it is and what exactly we’re doing here.

Yes, we’ve seen plenty of pirated Chinese 50-in-1 DVDs with titles like “Black American Nigga Money Films 2008” and the odd “Nigga Kutz” barbershop, but this was the first “er” spelling of the offensive word we’d seen. For a white teacher who spent a full week in his Spanish class facilitating a student debate about the use of the N-word, it made me upset, but I know from conversations with many Africans that they don’t understand why it’s offensive. For them, it’s just another piece of American pop culture to be imitated, but for me, it can never be separated from the hatred and violence of American history and the ongoing struggle of Black America.

In the next five minutes after seeing the car, at least five people shouted out “mzungu,” as if to test our acceptance of this quasi-racial term that so often feels derogatory to us. Usually we just ignore it because we know it’s just curiosity, but on some days you just want to scream at people and tell them to stop treating you differently because you look different. It is, I think, one of the most important lessons for white people living in Africa: to know what it’s like to be a minority, and to realize that no matter how well you learn the language and culture, you will always be seen as different.

Burundian Cuisine

For all the evils of colonialism that survive to this day in Africa, we seem to have found at least one positive byproduct in Burundi – its cuisine. In Tanzania, ruled first by the Germans and then the British, it is impossible to get a good Western meal. Great Indian food is everywhere but it gets old after a few months. Burundi, however, was placed under Belgian rule after the German defeat in WWI, and the legacy of French-Belgian cooking can still be tasted, especially in Bujumbura.

After Yusto helped us check into our downtown hotel, we consulted our guidebook and decided on an upscale restaurant on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. I ordered brochette (kebab – a national favorite) and Anette, fillet mignon. The beef, accompanied by perfect pommes frites, was tender and divinely flavored, our first taste of home in over a year. We could just as well have been sitting at a gourmet café on the banks of the Seine, and we shuddered to think of all the mouthfuls of chewy grey cow we’d stomached in our first year in Tanzania.

We stayed late in the warm night air digesting our meal and staring out over the black lake. When we went to leave, the two guards at the entrance of the restaurant were reluctant to walk down the road to find a cab for us. They confirmed what our guidebook said: Bujumbura nights are still ruled by thieves and armed gangs. Despite numerous police patrols, most Burundians don’t walk around after dark in the capital. Although the guards didn’t seem too happy about it, they agreed that they were less likely to get jumped than we were, so one of them kindly got us a cab.

When we woke up early the next morning, the smell of fresh bread was wafting through our open window. Just like in the old Looney Tunes cartoons, our noses pricked up and led us out of bed and downstairs towards the smell. Sure enough, local hot spot Boulangerie Trianon was right next door, and we sat down in a cozy cafeteria filled with Burundian men starting off their morning as they always do: with a personal pitcher of local coffee, fresh croissants, and omelettes a foot in diameter.

It was as if we had woken up in Heaven. Our breakfast for the past year has been terrible instant coffee and Corn Flakes, the only cereal available in Iringa. With gusto we tucked into our chocolate croissants and enormous omelettes filled with cheese, onions, and real bacon! Anette was thrilled that the fresh bread almost equaled Norwegian standards; quite a compliment considering that even the specialty bakeries in Berkeley didn’t measure up. We took our sweet time savoring the aroma and taste of the strong coffee, and walked out into the early morning with happy stomachs.

The only thing lacking at breakfast was a local newspaper. In Tanzania, the media, while not 100% free, is nonetheless prolific: there are dozens of newspapers in Swahili for sale on every street corner in every town. Most urban Tanzanians, especially men, read the papers every day. In Bujumbura, though, newspapers are nowhere to be seen. The lack of local media (in French or Kirundi) is certainly a consequence of the war - as with other industries, publishing is some 20 years behind the rest of East Africa. We finally found a deli that sold a couple of dailies, but it wasn’t the newspapers that we’ll remember...

The first thing you see as you walk into this corner store deli are two huge refrigerated glass cases containing an incredible selection of meats and cheeses, and shelves lined with mouth-watering snacks and chocolates. Again, we’ve never seen anything like it in Tanzania, and it could have been Paris or Seville or Whole Foods Market, Anytown, USA. Much of the meat and cheese was imported from Europe, but Burundians have clearly developed a taste for the stuff. We visited the deli four times in two days, and each time we drank a cup of fresh local yogurt to refresh ourselves in the heat of the day.

Arriving in Bujumbura

The road to Bujumbura drops from the mountainous border down to the shores of beautiful Lake Tanganyika, humid and ringed with fat palms and leafy banana trees. As we continued through the verdant landscape I asked Yusto about the war, and he proudly but solemnly launched into a Burundian history lesson in Swahili, pointing out hilltop forests where rebels used to hide and shoot at people farther down the mountain, explaining how whole classrooms of Hutu children were taken out of school by the army and made to lie on the road, where they were then run over by trucks.

He told us that in Burundi the Hutus were the primary victims of post-independence violence, but now they’ve gained political power, whereas the reverse is true in Rwanda. Interestingly, he referred to himself as “Mrundi,” putting national unity before tribalism. When I asked Yusto how he survived the war, he told us that he fled to Kigoma for a year in 1993 but didn’t like the lack of freedom and the discrimination he felt as a refugee, so he came back and gritted it out with his wife and nine children. Once a bomb fell just 30 meters from their house, but Yusto says you just get used to it.

As we drove, we saw groups of soldiers in army fatigues sitting along the road armed with AK-47s, watching out for robbers and rebels. We also saw the striking Burundian flag, but it was not nearly as prominent a white flag displaying an eagle clutching a rifle and a leafy branch in his talons. Yusto explained that this is the party flag of the new president, Pierre Nkurunziza, and the rifle and branch represent his time in the jungle, when he and his men ate nothing but manioc for ten years.

In his eagerness to tell us about his country, especially his palm oil export business, Yusto literally screamed in my ear throughout most of our trip. He was obviously a successful businessman; he had a five-inch thick wad of bills on the dashboard that he dipped into to buy necessities like fruit, fish and milk, all of which he shared generously with us. Personal relationships are the bedrock of African culture, and Yusto clearly values his: he must have stopped along the road every fifteen minutes or so to greet friends and talk at leisure with them. He taught us how to greet people in Kirundi by saying “Amahoro,” which always elicited laughter and excitement from the locals.

The poverty, however, was some of the worst we’ve seen in our travels throughout Africa and Latin America. The roadside villages were a constant procession of filth, dilapidation and hunger. Beggars crowded our windows each time we stopped, an old man with elephantiasis of the feet stretched out his arms in a plea for us to take pity on his grotesqueness, and a young boy tried to shake Anette’s hand…here is how she experienced it:

“My first impression of Burundi was surprisingly good, nothing like what I expected after reading the ominous warnings of the US and Norwegian embassies. The gorgeous landscape with high mountains, dense green vegetation and big banana trees was a real contrast from Iringa and Kigoma in the dry season. But in the middle of it all was poverty, much more desperate than what we’ve seen until now in Africa. Dirty children, hovels for homes and stores. When we were passing through a slum-like area with muddy roads and people with ragged clothing, Yusto stopped to buy some fruit.

I was absorbed in watching the fruit transaction and didn’t notice that a little hand had pushed its way through the open window where I sat. When I turned my head I saw right into the face of a small boy with sad eyes. Hoping to get him to smile a bit, I grabbed one of his fingers that was resting on the window and pressed gently. That was when I noticed that the finger I had grabbed was as good as dead, like a rag doll’s hand. The boy’s wrist was a stump and his hand just hung there like useless skin. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of that dead hand hanging from the end of a moving arm.”

At dusk we finally reached the outskirts of Bujumbura and realized that if we had been on public transport, we would never have made it to the city before dark. Yusto - just like all the Tanzanians who took it upon themselves to be our guides and caretakers - drove us right to a hotel in the center of town and got out to make sure that the manager gave us a good room for the night. We thanked him sincerely for all his kindness and then went to eat dinner and celebrate our arrival in this alluring country.

The Burundian Border

Heading north from Kigoma the hills rose higher and the villagers we picked up along the way to the border only spoke Kiha (a tribal language similar to Burundi’s national language, Kirundi). As usual, the camaraderie was jovial despite the claustrophobia and we made friends on our short journey, including a teenager named Shabani from the DRC who was leaving his Tanzanian refugee camp for a week to go see his mother in Burundi.

The daladala dropped us off at the border, a desolate road that snakes its way along a 2000m high ridgeline, and we were grateful that Shabani walked with us through the silent landscape. All we knew about Burundi was that our governments warned against visiting and rebels had bombed the capital in May. We were prepared, though: we had split up our money, stuffed it into socks, bras, and waistbands, and agreed that if the rebels took our passports we would get new ones at our embassies.

The silence at the border was the first sign that Burundi is unlike any other country we’ve visited. At every other African border we’ve crossed (Morocco, Senegal, Gambia, Zambia, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya) hordes of money-changers, petty thieves, tour guides and sellers of odds and ends make their living. These border towns have lives and economies of their own; they feed off the constant stream of cars, trucks and people who cross every day. But Burundi’s borders are eerily still, cut off from the rest of Africa by mountains, lakes and a recurrent civil war that began in the early ‘60s and ended with a tenuous peace agreement in 2006.

Shabani walked with us to the “old bandas,” where our passports were first checked, but the official border post had been moved during the war so we hopped on another bus to get there. The 20-minute ride took us past a repatriation camp, a gated compound with a gleaming corrugated metal fence surrounding the UNHCR and Red Cross offices, and cookie cutter tin houses for the refugees outside the fence.

Burundians were the first refugees to come to Tanzania in large numbers. This was in 1972, during a particularly violent wave of Hutu-Tutsi killings that left 200,000 dead in just three months. As the conflict continued to flare up throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, hundreds of thousands of Burundians fled to Tanzania, and this, combined with the influx of Congolese in the 1990s, has given Tanzania the distinction of hosting more refugees than any other African country. Just this week, however, the Tanzanian government made a historic decision to grant citizenship to 76,000 Burundian refugees who have been living in Tanzania for almost four decades.

Shabani was at first denied entry into Burundi, but the guards said with a big smile that he could pass if his white friends paid $10 on his behalf. Not willing to support corruption, and sure our friend could handle himself, we left him and walked to the middle of town to catch a bus. At the bus station people stopped what they were doing, stared, and then they stared some more. It felt good to find a place in Africa where white people aren’t a common sight. There is no tourism in Burundi as yet - the only wazungu are Belgian and French aid workers who travel by plane or expensive Land Cruiser.

Proud as we were to be entering the country via local transport, we began to worry when we found out that there were no more buses going the 150km to Bujumbura. Extreme height and whiteness, however, come in handy in such situations: I soon flagged down a smallish red SUV and scored a ride from a wealthy Burundian businessman named Yusto. Shabani had at this point made it past the border guards, so we reciprocated his earlier kindness by getting him a seat in Yusto’s car.

Five minutes into our trip a man and his young son whizzed by us on a heavily loaded bicycle, going way too fast and out of control down a steep mountain highway. Yusto suddenly pulled over, stopped the car and covered his eyes. Sure enough, the bike fishtailed violently and the man jumped off while his son was thrown to the cement. Yusto, hands still over his eyes, asked us, “Did he die? Did he die?” but miraculously both were apparenty unhurt. Yusto then got out of the car and began screaming at the man, berating him for having been so careless with his child on such a dangerous road.

It was a harsh reminder that these are the risks poverty forces people to take: to ride an ancient bike heavily loaded down a steep mountain road with your child on the back, forced to transport whatever you can however you can to get a few thousand francs a day to survive.

Crossing Tanzania, Part Five

We knew we were close. Our flashlight-guided ride the night before had brought us to within a couple hundred kilometers of Kigoma, so we slept late, had a leisurely breakfast of tea, toast and eggs, then walked up the red road past the purple jacarandas and earthen buildings with dust-caked tin roofs to the daladala station. It was now more than 50 hours since we boarded our first bus in Dar.

As the morning sunlight filtered in through the windows of our bus, young men struggled to stuff huge bags of cornmeal behind our seats and another man clutched a frightened chicken in his lap. We struck up a conversation with the woman sitting in front of us and noticed that her Swahili was flavored with French. She told us how she fled her native Burundi 15 years ago after her entire family had been killed in the war, and had made her living at odd jobs in Tanzania, in and out of refugee camps, ever since.

What could we say? She was clearly still in pain, so we gently shifted the subject. As we started our journey other passengers engaged us in conversation, curious to know what we were doing here. One man was so thrilled that we spoke Swahili that he bought a bunch of bananas and handed us two. Later he gave us two guava melons so we thanked him and shared our peanuts.

Each time we stopped along the side of the road, rural villagers, especially women and children, called to each other to come see the wazungu in the daladala. We beckoned to them, saying, “come and greet us!” at which point they hid behind each other giggling and urging the bravest one to run up to our bus.

The trip - although we had been told two hours and it turned out to be four - was a pleasant one thanks to the camaraderie among the passengers. However, our daladala was small and low to the road and we were eating dust the whole way. Another disadvantage of the low carriage was that we felt the bumps more acutely – the last 100 km or so to Kigoma proved to be the worst of the whole three-day trip. The daladala shook with such ferocity that we struggled to stay in our seats: our ears and our backsides ached from the relentless rattling of old, thin metal.

Ten kilometers outside of town a miracle happened: we met paved road for the first time in two days. It was a bit of cruel irony; I mean, really, why even bother to pave the last 10km? When we pulled into the daladala station covered in red dust, our Burundian mama called us a cab and got in to make sure we found our way to a decent guesthouse. Again, the selfless kindness and care for others that characterizes African society.

We stayed in Kigoma for five days, and every day we ate fresh “mgebuka” from Lake Tanganyika, quite possibly the world’s tastiest fish. Roasted whole, I even ate the tail and head - eyes and jawbone included - because it’s just that good. I also killed a four-foot long snake (yes, it was poisonous) with the help of a couple of Tanzanian employees of our guesthouse. The snake slithered into the room next to ours (thank God I saw it) and we spent about 20 minutes darting in and out of the room, throwing bricks and poking with long sticks, to roust the snake from his hiding place before one well-placed slide of a long metal pole severed his body against the concrete wall.

And so ended our traverse of Tanzania. Our East African adventure was just beginning, though: unknown Burundi was waiting just beyond the mountains.