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.
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