An Ordinary Man (3 page)

Perhaps this simple act taps into something in our national memory. Banana beer is known as “the drink of reconciliation.”
It plays an important role in our traditional local court system, known in the Kinyarwandan language as
gacaca,
or as it is loosely translated, “justice on the grass.” If somebody had a problem with a neighbor he would not seek revenge.
He instead brought it to the attention of a group of men who we called elders. They were not elected in the classical sense
of ballots, but they were put in a position of leadership by a kind of unspoken common assent. To be an elder you had to have
a reputation for fairness and sober judgment, something that would only become apparent over time. It was apparent in the
way you lived your life. Hard-liners and loudmouths did not get to be elders.

The elders would invite the village to come sit under the shade of a tree and hear the opposing sides tell their stories.
Almost all of the disputes concerned property. A stolen goat, for instance, or somebody trying to grow crops on a hill that
belonged to another family. More serious cases—such as those involving violence—were always referred to the courts, but village
elders were given wide latitude to help solve local problems.

After the two enemies had finished speaking, the elders would give their opinions, one by one, on what should be done to remedy
the problem. It usually involved compensation. A typical punishment for a stolen goat would be to repay the man a goat—and
then give him another as a fine. Somebody bringing a charge thought to be false would be ordered to pay the man he had slandered.
Confession was always the key. The village put a high value on the act of admitting culpability, even if you were the one
bringing the case. It was viewed as a necessary step in the process of absolution. A man who lied before the entire village
knew that he would have to wear that lie for years to come. There was an enormous incentive to come clean, and very little
penalty was meted out for being honest with the public, and with yourself.

Then came the most important part of justice on the grass: The two aggrieved men were required to share a gourd of banana
beer as a sign of renewed friendship. There were usually no lasting scars because it was hard to stay angry at someone who
had humbled himself before you. The adversarial system of justice practiced in the West often fails to satisfy us, I am convinced,
because it does not offer warring parties the opportunity to be human with each other at the end. Whether you were the victim
or the aggressor you had to strip yourself of pride and recognize the basic humanity of the fellow with whom you were now
sharing a banana beer. There was public shame in this system, true, but also a display of mutual respect that closed the circle.
Everyone who showed up to hear the case was invited to sip the banana beer too, as a symbol of the accused man’s reconciliation
with the entire people. It was like a secular communion. The lasting message for all that gathered there was that solutions
could always be found inside—inside communities and inside people.

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.

According to tribal lore the bloodline of the
mwami
had a heavenly origin. If there was a dispute over succession the true king was supposed to be known by being born with the
seeds of a squash plant clutched in his tiny fist. A court of royal advisers known as the
abiru
would reveal the successor when the current king died. They were also the guardians of the obscure poems, songs, and stories
that comprised a kind of underground national history. It was a long account of violence and royal assassinations and illicit
sex; in short, the failings of past kings and queens, the kind of history that doesn’t flatter. It was known by a Kinyarwanda
word
,
which is roughly translated as “gossip.” If you were trusted with the gossip it was a signal that you were now a part of the
inner circle. In Rwanda, political power has always been linked with control of history.

Kings were the ultimate guardians of the past and of power and they were supposed to watch over everybody with equal favor.
They fielded extremely tough armies with excellent archers. As a result, we were one of the only regions in Africa where Arab
and European slave traders were never able to conduct raids, and so almost none of our people were sold into bondage. One
of our ancient kings—a ruler named Gihanga—was supposed to have discovered fire. A flame burned in his memory at the royal
court until the monarchy finally ended in 1959. I’ll say more about that event later, but it is important to know now that
the early kings and all the advisers that surrounded them were generally the taller people in the tribe. This established
a legend just as colorful as the squash seeds I mentioned, but one that would be infinitely more damaging.

It is well known that the main ethnic groups in modern Rwanda are the Hutu and the Tutsi, but it remains a matter of controversy
if these are indeed two separate races or if that is just an artificial political distinction created in a relatively short
period of time. Evidence points to the latter. We share a common language—the beautiful tongue of Kinyarwanda—the same religions,
the same children’s games, the same storytelling traditions, the same government, even, in most cases, the same outward appearance.
We also had a strong idea of our hilly land as a unified nation and a pride in ourselves as tough warriors for the
mwami.
There was never any “Hutu homeland” or “Tutsi homeland.”

What divided us was an invented history.

The false—but very common—explanation for our origins is that the Hutus are a wandering offshoot of the huge group of Bantu-speaking
people who have occupied Central Africa for thousands of years. They were said to have come into the country from the west.
The Tutsis, on the other hand, are supposed to be descendants of the taller peoples of the Ethiopian highlands near the headwaters
of the Blue Nile. They were supposed to have invaded Rwanda from the north about five hundred years ago and established the
mwamis
government. Or so the story went. But there is no real evidence for it, and most scholars now think that it is pure invention.
We will probably never know for certain. Africa’s traditional history is one passed down through poems and genealogies and
heroic ballads in which people, not places, are the emotional focus. So many specific details about geography and migration
patterns are lost in the fog of time.

One influential man who helped create the “Tutsis from the Nile” theory was British explorer John Hanning Speke, who is given
credit for being the first white man to lay eyes on Lake Victoria. He made some superficial observations about the people
he came across during his expeditions in Central Africa and connected them with stories in the Bible. In his 1863 book,
Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile,
he showed a strange fixation with an extended clan of leaders in what is now present-day Rwanda. These people—they called
themselves Tutsis—measured their wealth in cows, drank milk, ate beef, and seemed to be taller and have slightly more angular
noses than their subjects, who fed their families by growing cassavas, sweet potatoes, and other vegetables. Speke theorized
that they were actually a lost tribe of Christians who had migrated from the deserts of the Middle East and were therefore
the carriers of a noble line of blood. The Hutu—what Speke called the “curly-head, flab-nosed, pouch-mouthed negro”—was a
different story. The name itself means “one who works, ” and Speke thought there was a divine purpose behind the differences
in lifestyle. Those who grew crops, he said, were probably the distant descendants of Noah’s son Ham, who according to the
ninth chapter of Genesis had committed the sin of looking at his father lying naked in a tent when he, Noah, was drunk on
homemade wine. For this transgression Noah cursed his son Ham’s descendants for all time.“The lowest of slaves will he be
to his brothers, ” said the man who had captained the ark through the floodwaters. And, to Speke’s way of thinking, these
poor lowborns had obviously found their way to exile in Central Africa and had reproduced themselves by the millions. The
Hutus were part of that accursed lot, and this explained their generally subservient role to the cattle-owning Tutsis, even
though the two groups of people looked quite similar on the surface.

All of this is, of course, total European foolishness, but what came to be called the “Hamitic hypothesis” carried a surprising
amount of weight in the late nineteenth century, just as the great powers were preparing to carve up Africa into colonies.
These ideas about race were to become more than fanciful stories told over port at the Royal Geographic Society but an actual
template for governing us. The real origin of Rwanda’s class system had almost nothing to do with physical characteristics.
It was much more banal than anything the European gentlemen explorers had been able to imagine.

What seems to have happened was that the ministers and priests closest to the Rwandan king started to conceive of themselves
as being a special class of people, in much the same way that large landowners in what is now Great Britain or France began
to call themselves lords and dukes and earls. In precolonial Rwanda, however, it wasn’t land that was used to reckon a person’s
wealth. It was cows. Those who didn’t have cattle were forced to turn to growing crops for sustenance and took on the identity
of Hutu, or “followers”. Many acquired cows by applying to a local strongman and agreeing to pay an annual tribute of grain
and honey beer and pledging to defend him in times of war. These client relationships were known as the code of
ubuhake
and became the glue of the Rwandan social hierarchy.

Intermarriage between the Tutsi and the Hutu was not unheard of, but it was also not the norm. Those taller frames and aquiline
noses that John Hanning Speke had fallen in love with were probably the result of just a few hundred years of sexual selection
within that particular caste group. This deluded love affair, as you might guess, was soon to become the cause of great misery.
I experienced it for the first time when I was nineteen years old.

My best friend, Gerard, was expelled from school in February 1973. This was one of the saddest days I had ever known, not
just because I was losing my friend, but because it was my first real taste of the poison in the soil of my country. I also
became aware for the first time of a bloodline inside me that divided me from people that I loved.

I had known Gerard almost as long as I could remember. We had both come from mixed families and we had a lot in common in
the way we viewed the world. We had grown up together—played soccer together, talked about girls, made fun of each other,
wondered together about our future careers, speculated about who we would marry—all the normal things that make up a friendship
between boys. He was as smart a kid as I ever met. Our daily walk to school together had been a constant feature of my mornings
ever since we were eight years old. Our footprints grew larger, but our friendship remained.

The year before Gerard was expelled there had been chaos and death in the neighboring country of Burundi, a nation with an
ethnic composition very similar to Rwanda. The president, a former Army captain named Michel Micombero, had ordered his armed
forces to crack down on a Hutu uprising, and these soldiers took their mission beyond the bounds of rationality. Nearly two
hundred thousand people were slaughtered and even more fled their homes for the relative safety of my country. We have a saying:
“Whatever happens in Burundi eventually spills over into Rwanda, and whatever happens in Rwanda will also spill into Burundi.”And
that was certainly the case in 1973.

The government in Rwanda was sympathetic and began taking reprisals against Tutsis as a kind of revenge. Several dozen were
massacred with knives and machetes in villages near the border. Others lost their houses and their businesses. The younger
ones were kicked out of the schools. One of them was my friend Gerard.

I will never forget the last time we walked to school together. When we arrived there were lists of names tacked to the bulletin
boards outside the classrooms. Gerard’s name was there. He was told to take his things and go—he was not wanted at the school
any longer. A group of Hutu students stood in front of the classroom door as a human wall to block the undesirables from going
inside. These were the same children who had laughed, played, and gossiped together just twenty-four hours before. Now they
were being divided in a way that was not fully comprehensible, but I will never forget the look of determination—even glee—on
the part of some of my classmates who were accepting their new superior role all too readily.

I stood alone on the grassy quadrangle and watched Gerard walk back down the lane toward his home. That was the last I saw
of him for a very long time.

His name was on the list because his mother was a Hutu and his father was a Tutsi. My name was
not
on the list because my mother was Tutsi and my father was a Hutu. Since ethnicity passes through the father’s loins in Rwanda,
according to this idiotic logic Gerard was considered a despicable Tutsi and I was considered a privileged Hutu. Had the parentage
been reversed it would have been me walking down that lane of guava trees with my head down.