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To Christopher Henry Kidder
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Introduction: Burundi, June 2006
PART ONE
FLIGHTS
PART TWO
GUSIMBURA
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Some Historical Notes
Sources
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Out of what I hope is an excess of caution, I have changed the names of many
people and places in Burundi. “Goss” and “Fair Oaks Nursing Home” are also
pseudonyms.
BURUNDI, JUNE 2006
A s we drove through southwestern Burundi, I felt as if we were
being followed by the mountain called Ganza, the way a child
feels followed by the moon. The road climbed through deeply folded
countryside. We would round a corner, and another broad face of
Ganza would appear.
Then my companion, Deogratias, would order the driver to stop.
Deo would get out of the SUV and stand on the shoulder of the
pavement, aiming his digital camera at the mountain. Deo wore a
black bush hat with a dangling chin strap. I supposed that to people
passing by, in the crowded minibuses and on the bicycles laden with
plastic jugs of palm oil, he must look like a tourist, a trim young
black-skinned rich man from somewhere far away.
Standing beside him at the roadside, I could look down on narrow
valleys of cultivated fields and up at steep hillsides, some covered
with grass, others quilted with groves of eucalyptus and banana
trees and dotted with tiny houses roofed in metal or thatch. Above
them rose the flanks and the domed top of Ganza, all but treeless,
barren of houses. In Kirundi, ganza means “to reign,” and the name
evoked the kings that once ruled Burundi. The little nation,
centuries old, straddles the crest of the watershed of the Congo and
Nile rivers, just south of the equator in East Central Africa. It is
bordered by Tanzania to the south and east, by the Democratic
Republic of the Congo across Lake Tanganikya to the west, and by
Rwanda to the north. It’s a landlocked and impoverished country
with an agrarian economy that exports excellent coffee and tea and
not much else—a land of dwindling forests that still has lovely rustic
landscapes.
Deo could hardly take his eyes off Ganza. He was thronged by
memories. All the summers of his boyhood, once a week and
sometimes twice, he and his older brother had toiled over the
mountain, climbing impossibly steep paths, their knees shaking
under the loads balanced on their heads. Back then, the land out
there had all been thickly forested, and in the trees and under them
he used to see chimps, monkeys, even gorillas. They were all gone
now, he said. But there had been so many monkeys then! One time
he and his brother sat down to rest partway up another mountain,
and a host of monkeys surrounded them, like a gang of little thugs,
harassing them, trying to take their sacks of cassava, even slapping
them right in their faces! In the end there was nothing for him and
his brother to do but run away, leaving the cassava behind.
When he told me this story, Deo laughed. It was what I’d come to
recognize as his normal laugh. It had the same bright, surprised,
near soprano sound as his voice when he greeted a friend and cried
out, “Hi!,” the “Hi!” drawn out as if he didn’t want it to end. His
English was accented with French and Kirundi and sprinkled with
misplaced emphases—as in, “I am laughing when I think about it.”
And many of his phrases had a certain hybrid vigor, a fresh
extravagance: “I want to get it out of my chest.” “Run like a
thunderstorm.” “I had to bite my heart.”
Deo grew up in the mountains east of Ganza, in a tiny settlement
of farms and pastures called Butanza. He had returned to Burundi
several times over the past six years. But he had avoided Butanza.
He had not visited it for nearly fourteen years. Now he was going
back at last. He seemed happy to see Ganza again, but when we
drove farther east toward Butanza, he grew, not silent, but
increasingly quiet. One noticed this, because he was usually so
talkative and animated.
After a while we turned off the paved road onto dirt roads. The
dirt roads grew narrower. Finally, as we bumped along up a steep,
rutted track, Deo said we were getting close. He said that when we
arrived, we would climb on foot to the pasture where, many years
ago, his best friend, Clovis, took sick. We would visit the very spot,
he said. Then he added, “And when we get to Butanza we don’t talk
about Clovis.”
“Why?”
“Because people don’t talk about people who died. By their
names, anyways. They call it gusimbura. If for example you say, ‘Oh,
your granddad,’ and you say his name to people, they say you
gusimbura them. It’s a bad word. You are reminding people …” Deo’s
voice trailed off.
“You’re reminding people of something bad?”
“Yes. It’s so hard to understand, because in the Western world …”
Again, Deo left the thought half finished.
“People try to remember?”
“Yah.”
“Here in Burundi, they try to forget?”
“Exactly,” he said.
PART ONE
FLIGHTS
ONE
Bujumbura–New York,
May 1994
Oninternational
the outskirts of the capital, Bujumbura, there is a small
airport. It has a modern terminal with intricate
roofs and domed metal structures that resemble astronomical
observatories. It is the kind of terminal that seems designed to say
that here you leave the past behind, the future has arrived, behold
the wonders of aviation. But in Burundi in 1994, for the lucky few
with tickets, an airplane was just the fastest, safest way out. It was
flight. In the spring of that year, violence and chaos governed
Burundi. To the west, the hills above Bujumbura were burning.
Smoke seemed to be pouring off the hills, as the winds of mid-May
carried the plumes of smoke downward in undulating sheets, in the
general direction of the airport. A large passenger jet was parked on
the tarmac, and a disordered crowd was heading toward it in sweaty
haste. Deo felt as if he were being carried by the crowd, immersed
in an unfamiliar river. The faces around him were mostly white, and
though many were black or brown, there was no one whom he
recognized, and so far as he could tell there were no country people.
As a little boy, he had crouched behind rocks or under trees the first
times he’d seen airplanes passing overhead. He had never been so
close to a plane before. Except for buildings in the capital, this was
the largest man-made thing he’d ever seen. He mounted the
staircase quickly. Only when he had entered the plane did he let
himself look back, staring from inside the doorway as if from a
hiding place again.
In Deo’s mind, there was danger everywhere. If his heightened
sense of drama was an inborn trait, it had certainly been nourished.
For months every situation had in fact been dangerous. Climbing the
stairs a moment before, he had imagined a voice in his head telling
him not to leave. But now he stared at the hills and he imagined
that everything in Burundi was burning. Burundi had become hell.
He finally turned away, and stepped inside. In front of him were
cushioned chairs with clean white cloths draped over their backs,
chairs in perfect rows with little windows on the ends. This was the
most nicely appointed room he’d ever seen. It looked like paradise
compared to everything outside. If it was real, it couldn’t last.
The plane was packed, but he felt entirely alone. He had a seat by
a window. Something told him not to look out, and something told
him to look. He did both. His hands were shaking. He felt he was
about to vomit. Everyone had heard stories of planes being shot
down, not only the Rwandan president’s plane back in April but
others as well. He was waiting for this to happen after the plane
took off. For several long minutes, whenever he glanced out the
window all he saw was smoke. When the air cleared and he could
see the landscape below, he realized that they must already have
crossed the Akanyaru River, which meant they had left Burundi and
were now above Rwanda. He had crossed a lot of the land down
there on foot. It wasn’t all that small. To see it transformed into a
tiny piece of time and space—this could only happen in a dream.
He gazed down, face pressed against the windowpane. Plumes of
smoke were also rising from the ground of what he took to be
Rwanda—if anything, more smoke than around Bujumbura. A lot of
it was coming from the banks of muddy-looking rivers. He thought,
“People are being slaughtered down there.” But those sights didn’t
last long. When he realized he wasn’t seeing smoke anymore, he
took his face away from the window and felt himself begin to relax,
a long-forgotten feeling.
He liked the cushioned chair. He liked the sensation of flight.
How wonderful to travel in an easy chair instead of on foot. He
began to realize how constricted his intestines and stomach had felt,
as if wound into knots for months on end, as the tightness seeped
away. Maybe the worst was over now, or maybe he was just in
shock. “I don’t really know where I’m going,” he thought. But if
there was to be no end to this trip, that would be all right. A
memory from world history class surfaced. Maybe he was like that
man who got lost and discovered America. He craned his neck and
looked upward through the window. There was nothing but
darkening blue. He looked down and realized just how high above
the ground he was seated. “Imagine if this plane crashes,” he
thought. “That would be awful.” Then he said to himself, “I don’t
care. It would be a good death.”
For the moment, he was content with that thought, and with
everything around him. The only slightly troubling thing was the
absence of French in the cabin. He knew for a fact—he’d been
taught it was so since elementary school—that French was the
universal language, and universal because it was the best of all
languages. He knew Russians owned this plane. Only Aeroflot, he’d
been told, was still offering commercial flights from Bujumbura. So
it wasn’t strange that all the signs in the cabin were in a foreign
script. But he couldn’t find a single word written in French, even on
the various cards in the seat pocket.
The plane landed in Entebbe, in Uganda. As he waited in the
terminal for his next flight, Deo watched what looked like a big
family make a fuss over a young man about his age, a fellow
passenger as it turned out. When the flight started to board, the
whole bunch around this boy began weeping and wailing. The
young man was wiping tears from his eyes as he walked toward the
plane. Probably he was just going away on a trip. Probably he
would be coming back soon. In his mind, Deo spoke to the young
man: “You are in tears. For what? Here you have this huge crowd of
family.” He felt surprised, as if by a distant memory, that there
were, after all, many small reasons for people to cry. His own mind
kept moving from one extreme to another. Everything was a crisis,
and nothing that wasn’t a crisis mattered. He thought that if he were
as lucky as that boy and still had that much family left, he wouldn’t
be crying. For that matter, he wouldn’t be boarding airplanes,
leaving his country behind.
Deo had grown up barefoot in Burundi, but for a peasant boy he
had done well. He was twenty-four. Until recently he had been a
medical student, for three years at or near the top of his class. In his
old faux-leather suitcase, which he had reluctantly turned over to
the baggage handler in the airport in Bujumbura, he had packed
some of the evidence of his success: the French dictionary that
elementary school teachers gave only to prized students, and the
general clinical text and one of the stethoscopes that he had saved
up to buy. But he had spent the past six months on the run, first
from the eruption of violence in Burundi, then from the slaughter in
Rwanda.
In geography class in school, Deo had learned that the most
important parts of the world were France and Burundi’s colonial
master, Belgium. When someone he knew, usually a priest, was
going abroad, that person was said to be going to “Iburaya.” And
while this usually meant Belgium or France, it could also mean any
place that was far away and hard to imagine. Deo was heading for
Iburaya. In this case, that meant New York City.
He had one wealthy friend who had seen more of the world than
East Central Africa, a fellow medical student named Jean. And it
was Jean who had decided that New York was where he should go.
Deo was traveling on a commercial visa. Jean’s French father had
written a letter identifying Deo as an employee on a mission to
America. He was supposed to be going to New York to sell coffee.
Deo had read up on coffee beans in case he was questioned, but he
wasn’t selling anything. Jean’s father had also paid for the plane
tickets. A fat booklet of tickets.
From Entebbe, Deo flew to Cairo, then to Moscow. He slept a lot.
He would wake with a start and look around the cabin. When he
realized that no one resembled anyone he knew, he would relax
again. During his medical training and in his country’s history,
pigmentation had certainly mattered, but he wasn’t troubled by the
near total whiteness of the faces around him on the plane that he
boarded in Moscow. White skin hadn’t been a marker of danger
these past months. He had heard of French soldiers behaving badly
in Rwanda, and had even caught glimpses of them training
militiamen in the camps, but waking up and seeing a white person
in the next seat wasn’t alarming. No one called him a cockroach. No
one held a machete. You learned what to look out for, and after a
while you learned to ignore the irrelevant. He did wonder again
from time to time why he wasn’t hearing people speak French.
When his flight from Moscow landed, he was half asleep. He
followed the other passengers out of the plane. He thought this must
be New York. The first thing to do was find his bag. But the airport
terminal distracted him. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before,
an indoor place of shops where everyone looked happy. And
everyone was large. Compared to him anyway. He’d never been
heavy, but his pants, which had fit all right six months before, were
bunched up at the waist. When he looked down at himself, the end
of his belt seemed as long to him as a monkey’s tail. His belly was
concave under his shirt. Here in Iburaya everyone’s clothes looked
better than his.
He started walking. Looking around for a sign with a luggage
symbol on it, he came to a corridor with a glassed-in wall. He
glanced out, then stopped and stared. There were green fields out
there in the distance, and on those fields cows were grazing. From
this far away, they might have been his family’s herd. His last
images of cows were of murdered and suffering animals—
decapitated cows and cows with their front legs chopped off, still
alive and bellowing by the sides of the road to Bujumbura and even
in Bujumbura. These cows looked so happy, just like the people
around him. How was this possible?
A voice was speaking to him. He turned and saw a man in
uniform, a policeman. The man looked even bigger than everyone
else. He seemed friendly, though. Deo spoke to him in French, but
the man shook his head and smiled. Then another gigantic-looking
policeman joined them. He asked a question in what Deo guessed
was English. Then a woman who had been sitting nearby got up and
walked over—French, at long last French, coming out of her mouth
along with cigarette smoke.
