He seemed satisfied to have my friendship, and he earned my deep gratitude for his help and advice. I wanted to take a lake ferry boat up to Bujumbura but Juma insisted it was too dangerous: ‘The rains and storms are here, the boats are overcrowded, people are capsizing and drowning all the time. Also, when the boatmen see you, they see a rich man, so they call on their phone to the robber boat, and they come and rob you. They want your money and belongings. Very rarely do they kill. If someone kills here, we think they are crazy. Or from Burundi. But Richard, you must not take a lake taxi. Please. The way to Bujumbura is on the bus.’
That night he took me to a muddy yard full of stones, chickens, trash, loiterers and Toyota Hiace minivans. He made inquiries about going to Bujumbura, asking prices, giving the impression it was for him not me, and this was an easy impression to give, because white people did not go to Burundi on the bus. Then he said, ‘OK. You meet me here at 6am, and don’t be late. They say crossing the border is no problem. It is quiet there. You have to catch another bus on the other side. I will arrange everything.’
I arrived at quarter to six with my backpack, and Juma was already there. He bought the ticket so I wouldn’t get a special price. He made sure my backpack was stowed in a place where it was hard to steal. He said I would have to walk across the border and then catch a taxi to the nearest town, and get a bus to Bujumbura from there. We shook hands goodbye in a sudden rainstorm, and then I sat down inside the Hiace and waited for it to fill up. max capacity 13 said the writing on the back of the vehicle. The driver and his assistant managed to get in 20, but that wasn’t good enough. We sat there squeezed in for 45 minutes until two more passengers arrived and then two more.
Then the driver roared out into the muddy streets, skidded, lost control, fishtailed and almost flipped. The passengers were angry, especially the women, and they gave the young man at the wheel a barrage of scolding. He responded by turning up the radio to its maximum distorted volume and roaring off again at the same idiotic speed. Whenever the Hiace went over a large bump, which was every few minutes, I cracked skulls with the young man to my left and learnt to appreciate the fact that his hair was long enough to cushion the blow slightly. But his body odour made my eyes water.
To my right, I was jammed up against a serene-looking Muslim with a white beard, a white prayer cap and a kind smile. He spoke some English, and over the racket of the music I determined that his name was Sudi, and he had been visiting his wife in Kigoma, where she was pregnant with his fifth child and staying with her family. Now he was returning home to Bujumbura, where he drove a taxi. When I said I was going there too, he said we should travel together. I trusted him immediately and completely, and I felt greatly relieved to have an ally in negotiating the border crossing and the Burundian bus system.
Alongside our muddy, potholed road, the Chinese were building a paved highway. It seemed odd to see Chinese faces under the hard hats on that rainy African morning and Chinese drivers in the cabs of muddy Chinese earthmovers, but it’s a normal sight in Africa these days. China is the biggest foreign player on the continent now, with a presence in all 53 countries. Unlike the West, which feels a moral obligation to reduce suffering and improve African lives, China looks at Africa purely as an economic opportunity. Its basic strategy is twofold: strip out the natural resources, and sell Chinese-made goods to Africans, everything from fighter jets and tanks down to flip-flops and combs.
Starting with the missionaries, the West has always had this idea that Africans need to change their ways and live more like us, but the Chinese, who started trading here in the seventh century, do not feel this impulse. Chinese officials don’t upbraid African leaders about human rights or democratic governance. Nor do they have any objection to bribery and corruption, if it helps business get done.
While the West concentrates on partnering with Africans in the areas of education, health, environmental issues, gender issues and community development projects, and bends over backwards to be culturally sensitive and politically correct, China comes in with Chinese workers, hiring Africans only for the most menial tasks, and builds roads, factories, ports, dams, airports and presidential palaces, all with the aim of boosting its trade. In 1996 China’s trade in Africa was $5.6 billion. In 2010 it was over $100 billion, with more than a million Chinese living in Africa.
The Hiace stopped in a small village in forested highlands with mist drifting through the trees. It was immediately surrounded by shouting young men, getting off their bicycles, shoving and shouldering each other aside to wrench the back door open and start grabbing at our bags. Sudi stood there, gentle and beatific, as five men began yelling and gesturing in his face, then he spoke some words, more yelling, more soft words from Sudi. ‘These are bicycle taxi men,’ he explained. ‘They will take us to the border. They want 10,000 [Tanzanian shillings; about £4] for the two of us, and another five for your bag. It is a fair price.’
I didn’t understand why the bus didn’t go to the border, but it was a pleasant relief to ride on the back of a bicycle in the cool, fresh highland air. Sudi was on the bicycle next to me, smiling happily, and my backpack was on a third bicycle.
The road curved along a high saddle separating the two countries, and we caught glimpses below of misty valleys with small patchwork fields. At the border itself, there was none of the usual commotion and opportunism that you find when crossing from one poor country into another. This was a remote area with no town either side. There were two small buildings in a quiet forest, a handful of people crossing, and no one else around. A friendly Tanzanian official stamped our passports and wished us well, and then we walked across a patch of no-man’s-land to his Burundian counterpart, a big, sullen, muscular man turning to fat, who glowered at me for a good 20 seconds without saying anything, then stamped my passport for three days. I was relieved to get out of there.
Seven of us got into a taxi, an old Toyota Corolla with a spiderweb crack across the windscreen, upholstery spilling out of the seats, loose silencer rattling on the ground. We drove down through the quiet forest into Mabanda, a highland town heaving with people and strewn with rubbish. Hard challenging glances and mad-dog stares came at me from out of the crowd, then jeering catcalls and sharp whistles, ‘Eh, muzungu – white man!’ A dog was shaking on the ground with malaria or some other fever. There were soldiers and police with machine guns, teenage boys with thousand-yard stares, presumably from their years as child soldiers in the war, malnourished children with muddy rags and white hair like little old men.
Women were selling cassava and tomatoes, bananas and flip-flops, cans of USAID cooking oil and donated Louisiana rice, various medicines marked not for sale and donated by… The earth was a dark brick red, almost a wine-stained colour, where it wasn’t black with charcoal dust.
Sudi asked for my backpack and stowed it on the front seat of a Hiace. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We will eat now. We leave the bag here. There is no problem. The driver is my friend.’
We walked through the market and ducked into a four-table restaurant that served only rice and beans. Stacked against the back wall were sacks of uncooked rice and beans stamped with the logos of Unicef and other aid agencies. The donated food had found its way into the local economy, and now it was being consumed by people who could afford to pay for it and not the hungry malnourished children begging outside. The tired-looking women cooking this food and running this little restaurant were using their tiny profits to feed and clothe their own children and buy them donated medicine. The morality of the situation was messy and complicated, but one thing was certain. None of this would be mentioned in the NGO press releases or fundraising literature. There would be a glowing report, listing an impressive quantity of food and medicine successfully delivered to a needy area, and that would be it. Maybe that was all that could be hoped for.
Or maybe it was teaching people that food arrived on aid trucks, and they didn’t need to grow it. Maybe if Médecins Sans Frontières and other medical charities were to pull out of Burundi, the government health department would be under more pressure to actually do something with its budget. But it was so hard to say. In a region where hungry people watched their cattle starve to death without selling or eating them, where people took donated food away from starving children and sold it instead, how could I trust my muzungu thought patterns?
I could never know what it was like to stand in rags and Chinese flip-flops, having lived through 13 years of ethnic warfare, with all the chopping, hacking, raping and mutilating that went out of European warfare a long time ago, and watch squeaky-clean, super-polite white people step out of their $60,000 Land Cruisers with a plan to make poverty history, to enrol you in a gender sensitivity workshop, to reconsider the environmental implications of your hunting and farming practices, to change the way you have sex, take a crap in the morning, gather water, plant crops, graze livestock, raise your children, treat your wife, manage your anger issues. Would I feel intruded upon, grateful, puzzled, angry, shy, resentful, uninterested? Would it encourage me to fix problems or depend on others to fix problems? Would I think: they have so much, I have nothing, so give me, give me, give me? I had no idea.
Driving out of Mabanda, in the front seat of an otherwise horrendously overcrowded Hiace, hurtling at a lunatic speed through the descending mountain curves on the way to Bujumbura, every town and village was preceded by a big white sign proclaiming an NGO project under way or completed and listing its funders and partners. Water projects were popular, at least among NGOs and their donors. It was easy to get funding for a water project, because in the West access to clean running water from a tap is considered an inalienable human right, and a universal human desire.
On an earlier visit to Tanzania, I went to a village by Lake Eyasi where a Spanish NGO had built a water project. The villagers had tried to stop it, but this made no sense to the NGO. Why would anyone willingly gather water by hand when they could have a tap? Also, it was an oppressive system for the young women and the girls who did most of the water gathering, and since the NGO had already raised the funding, its engineers went ahead and built the project. Now the villagers had taps outside their huts, and they were not happy about it. Why? Because for as long as anyone could remember, walking through the village to fetch water was how the marriageable girls had caught the eyes of marriageable boys. The NGO had wrecked their courtship system.
In Kigoma, I heard another water project story from a nearby village. NGOs are always trying to learn from their mistakes, and they know all too well that development projects tend to fall into disrepair after they leave. So the NGO in question was careful to involve the villagers at every stage of the water project, so their labour and ideas would be ‘invested’ in the project and they would think of it as their own, rather than something that foreigners came and built for them. The NGO trained up villagers as maintenance engineers and set up a fund and delivery system to pay for future spare parts. All this was time-consuming, and the project took nearly three years to complete. A week later, the villagers tore the whole thing apart. Why? Because they wanted to sell the pipes; it was easy money.
Stories like these are a dime a dozen when NGO people get together and drink, but they don’t like them getting into the media, because they think it damages their fundraising abilities. I have my doubts about this. Most people give money to NGOs because it makes them feel better. It’s a kind of tithe, or guilt tax, and they show remarkably little interest in finding out how effectively their money is spent. Good intentions are good enough for both donor and NGO. The many well-documented failures of the aid industry and its overall ineffectiveness – the more aid a country has received, the more likely it is to be getting poorer – hasn’t hurt its fundraising abilities in the slightest.
It was a four-hour drive to Bujumbura and the driver drove as if he were in a video game, passing every car on the road, using the horn to clear the road in front of him of cyclists, goats, scurrying pedestrians, hitting 80mph on the straights, honking his way impatiently through the crowded villages and towns, which came one after the other as we descended into the foothills and flatlands. Burundi is the size of Belgium. It’s a green and well-watered country, but with eight million people, an agricultural economy, and over 90 per cent of the population living in rural areas, there was serious pressure on the available land. In some provinces there were 700 people per square mile, and Burundian women were averaging six children apiece. Burundi and Rwanda, the two Hutu-Tutsi countries, are the most overpopulated in Africa, and this fact cannot be separated out from either the chronic poverty or the ethnic violence.
As we entered the villages and towns, the driver made frequent stops to haggle with fruit vendors, flirt with young women who caught his eye by the side of the road, and exchange greetings with various young men of his acquaintance. He got out several times to inspect barrels of palm oil for sale, and when he found one that met with his satisfaction, the passengers in the back had to squeeze up further to make room for it. Then he took off at top speed again, scattering the goats, cyclists and pedestrians in his path.
‘Sudi,’ I asked. ‘Do you drive like your friend here?’
‘No, no,’ he laughed. ‘I am a careful driver.’
‘Thank you again for helping me. You are a good man.’
‘Welcome to my country,’ he said. ‘When we arrive at Bujumbura, you no go hotel. You stay at my house. You see African house, stay with African family, learn more.’
Lake Tanganyika came into view, rippling with white-capped waves in the wind. The road ran along the lake shore, past fishing boats, the occasional lone hippo that had somehow managed to survive amid all this hunger, and many roadside kilns where people were baking mud into bricks. Then we entered the outlying sprawl of Bujumbura – brick buildings with tin roofs, crankshaft repair shops, brightly painted storefronts, bustling roadside stalls, a traffic jam of motorbikes, taxis and Hiaces mixing their vapours with charcoal smoke from grilled meat vendors in the heat, noise, commotion and humidity.
There were electricity poles, cables and transformers but no electricity. Bujumbura was currently getting its power from Congo, but it had been delinquent in paying its bills, and the Congolese were restricting the supply to teach them a lesson. Normally Bujumbura got its electricity from a donor-built hydro project, but the reservoirs were dry. The managers had run all the water through the turbines already, or the main dam had sprung a leak and no one had done anything about it. No one was quite sure. Later, I would meet a World Bank water expert who attended a meeting of the Burundian government to address this situation. The officials began the meeting by asking him to join them in a prayer for rain to fill up the reservoirs. He turned them down politely, saying, ‘I’m with the World Bank. We don’t believe in that sort of thing. If my bosses find out I’ve been praying for rain, I’ll get fired.’
Central Bujumbura, the old Belgian colonial city on the lake shore, with its sandy beaches, hillside villas, art deco buildings, elegant Francophone restaurants and lively nightclubs, had been a haven of cosmopolitan sophistication in the middle of Africa, a choice posting for diplomats and NGO workers in the 1980s and early 1990s. Now, having endured wave after wave of ethnic cleansing and gangsterised ethnic war, conducted with phenomenal cruelty by all the groups involved, the city was pockmarked, grimy and traumatised, with packs of half-feral children roaming the streets, but the aid money was flowing again, the NGO people were back in greater numbers than ever, and there was a vibrant illegal economy in smuggled gemstones and minerals from Congo. Cafes, restaurants and nightclubs were open again, and Sudi said there was a good spirit in the city these days, a feeling that despite all the problems – the terrible poverty, lack of jobs and the worst corruption in the world, according to Transparency International – things were now getting better and maybe this time the violence was gone for good.
We got off the bus in the crowded streets near the central market. People were speaking French, Swahili and Kirundi, the subtle, allusive language of Burundi, switching back and forth fluently between the languages, and many of them also spoke some English. Sudi told me to be careful of pickpockets, and there were plenty of beggars, including glue-sniffing children with one hand outstretched and the other holding a bag of glue, but the streets felt less dangerous and threatening than Mabanda, or Bagamoyo, or a bad neighbourhood in an American city. Sudi lived in the Nyakabiga quarter, a majority Tutsi area. During the war, the city had been strictly divided on ethnic lines, and anyone trying to cross from one area to another ran a high risk of being killed. Soldiers, militias, ethnic street gangs would all enforce these boundaries by dragging people out of vehicles and beating, stabbing or necklacing them with a burning tyre by the side of the road. Sudi, being of mixed Hutu-Tutsi parentage, was able to cross these lines in his taxi, because both Hutus and Tutsis thought that despite his mixed blood he was really one of them.
It’s important to understand that Hutus and Tutsis are not separate tribes, although many Hutus believe they are. They are more like ethnic castes. They both speak the same language, and for many centuries, in Burundi and Rwanda, they lived together as part of a unified society ruled over by kings and princes. For the Belgian colonial authorities, however, this was too untidy. They classified the Hutu and Tutsi as two separate races, and anyone who had a long nose or lighter skin was marked down as Tutsi. Colonial patronage went to the Tutsis, and the grievances of the Hutu majority sharpened and intensified. By the time the Belgians left in 1962, both Hutus and Tutsis were thinking of themselves as separate races, violence followed swiftly in both countries, culminating in the Rwandan genocide and the ethnic civil war in Burundi. In both countries, the ethnic tensions were whipped up by politicians seeking power and wealth, and the violence fuelled by an atmosphere of swirling rumours, deep paranoia, escalating hatred and vengefulness.
In Sudi’s neighbourhood, there were now some Hutus living peaceably among the Tutsis, although I couldn’t tell the two groups apart. All I could see was lots of Africans in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and skin tones, and all they could see was ‘Muzungu! Muzungu! Muzungu!’ The children were wildly excited to have a real live white man on their block, the adults were gently amused on the whole, and only the drunks harassed me for money. One of Sudi’s neighbours shook her head and laughed and laughed when she saw me. ‘Oh Sudi,’ she said. ‘Did he get lost from his safari? Is he looking for elephants?’
He led me down a narrow alleyway that was also an open drain and into a small, shabby courtyard shared by three houses. There were laundry lines strung across it and a communal bathroom consisting of a bucket of water and a hole in the ground. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ said Sudi, leading me through the doorway of his small house and proud to show it to me. The floors and walls were concrete. The walls were painted royal blue and growing mould, and the ceiling was a woven-reed matting. Sudi knew that muzungus had delicate stomachs and could not drink the lake water like normal people, so he sent out one of his headscarved teenage daughters to buy bottled water. When she returned, he sat me down in his best armchair and turned on the television. ‘I must go to the mosque and pray,’ he said. ‘You stay here. Relax.’
There was a gold-threaded velvet painting of Mecca on one wall, plastic flowers on a plastic tablecloth on the coffee table, a large plastic thermos on a sideboard with a glass tea set. On the small colour television, President Nkurunziza, wearing a blue Adidas tracksuit and a white bush hat, was passing bricks along a line of people volunteering to build a new hospital. He was making a dance out of it, dipping his knees and twisting his hips to a rhythm and exhorting the others in the line to do the same. There was a kind of blank, glowing, happy spaciness in the president’s eyes that I couldn’t quite pin down. Was he just bugged out on Jesus? Was there some war trauma mixed in? Did he seriously believe, as he kept stating in public, that physical exercise and born-again Christianity were the keys to rebuilding the world’s poorest and most corrupt country?
When Sudi returned from the mosque, we ate rice and beans with his sister, aunt and two teenage daughters and then settled down to watch hip-hop videos on television. One of his daughters tried out a few flirting moves on me, much to the amusement of her sister, and in general the women were more confident, outgoing and in charge than one might expect in a Muslim household. Sudi was a gentle, yielding patriarch. With all the fearful angry barking about Muslims in America and Europe these days, it’s easy to lose track of the fundamental decency of Islam, its emphasis on compassion, humility and hospitality to strangers. During the war in Burundi and the genocide in Rwanda, Muslims had generally stayed neutral and pacifist, while the majority Catholic population hacked away at each other.
When the time came to sleep, I unrolled my sleeping pad on the floor and covered myself in insect repellent against the house mosquitoes. Sudi rolled himself up like a sarcophagus in an embroidered white cotton sheet, pulling it over his head, tucking it in round the sides. That was his protection against the mosquitoes and the malaria and other diseases they carried. His brother slept outside in the taxi every night to make sure no one stole it.
The next morning, I bought Sudi a phone at the Obama Shop. It sold mobile phones and computers, and the employees wore T-shirts with Obama’s picture on the back, and all the different models of phone had been renamed and repackaged on the Obama theme. While a reggae song called Barack Obama played on the stereo, Sudi looked at the Yes We Can phone, but settled on the Living the Dream model. ‘This will be good for my business,’ Sudi said.
I bought myself a Burundian sim card, and loaded up both our phones with credit. I was starting to like this city, with its crumbling art deco buildings, its sense of fragile peace, a spirit that seemed traumatised but vigorous and undefeated. I wanted to know more about this beleaguered, corrupt little country and its efforts to heal and repair itself after so many years of war and hatred. Was this the beginning of a lasting peace or an interlude in the cycle of violence? What could be done about ethnic hatred? Who were these people and how did their society fit together? Were they doomed or was there hope?
One morning, Sudi drove me to Buterere, a poor area near the airport. He wanted to show me what happened to the rubbish collected from the embassies, the UN buildings and the rich neighbourhood on the hill where the foreign NGO people lived. They all paid to have their rubbish collected by a private company, whose trucks came around once a week and dumped the foreigners’ rubbish by the side of a long dirt road paralleling a filthy stream.
Naked boys were swimming and fishing in the stream. On the other side of the road, amid thick buzzing clouds of flies, skeletal men in rags were scavenging through the broken glass and filth for scraps of food. They were Twa pygmies, displaced from the forest and now living in a small shantytown. Sudi gave one some money to talk. He took the money and ran away. Sudi held up another banknote, called him, and he came running back.
The man said the Twa wanted to be left alone to hunt in the forest, but the forest was gone now, cut down for charcoal, and all the animals had disappeared. He was holding a plastic bag, and Sudi asked him to show us its contents. He had some rotting fruit covered in black filth, some fishheads, a plastic water bottle and a sooty grey object that I thought was a chunk of dried mud. He wiped away the dirt on the object to show us it was a packet of American instant mashed potato. ‘Today is the best day,’ he said. ‘This is when we get the good things to eat.’ He held up his instant mashed potato like a prize and smiled.
‘Oh God, I wish you hadn’t told me that,’ said T that evening over glasses of wine at a large open-air bar with manicured lawns. She was a lively, intelligent American woman, very fit, clean and healthylooking, and she had been in Burundi for two years working on women’s issues with an American NGO. She had no authorisation to talk on the record to journalists (hence the initial T). She lived in a gated villa on the hill with four servants, two vehicles and a swimming-pool, and like so many of her tribe, she felt guilty and awkward about having these luxuries in such a poor country. She justified it by saying the house was bequeathed to her by her predecessor at the NGO, that she was in Burundi for the long haul, and to be at her most effective she needed a quiet, safe, comfortable refuge. I found her argument faultless. Sleeping on Sudi’s floor with the whining mosquitoes and 4am muezzin calls from the nearby mosque was wearing me out.
Why, I asked, with all the aid flowing into Burundi and the dozens of NGOs headquartered in Bujumbura, were people excited about eating her rubbish? Couldn’t someone go down to Buterere with some food aid? ‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘The trouble is that no one is doing projects for the urban poor in Bujumbura. The funding isn’t there. We’re all so focused on truth, reconciliation and justice. Underdevelopment in the rural areas. Democratic governance. Human rights.’
‘What about the government?’ I asked. ‘What is it doing?’
‘Well, the international community supplies more than 60 per cent of the government’s budget, and supposedly there are strings attached. They’re supposed to show evidence of democratisation and improved human rights before getting the money. In reality they got another $35 million, with no strings attached, because they threatened to resume the civil war if we didn’t give them the money. And of course most of that money ends up in private bank accounts.’
I told her I was going to Rwanda, and asked what she thought of President Kagame. ‘I think he’s fantastic,’ she said. ‘I wish Burundi had one like him. Kagame is a dictator, but he has a vision, and he’s dragging that country towards it by the scruff of its neck, and development is actually happening. It’s the only way. Here we’re trying to have a democracy, and we have a shambles. All it takes is one leader with vision and power. Unfortunately I don’t see anyone here like that at the moment. The only ones with vision have no power. And the ones with power are only interested in getting rich. They really are a bunch of thugs, Neanderthals. Oh God, did I just say that?’
Meanwhile, Kenny Rogers was playing through the speakers, as Kenny so often does in Bujumbura. It’s a minor curiosity of Burundian life that I feel compelled to record. There are a surprising number of country and western fans in this part of Africa, and Kenny Rogers is their stone favourite. As we sat there discussing Burundian politics and the dilemmas of aid, Kenny crooned, ‘Know when to hold ’em / Know when to fold ’em…’
‘Crazy River’ (Little Brown) can be ordered for £12.99 plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1515)
The tea can be made stronger by adding more flowers. That would be very naughty if this freaked you out because it actually worked. For example, you'll earn an extra 10 points if you serve all of the components of a three-item order at the same time. Herbal teas are the staple beverage in many countries. Some would like for my basis to become more than what it is. Be guaranteed when growing from seeds. It is my turn to state something that puts in plain English issues with tea online so poorly. That isn't a problem and this can be a good way to do this from the comfort of your own home. I don't see much hope for tea in that area, however. What does jasmine green tea do?
By JAN SJOSTROM
