12 August 2005: Joys of language

I am pleased to report that I’ve learned my first word in Kinyarwanda. It was a word that I heard often coming down the street, and, silly me, I thought it meant hello. A kid, usually a boy, will shout “umuzungu” when I pass. I wave, smile or brush off the hawker. I think Rebecca thought the same thing. And then, as she began to learn Kinyarwanda from Christine, CRS’s receptionist, we learned what the word meant. Umuzungu means “Hey whitey!”

Allow me to translate:

“Umuzungu, newspaper?” in Kinyarwanda is “Hey whitey, want a newspaper?”

“Umuzungu, need change?” is “Hey whitey, do you want to get ripped off as my friend over here gives you two francs to the dollar?” The exchange rate is around 560 francs to the dollar, and yes, that’s what Rebecca and I get.

“Umuzungu, money?” means “Hey, rich whitey, give my friends and me some money. We know you’re good for it.” That usually comes from the street kids.

It’s not menacing in anyway, and I don’t think that it’s racist either. It’s almost like calling out, “hey, mister,” or, “excuse me, miss,” just more specific on skin color than gender. It’s probably a little bit of good-natured razzing as well. Given the history of white people on this continent, I think a little friendly razzing seems in order, and far better than we should expect.

Despite the fairly warm welcome Rebecca and I have received here in Rwanda – I think Rwandans realize that the foreigners that are here really want to be here, usually to help – umuzungu reinforces outsider status here. And here I was thinking I blended in.

Doing what I’m doing, trying to report on what’s happening here, also reinforces my role as the outsider. My job is to try to make sense of this place and what happens here for folks reading in relative comfort. How can I make the unfathomable fathomable?

I’ve met with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees representatives here to discuss going to meet refugees returning from the jungles of Congo. These refugees are the last remaining from the record-setting refugee flow that marked the end of the genocide. Often they were entirely cut off from any information, being told that the current government of Rwanda would kill them if they returned to the country. Hundreds of thousands left in the span of days, and the last 50,000 are sitting in refugee camps. That’s not really counting the genocidaires and former Rwandan military terrorizing the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda’s massive and anarchic neighbor, and threatening to come back and take over the country. Nobody believes they can do it because these are the guys that the current Rwandan military routed in 1994, but they do have the potential to do some mischief.

Now these unbelievably poor people are returning to Rwanda, although the flow has slowed because of renewed fighting in Congo, to find that there is almost no land for them. According to the UNHCR guy I spoke to, the biggest problem is the scarcity of land. Rwanda has the highest population density of any African country, and much of the land here is made up of hills and mountains. So where do they go?

I’ll be speaking to these people. But how do I relate to them? How do I talk to them without condescending to them? We’ll find out. Add to that the language difficulty – they all speak Kinyarwanda and I’m not counting on them knowing French – and you have the mixture of an alien experience. I think I’m up to it, but really I’m not sure.

I’ve also been spending time at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda information center here in Kigali, in preparation for covering trials of Catholic clergy over their roles in the genocide. My first trip will be in September, when the trial of one priest who had around 2,000 people killed and then had his own church bulldozed, restarts.

I expect that it will be like covering any trial. The priest is innocent until proven guilty, evidence will be presented and both the defense and prosecution will make their arguments. But if this man is guilty, it is a level of evil unlike any I’ve encountered face to face. I recognize that everyone, no matter how evil, is entitled to a defense. I just don’t think that I could do it, and I don’t understand how anyone can. It’ll be another example of looking at people I don’t know if I can understand.

And that brings us to Kigali today. It is a relatively calm city, filled with unidentifiable Japanese taxis, old Suzuki jeeps and expensive 4x4s driven by aid agencies traversing the undulating hills. People walk to and fro, business happens and construction is going on everywhere. It’s hard for me to picture the streets filled with bodies and the people with the ready smiles and easy laughs either running for their lives or running to take them. But it’s something that happened, and it underlies everything here.