14 November 2005

I’m hiding out in my house this morning and won’t leave until the madness is done.

That sounds really ominous in a country with Rwanda’s history, so I’ll explain. The government announced on Friday that businesses would be closed on Monday morning and all people were expected to plant government-provided trees.

On its face, tree-planting day sounds like a great idea. Deforestation and soil erosion are huge problems in Rwanda, and since Rwandans don’t really volunteer for anything unless there’s money involved, it’s good to get everyone out planting.

The tree planting is an extension of umuganda, where on the last Saturday of each month all Rwandans are expected to go out and do public works projects. Expected is the wrong word. Forced is more apt. Rebecca’s boss Sean says he’s been pulled over on many occasions driving to work on a Saturday, with the police trying to force him into clearing brush or something like that.

Again, on its face umuganda sounds like a great idea. Everyone pulls together to plant and spruce up the neighborhood.

But there are huge problems with this system. First of all, in a country trying to develop its economy, shutting everything down so people can plant trees is not necessarily the way to encourage growth. You want those shops open and money changing hands. That’s how economies grow. Everything was closed on Saturday morning by some sort of mysterious governmental decree. Our neighbor Kersty said that it was an extension of last month’s “Ask President Paul” event, where President Kagame gathered thousands of people into the main football (soccer) stadium and, in theory, everyone asked him a question. The president then decided to take a spin around Kigali, which necessitated shutting the place down.

“Ask President Paul” took place on the Saturday when umuganda was supposed to take place, so that was two Saturdays in a row where the city shut down. (Most shops close at 2 p.m. on Saturdays and aren’t open at all on Sundays.)

Not everyone was able to ask their questions during the session, so they shut everything down this past Saturday so people could ask remaining questions of their commune leaders, or as Rebecca calls them neighborhood spies. So that means the country has essentially been shut for two-and-a-half days. Gacaca days also cause everything in a neighborhood to close. There’s a Gacaca tribunal, quasi-traditional communal courts for trying low-level genocide suspects, going on somewhere in the country every day. And they want to grow an economy?

That’s just annoying. But umuganda has an air of menace to it. First of all, it is apparently a vestigial element of Belgian colonialism.

Second, it’s not hard to make some really uncomfortable leaps of logic. The government now is forcing everyone to get out and work, hoes, shovels and machetes in hand, for community improvement.

It was exactly the same message during the genocide. People were told to get out and complete their work. Essentially, if one wanted to, the genocide could be seen as a depraved 100-day umuganda, except the community improvement was getting rid of about 10 percent of the community.

Even with that understanding it’s hard to fathom how the majority of a population could be convinced that decimating their neighbors was community improvement. But once that threshold was crossed it’s not hard to see how the organizers could mobilize the population to do their “work.”

And I’m not comparing the government’s motives to those of the genocidal maniacs who used to run Rwanda. This is a commentary more on how Rwandans, for the most part, don’t question orders from authority, and the obvious dangers that poses when the power is abused.

So, now that I’ve bummed you out on a Monday morning, I’ll continue ducking when I walk past our windows. Rebecca seems to have passed through the tree police without getting caught, and is safely working away in her office. As for me, only an hour or so to go.