Finally Revisiting the Twa

Wednesday, February 16^th finally rolled around – the day I was promised we would do nothing else until we visit the Twa once again and bring them the school supplies, sorghum flour and sugar I’d purchased in Gesenyi on the previous Monday.  We left Kigali at 8:00 a.m. and an hour and half later arrived at the compound where they were waiting for us to arrive, the children having run down the hill once more to greet us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Talking with the Elders

Mukashingiro Speciose, the 46-year-old leader of  this group of Twa, greeted us (Celestin, Pauline and myself) at the bottom of the hill and accepted my gifts on behalf of her people.  When we made the hike up to the compound I found that they had arranged two chairs and a low wooden bench on which we could have our conversation. Mukashingiro and the compound’s other elders graciously told me the stories of their people, reaching back into their past as far as they could remember.

Following is some of what I learned from Mukashingiro and others during our time together:

• There are 120 Batwa living in this compound of 21 dwellings.  (She consulted her handwritten tabulation of residents to make sure her numbers were correct.)  The dwellings are generally single room, dirt floor huts, some with relatively intact roofing and many without.  There is no electricity or running water.  The government gave them these dwellings when they were told – upon returning to Rwanda from fleeing to the Congo from what they call “the war”– that they couldn’t return to their previous homes in the forests.  They’ve been living here for 11 years.  No one has a job.

• Prior to living here they were forest dwellers.  They grew much of their own food and lived near the clay pits where they dug the clay to make their pots, a craft they have been practicing for centuries.  This compound is 2 or more hours walk to the clay pit, to which they walk only once a week or so because it’s a long way and clay is heavy.

• Every adult makes pots.  After the sun dries them out, they’re fired in grass and wood fires, not unlike raku firing.  Sometimes they’re painted before use.  Sometimes they sell them, when they can, along the roads.  A pot like the ones pictured might go for 200 Rwandan francs (34 cents), “if we meet a good person."
  

• This compound that was given to them has no place on which to grow anything.  And they couldn’t plant anything even if they did have the land because they don’t have any money to buy fertilizer, a necessity for growing anything in this soil.  Sometimes they beg their neighbors for food.  Countless times they simply don’t eat.

• Many years ago they (the Rwandans) had a Tutsi king and he gave them no trouble.  There were no problems with the rest of the population until after “the war” (their term for the Genocide since they didn’t experience the same kind of mass killings where they resided as did the residents of Kigali, for example). 

• Before the war, they lived their own lives and no one bothered them.  But in 1994 and again in 1999 (they believe these were the years but have no calendars or timepieces to keep track) they were forced to flee for their lives to the Congo.  So many Twa were massacred in Goma when they reached the Congo the first time that the bodies were tossed into mass graves. Mukashingiro’s mother, for example, had 12 children, and all but five were slaughtered in Goma.  The majority of adults in their compound today are women because so many men were killed during those flight years.

• Those who survived the slaughter stayed in the Congo for several years.  To determine the number of years they lived there, Mukashingiro remembered that she got pregnant in Goma and when they came back the baby was running around.  So she figures it was 2 or 3 years during which they temporarily settled there.  UN cars brought them back to their land, and it was during the second return (during what they call the second war in the Congo with guerillas) they were told they couldn’t live in the forests any longer, and were told they had to move.
  
  
  

• The government says where they have to live now.  Others are now using the place where they used to live; while they were away, their land was given to other, non-Twa people.  They’ve tried to reclaim their land, even as late as yesterday when they appealed to the local government office.  They are always told no.

• There are many children in the compound now, too many for Mukashingiro to remember the exact number, but only 19 have been to school.  And even they don’t necessarily go on a regular basis because the Twa don’t have money for school fees, uniforms, supplies and to feed them when they’re at school.  Also, if the children have no shoes, the school sends them home.  (I counted only 3 or 4 pair of plastic sandals among the group.)  And if they don’t have anything to eat, they don’t go to school.  If someone buys a pot, they’ll eat.  Eating comes first, they told me.  School is second.

I asked all of them gathered around to try to imagine what a better life would be and to tell me what that would look like to them.  It took them a very long time to think about it, and this is the sum total of what they were able to imagine:

 

• To have a house and a farm that are closed up so it doesn’t rain on us.

• To have fertilizer.

• To have a little money so we can go farther from here to do business on the road and sell our pots.

• To sleep in a bed.

That’s it.  No one could think of anything else.

When I asked how they sleep now, one of the elders got down on the ground and showed me.  They sleep on the hard ground, using old mats as pillows, covering themselves with used plastic flour sacks.) 
So at the end of the day, they don’t put on their pajamas and crawl into bed.  They don’t have pajamas – they sleep in the same clothes they’ve had on for weeks.  They don’t have beds.  They don’t have blankets.  They don’t brush their teeth because they don’t have toothbrushes.  Or running water.  The kids don’t do their homework because they’re trying instead to find something to eat and a pair of shoes so they can go back to school sometime. 

On the way back to Kigali, I saw the land near the forest on which they used to live.  There were pens with animals in them, and avocado trees, sweet potatoes, beans and arrowroot growing in the verdant plain. 

It was unspeakably sad.

Next:

Arranging for the touring part of the upcoming Symposium.