Blood Papa Read online

  If we drop in at the Cultural Center, it’s during rec times. Dancing makes me happier than anything. I love to dance surrounded by friends. I lose myself laughing. We also go to watch movies or music videos, especially Rwandan or American music, and the Rwandan team’s soccer games. I’m fond of war movies with uplifting endings. Nigerian soaps are a delight because the actors have very fancy manners—they are more attractive than American actors and all the rest. I tag along with my brother Valois to a cybercafé on the main street. We browse the news and keep an eye on world events, of course. We watch the performers, the dancers and singers, on YouTube. We chat with friends on Facebook. We explore amazing websites. Valois shows them to me because he has them at his fingertips. They describe the world’s catastrophes and explain the evil rites used by secret societies to stir up wars. They talk about the punishments in store for mankind in the afterlife, the dark forces taking over the universe, defiling it more thoroughly than all the massacres one can imagine—sort of the warning signs of the apocalypse. We aren’t the only ones to visit these wicked sites—almost all young people do. At some point, we simply won’t be able to stay away; it’s a world that excites our imagination. We also visit funny sites to laugh at the jokes.

  My greatest joy is running off to the market, which is always a big temptation because it lets me escape the boredom at home. I can’t even find the words to describe how exhilarating it is, probably because being around all those people never gets old. It’s so much fun to hear and see so many things. I know how to bargain for the best prices, and I make my counteroffers firm, despite my young age. At the market, one runs into friends from other schools who come to buy things or just wander around, and we swap jokes more than actual news.

  * * *

  AT SCHOOL, a group of friends and I often discuss the genocide. It can come up anytime, during recess, for example, often on our way to places, far from other people’s ears. Someone might mention it after a history lesson or want to work through new details heard on a radio show. Sometimes an incident occurs in one of our families and the person needs to talk to relieve their anxiety. This is more frequent during the Week of Mourning, when trauma erupts everywhere. You see students at school who go off by themselves to sulk, some with their heads down on their desks, and who won’t utter a word the whole day. Some are thrown into a tumult and thrash about violently. For example, students start running and screaming about machetes. They scream that someone is coming to cut them or that they have already been cut. When a student behaves like that, the principal steps in straightaway to have him taken to the clinic. He calls on the student’s friends to gather around to comfort him. Later, classmates come together and we share what we’re feeling. Some of us are shaken up; others are used to it. We split into small groups, then, to talk about what happened. There are cases of troubled kids insulting Hutus. They distrust Hutu faces and they shout mean words. Their friends show sympathy. Others are indifferent or embarrassed—they don’t know what feelings to express.

  Yes, there are brawls occasionally. When students hurl insults, sometimes fists fly. For example, students might provoke a boy by harping on his parent’s misdeeds. Or the opposite, they deliberately go past a person, making believe that they don’t know what week it is, that nothing important ever happened anyway, or that they couldn’t care less about all the fuss. Behavior like that riles people up. We also had a girl once who wrote her schoolmates threatening messages: “You’ve done so much killing that now you’re going to pay for it. We’ve got our eyes on you.” On the other side, a boy student wrote anonymous notes saying, “We killed your family, but it’s not enough. We’re going to finish the job.” Three times he left the same notes on desks during recess. The principal marched off to the police, but they never discovered who it was. Most of the time, students choose avoidance.

  I steer clear of ethnic arguments. I keep from discussing the genocide with my Hutu classmates. Not one of them has ever come up to me and suggested talking about it. I think they are too uncomfortable. With my good Tutsi girlfriends, we can discuss our parents’ troubles—their quirks, so to speak. It doesn’t happen often. For example, certain parents break down right in the middle of the day; as soon as someone mentions the killings, they become agitated or morose. Friends have run away from home because of their parents’ behavior. A classmate told me that her mama abandoned them to escape the poverty brought about by the genocide. Several classmates say that they feel really worn down by the mess at home: the drinking, their parents’ eccentricities and neglect. I know some who try to find peace and quiet with their distant relatives.

  Hutu children don’t talk about these things as much. They talk very little. To hear them tell it, there’s nothing out of the ordinary at home. They reject the chance to be consoled. They never reveal what their family lives are like. Plenty of young Hutus pretend they don’t know what their parents did. There are some who repeat how sick they are of always hearing about the genocide; some seem ashamed, and others are bitter—they praise their parents’ courage. I’m young: when in doubt, I avoid discussions with them.

  * * *

  I PRAY WITH all my heart every morning. I say a special prayer for the safety of the country so that my loved ones no longer tremble, and I ask for extra help when difficulties arise at home. My mama drew me to religion, but I’m the one who chose the Presbyterian church, because it’s near our house. My faith runs deep. I believe that a people’s destruction is the will of God. He decided who should die and who should be saved. Why would a benevolent God, with infinite goodness and supreme power, accept the almost total extermination of the Tutsis by their neighbors? That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer. I don’t understand any of God’s reasons, except that He may have wanted to demonstrate His omnipotence, because now the survivors can bear witness to it. I am too young a girl to grasp the depths of theology. The dark soul of mankind holds temptations; maybe God puts people to the test. I don’t know.

  God is a mystery; I’m in favor of that idea. The mystery doesn’t alter my faith in the least. Still, I know people whose faith has faded. They have abandoned the church or are so unsure that you barely see them from one Sunday to the next. The sermons no longer flow through them; they have stopped closing their eyes to drink in the pastor’s words. Certain others are constantly changing parishes. The whole family goes to the Catholics and they come away disappointed; then they turn to the Adventists, they last a month, and off they go, following a colleague someplace else.

  They flee their uncertainty. I don’t at all share their doubts, but I understand their tendency to let everything drop. Myself, I don’t pray to erase the present or the past. My faith doesn’t relieve the sorrow that my thoughts of lost family cause. No, no, that much I’m sure I know. My faith doesn’t make me more trusting toward people. In my view, it gives human beings more strength. It protects me, anyway.

  FISHING ON THE AKAGERA

  In the middle of the night, as the coals in the courtyard go out, Idelphonse leaves home, fishnets over his shoulder. He crosses the center of Kiganwa, exchanging a few words with the silhouettes chatting in the glow of the candlelight on the verandas. He follows a stretch of path, then turns down a trail that descends abruptly toward the river. In the darkness of the banana groves, the coos of turtledoves answer the cuckoos’ calls, their odes interrupted by the barks of what may be jackals or monkeys.

  Down the hill, lapping water lets one know the river is near. In the shadows, its current seems stock-still. The water is slack; even during the rainy season, it barely stirs. On clear nights, the moon and even the stars are reflected on its surface. A tongue of earth skirts the river, surrounded by sloping pastures. A dozen years ago, these banks held the barrel-like shadows of hippos. Herds grazed until daybreak. The females mooed at their cavorting calves while the males grunted, marking their territory for the umpteenth time with mounds of droppings. Today the fishermen lament the animals’ absence because, they say,
the squat pachyderm hooves used to mill the mud, working into the current the plankton and insects the fish were fond of. Nowadays, only cow dung mixes with the sludge. The cows come at night to graze on the aquatic fodder, which young kids, night owls balanced atop thin boats, cut into islets for them to eat along the riverside. Yet the hippos didn’t leave because of the cows, and still less because of the gaggle of geese one sees coiled in the grass at the edge of the bush. It was the sugarcane planters. Indeed, the green-gold fever of Kigali’s investors has spread all the way here.

  As Idelphonse inspects his traps, other fishermen arrive and deposit their gear into slender pirogues. They silently slide their boats into the river and depart for deeper waters, baiting their hooks with beeswax before setting up their traps and lines in the choppy current. In the morning, the fishermen return home singing, just as people in pirogues sing nearly everywhere in the world. A hustle and bustle awaits them on the banks. Women do their wash kneeling at the water’s edge; herders goad their cattle to drink. A bevy of herons, touching down from who knows where, scour the rushes with their hungry beaks. During the migration season, egrets bivouac here as well. The heat has stopped the gray geese from sleeping in; they graze the grass unperturbed by the commotion around them.

  The fishermen empty their catch onto the landing. Tilapia are tossed into a red bucket, barbs into a green one, small catfish into pails carried off by female fish-merchants to be smoked and then sold at the market. Idelphonse can’t hide his disappointment. It was a luckless morning with the nets. An eel or a plump Nile perch could have earned him and his colleagues several thousand francs from Kigali restaurants.

  When he returns from the river, he walks past the parcel where his mother and brother, Jean-Damascène, are busy tilling the soil. Scarcely a word is said between them. For Idelphonse, the workday is over. He goes for a stroll with friends from the fishing co-op until mealtime and then takes a nap. Afterward, he sees to the urwagwa, whose secret recipe his father, during his years of freedom, handed down to him.1 The banana beer Idelphonse distills delights his Kiganwa customers, who sit on the veranda passing around the chalumeau late into the evening, some admirers coming from as far as Nyarunazi or Kibungo for its exceptional taste.2

  Unlike his brother, Idelphonse hardly thrived at school. Leaving was less of a disappointment than he lets on. He didn’t dream of a job in town. He pictured himself instead alongside his father, Fulgence, who trained him in business and in new crops like tomatoes and coffee. He learned fast. A tenacious worker, he spared no effort to succeed. He had been looking forward to a good marriage on the hill, a house in Kiganwa, and later a business of his own, until the day the Ernestine Kaneza affair changed everything. It was a Sunday, sixteen years after the genocide. During the final session of the gaçaça trials, to everyone’s surprise, Janvier Munyaneza’s story of the horrid murder of his sister Ernestine, on the first day of the killings, sent Idelphonse’s father back to Rilima for life. On that notorious Sunday night, as Idelphonse followed the three men leading Fulgence away in shackles, he still didn’t know the reason for his father’s arrest, for no one in his family had attended the trial. He thought it merely a momentary twist of fate, which would explain his shock the next day when he discovered the details.

  At nineteen years old, he is no longer the little boy who watched his father leave for prison after their return from Congo. At that time, at least one man from every Hutu family in Kiganwa was in prison. The children shared the same incomprehension, destitution, and humiliation. This time, however, the family had to confront alone the rumors and shame brought on by the accusations of the appalling crime. They kept their feelings of injustice to themselves. Their hopes for an appeal dwindled; the signs of their poverty quickly appeared. The parents of Idelphonse’s fiancée refused to accept him as their son-in-law, his brother was expelled from school, their crops declined in Fulgence’s absence. There were endless arguments in the fields, which their neighbors eyed covetously. Idelphonse gradually gave up the hoe, preferring his nights spent fishing on the silent river. He rarely mentions his troubles. He goes on walks; he drinks in Primus the money he makes from fishing, which he then earns back by selling urwagwa.

  IDELPHONSE HABINSHUTI

  NINETEEN YEARS OLD

  Son of Fulgence Bunani, Hutu prisoner

  When I fish, I’m out the door in the evening. With farming, I’m up at five o’clock. It’s a little over a two-kilometer walk to the field. Mama joins me after housework around the yard. Our plot takes up some seven and a half acres in a place called Batsinda, near the river. When Papa’s strength set the pace for ours, the land gave in abundance. It yields plenty to those who put a lot of effort into it. I take a break once the sun begins beating down. I head home for lunch, rest while the sun lasts, and return to the field until 5:30 or 6:00. I get washed, I relax. If I scrape up enough, I buy myself a Primus, because it’s a treat. Otherwise, I have some urwagwa or sorghum porridge—that’s good, too. Our family makes them tasty.

  Since Papa’s imprisonment, it’s been up to me to distill the bananas for the urwagwa. How? You select bunches of slightly bitter bananas, you add plantains, and you bury them four days. You take them out and mash them in a bucket with herbs. You grill the sorghum, you mix it with the juice for the fermentation, and you bury it again to contain the fumes. After a day’s wait, you pull out the tasty urwagwa that everyone craves. In our family, I don’t make decisions in place of my papa, because I was born a child with only my mama in front of me. But in the drink business, it’s me who speaks up and she who takes my side.

  In the evenings, I go for walks around Nyarunazi, see pals, or get a shave. I’m asleep at nine o’clock unless a friend stops in to chat. Nothing but rest on Sundays. I’m a good Catholic but not so fervent. I pray for Papa before bed. I appeal to God again when I get up. One still wonders, though, how a good and all-powerful God could shut His eyes to such killings. I gladly attend mass but not every Sunday. Afterward, I stroll around Kibungo or else I wash clothes. I visit friends—I join them in their courtyards, or we meet along the way to shoot the breeze. We share our thoughts and bottles of beer.

  There are no televisions in Kiganwa. In Nyamata, I don’t stay to watch; I couldn’t name my favorite programs. You won’t find a field for kicking the ball around, either, because farming has swallowed up all the flat plots of land. I listen to the Rwandan team’s matches on the radio. I root for all the national team’s players, Michel Ndahinduka in particular—he’s a dribbler from Nyamata. In his childhood he wore our jersey with the striker’s number nine. A friend owns a smartphone. We watch movies, but I’m not overeager to see how they end. We listen to music videos. Rwandan music makes me happy, of course, and the music of young people my age like Tom Close or Kitoko, especially dance music. Do I dance? Not enough time. And where would I? Every month I head to the Nyamata market to sell sweet potatoes, or cassava flour, or beans when prices bottom out. I take advantage of the trip to buy an outfit or a phone card and cheer on the Nyamata team with the others around the soccer field. Go to a cabaret? Never, I haven’t got the money. Listen to a band some night at the Black and White? I haven’t got polished shoes. When I visit the family in Kigali, we stroll the streets, we admire the new neighborhoods, and we share news about relatives we haven’t seen for a time. My cousins point out where prestigious people live. We obviously don’t go in anywhere; I’ve never stepped foot in a movie theater or an internet café. Anyway, I don’t know how to work the computer.

  * * *

  MY NAME MEANS “one always counts on friends.” My father’s the one who chose it. I was born in 1992, I don’t know the month. There are four of us children in the family. My father is called Fulgence Bunani. He lives in Rilima. He was first put in prison after we returned from Congo. Our country’s president pardoned him in the seventh year of his sentence. In 2010, a gaçaça trial sent him back again. We were disappointed beyond measure. Before that, he had proved himself a praisew
orthy farmer, his business prospered, and the urwagwa trade filled his pockets.

  My mama’s name is Jacqueline Mukamana. As a farmer, she holds her own on the family plot; she carries on quite capably with my papa away. I have stood by her on the parcel from the age of seventeen; basically, since my papa’s return to prison. I fish at night on the Akagera River. I didn’t leave school gladly. The first time I was expelled; I was in my third year of primary school—I was fifteen. I had a clever hand at math, and I saw myself in a premium job later on. But the principal called Mama in, demanding the minervals right there and then. She lowered her gaze. He warned her that with each payment we missed, he would send me home. Poverty led to more comings and goings; Mama could see that she was stuck. The land refused to give her good harvests. She handed me the hoe and asked me to be patient on the parcel.

  In 2003, Papa was released with a long line of repentant prisoners. Once home, he took the hoe from my hands. The parcel produced in abundance, and the harvest paid the minervals. For two years, I returned to school, until the first semester of my fifth year. I had my sights set on studying crafts so I could learn a trade in town. Then my papa was taken back to prison in 2010. That was the end of school. At the penitentiary, he offered to sell a strip of land to cover tuition, but Mama decided that I would stay on in farming. I was a little angry. Not too much, though, since I knew that selling land would set off a family feud.

  * * *

  I FIRST HEARD about the war when we were in Congo. I was a little boy. We lived two years in the Masisi camp, next to the volcano. My papa distilled and sold his drink, my mama sold her strength in the Congolese women’s fields. I went with her because preschool was rare. I don’t remember any tough times in Congo. It was good for a child; we children played. Except at the end, when everyone was mistreated. The soldiers fired their artillery shells, and it was an awful tumult of bloody panic and fear. We left the camp sprinting; we trekked in columns for days to Gisenyi. Trucks transported us to the district, where we walked to our hill in Kiganwa. The house stood in a sorry state, with no sheet metal on the roof and broken windows. Scrub was eating away the land. Papa didn’t last more than two weeks at home. The soldiers came, tied his arms, and took him away to the penitentiary with his colleagues from the hill.