Rwanda Means the Universe: A Native's Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines - Hardcover

Mushikiwabo, Louise; Kramer, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312209592 ISBN 13: 9780312209599

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2006

Synopsis

Mushikiwabo is a Rwandan working as a translator in Washington when she learns that most of her family back home has been killed in a conspiracy meticulously planned by the state. First comes shock, then aftershock, three months of it, during which her worst fears are confirmed: The same state apparatus has duped millions of Rwandans into butchering nearly a million of their neighbors.
Years earlier, her brother Lando wrote her a letter she never got until now. Urged on by it, she rummages into their farm childhood, and into family corners alternately dark, loving, and humorous. She searches for stray mementos of the lost, then for their roots. What she finds is that and more---hints, roots, of the 1994 crime that killed her family. Her narrative takes the reader on a journey from the days the world and Rwanda discovered each other back to colonial period when pseudoscientific ideas about race put the nation on a highway bound for the 1994 genocide.
Seven years of full-time collaboration by two writers---and the faith of family and friends---went into this emotionally charged work. Rwanda Means the Universe is at once a celebration of the lives of the lost and homage to their past, but it's no comfortable tribute. It's an expression of dogged hope in the face of modern evil.

About this title

About the Author:

Louise Mushikiwabo was born and raised in Kigali and educated at the National University of Rwanda and at the University of Delaware after immigrating to the United States in 1986. She is active as a public speaker on Rwanda-related issues, works as a public relations consultant, and lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband.

Jack Kramer is a reporter and ex-marine who has covered six wars as well as Rwanda, Algeria, the oil crisis, Saudi Arabia, the revolution in Iran, and the civil rights movement in the Deep South. His articles have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Washington Post, Business Week, Time, and The Wall Street Journal. The author of a memoir, Travels with the Celestial Dog, Kramer lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One
In-laws, Outlaws, and a Pratfall from Grace
 
I met a man once who told me about a pigeon that his cook fixed for him in Cairo. He said it looked as if the houseboy had just shot the bird with a pellet gun and it crash-landed on his plate. Its drumsticks were splayed, head twisted sideways, wings akimbo, tail in the air.
 
That's pretty much how Juvenal Habyarimana met his end. Shot from the sky like a pigeon.
 
He dies, and wherever you look, tender shoots come suddenly and enormously abloom. For something like four years, and on his orders, men and women credentialed in the cultivation of hate had been seeding poison in neat rows, and now for an even one hundred days and uncountable nights, their business blooms, boiling at last into a crime that spreads beyond your ability to comprehend.
 
From too far to see much or know much, I find it floating through my imagination, a bloom of algae suddenly sickly green on hills that roll like liquid swells. Up close, it stares back, an ooze with eyes called "genocide." Blooms of bobbing corpses foam up on the cold roaring feeders of the Nile. There's nowhere to hide.
 
But that's when he dies, and those hundred days after, and just now, that's not what's on my mind. What's on my mind just now is those last few days before he dies. I don't know why.
 
Juvenal Habyarimana and I were countrymen. We were Banyarwanda, people of the mountain nation called Rwanda. We were Africans. So let's see if I can draw you a picture of my brother African as he was during those last six days I can't get off my mind anyway. Let's look at the picture he presents before his big bang, before he goes nose-first into the mess he's made and his bird-beaked soul flutters up in thin air.
 
This can be tricky. You think back to his last few days, and it's hard keeping your mind off what's coming, for him and for us. But why not try? After all, right there, just then, watching him go about his business that first week of April 1994, who knows he's a man on the cusp?
 
Well, clearly somebody knows. Somebody's about to shoot him out of the sky. And besides the shooters, a few other personalities might well know something's up. For all we know, one of them is Juvenal Habyarimana.
 
He's quick. Never has this man been easily blindsided. He may well have an inkling. But put me there, or you, and we'd have no inkling at all. So let's look at the man we the ignorant might witness during the last few days before he makes that last lurid appearance on the slick pages of Jeune Afrique, his tasteful Afro still neatly carved, his head cleanly cleft at the neck by the force of the crash, sitting wide-eyed on its left ear just meters short of his pride, his swimming pool.
 
He stands trim, square, proud, his necktie smartly knotted, his head firmly on his shoulders. He steps out like Johnnie Walker on the whiskey bottle. His eyes are clear, intelligent.
 
His smile is healthy, white, genuine. His manners attend so considerately. He actually listens. He cares who you are. In just a few weeks, King Baudouin of the Belgians will look up in silence as he's told what Juvenal Habyarimana was up to behind closed doors. At last his royal highness will speak. "But he was such a Christian. . . ."
 
Some soldiers can make a career of standing at attention. Good soldier Habyarimana has made a career of paying attention. He's risen from the ranks by drinking in every drop of detail, and he's risen far. He springs from the poorest of the already poor people who make up the great mass of our nation.
 
Juvenal H, Confounder of Cartoons
 
We call his people Bahutu. They call themselves Bahutu. Nobody else knows their name. Nobody knows our name. At least not where I'm at work that final week of his life, worlds away from Africa in a strange land of Post-it notes and drive-thru banks.
 
"How can things get so all, like, nuts?" asks a voice at work. "In Africa. On the news. Or was it the Jiffy Lube? USA Today in the waiting room? No. It was my podiatrist friend, Lorraine. A news junkie, world class. Now who is it you are? The Hottentots?"
 
As I said, nobody knows our name.
 
It's been a charged few months, following a charged year. No sign that this will be the week, Juvenal's week, our week, but all the same, come Thursday an occupational hazard gets the best of me. I'm a translator. I get paid to be picky with words, and I'm not handling the week as well as I should. Thursday noon, I'm standing at the elevator with Bea from Benefits. She's a mild woman who always smiles and nods and likes to get familiar. She asks the usual topsy-turvy questions, and I find myself explaining, in a tone I'm certain is all too picky, "I'm Tutsi. The minority people. The other people are Hutu. Which is an adjective, not a noun. The noun is Bahutu. Batutsi."
 
"Oh precious," she says. "Thank you so much. Now I remember. Saw it just the other night on Fox Five. The Hutsie are the other ones. The poor ones. Poor, short, and not exactly stocky, but they do have this, well, issue with weight. You're like the rich ones. The tall ones. Skinny. So when are we going to see some flesh on those bones, young lady?"
 
So there you have it, no one knows our name, but all the same, there's a cartoon doing the rounds: Hutu means the masses, squat and sturdy. Tutsi means patrician, tall, slight, and you will please ignore the tendency of patrician teeth to stick out. Thursday after work I find myself silently lecturing produce at the Safeway. "There just aren't many rich Batutsi anymore," I silently instruct a bin of indolent cabbages. They seem not to pay much attention, so I turn to some equally inattentive eggplants. "As far back as the fifties, figures show Bahutu doing about the same as Batutsi." Facts and figures document my lessons, fastidiously honed footnotes pump through my head.
 
"And you chattering onions there: This business about a Hutu 'issue with weight.' I'd say more Bahutu are underweight than overweight." Indeed, plenty of Bahutu are hungry these days.
 
For that matter, plenty of Batutsi are hungry these days. Right enough, some Batutsi are skinny for no other reason than genes. But hunger has slimmed all our people. Hunger is in our souls, in the souls of all of us, Batwa (Rwanda's pygmies), Bahutu, Batutsi.
 
You see it especially in our worship of amplitude, and especially in the eye our men have for cows. Time was, the gift of a cow from a Tutsi lord was one way a Hutu man won rank, a step toward becoming Tutsi, which some did. Even as I fill my cart with Sara Lee, my brothers in Africa are grooming their cows to a sleek sheen, lotioning them with butter. They can pay a woman no greater compliment than to call her a cow. They would admire Big Bea from Benefits.
 
 
Like most bahutu, Habyarimana confounds the hutu cartoon. He's neither short nor all that heavy. Even as he ages, he's built just fine, and looking smart hasn't hurt this bella figura one bit. He's married well. Agathe Kanziga is not a daughter of the Batutsi. Like him, she's Hutu. But she's far better educated than most Batutsi, and in the mystery-ridden ways of our nation, she is also higher born than most.
 
This latter-day queen would be higher born than most of us once-patrician Batutsi even if her republic had not stripped us of all station (no, worse, of all credit) after the Belgians began handing them power in 1959. Her line of Bahutu once ruled a princely state, and lineage shows in her bearing. Married to this highborn Hutu woman, Juvenal Habyarimana has risen from the poorest of the already poor Bahutu and become His Excellency, president of the last African nation to be discovered by Europe, the last successfully to be made a colony of Europe, our Rwanda, at bay with the mountain gorilla in Africa's high interior.
 
Smelter of Iron, Carver of Terraces
 
I grew up in Habyarimana's Rwanda. When Albert Einstein was born in the industrial-strength Rhineland of 1879, our nation had yet to be glimpsed by a single white person. For years, soot-belching freighters had been plying the sea-lanes from Brindisi and Suez to Mombasa. From booming Mombasa, the Uganda Railway regularly chugged up past booming Nairobi to our very gates in the Uganda highlands.
 
Where we heard you knocking, but you couldn't come in. Behind those gates, locked tight, we were a stubborn people, and not simply stubborn but illiterate, and not simply illiterate but innumerate. We couldn't count.
 
Another decade comes and goes. Young Colette is enumerating her beaux. Young Albert is working differential equations. We can still barely count.
 
White people--Zungu people, Bazungu--remain something we know the way we know that our paramount chief, our mwami, is divine. In Paris, photographs are starting to move. In Berlin, a man named Benz is designing an automobile. In Cleveland, a black child who will one day devise the traffic light enters school. We remain ignorant of the wheel, a people still unseen by even one Muzungu.
 
And yet . . . Presume if you will that we're aboriginal, some elusive stone-age remnant whose scant numbers and simple ways let us hunt and gather in deep secrecy. In the event, we're neither much of a secret nor graced with Pleistocene charm. With iron we've long since been smelting in bush forges, we've long since--centuries since--felled most of our forests. We're isolated, a small place adrift in wilds without end, but our isolated valleys are crosshatched with irrigation channels, our hills stepped in painstaking terraces. Our cows give rich milk, our bees fine honey. Our women weave fine basketry.
 
For nearly half your nineteenth century, the rifle-armed merchants of two different Muslim worlds have been heading for us from two different directions. From the north out of Ottoman Cairo marches the expanding merchant world of the Nile. From the east marches the expanding merchant world of Zanzibar. As John Wilkes Booth fires his derringer at Ford's Theatre, hired Arab gunmen are circling us, dragging the endless wilderness about us for slaves and ivory as they eye what they call our "infidel sultanates."
 
Nor are they alone in their designs. More than a quarter century before Colette begins to flirt, that most moody of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, General Gordon, declares he wants to trade his command at Khartoum for Mombasa, the better to reach what he reckons the Nile's true prize, our highlands. In 1884, Bismarck summons a council of Zungu cannibal chiefs. He bills it "the Conference of Berlin." The idea is to carve up Africa without carving up each other. It works--though with each cut, the Zungu chiefs eye each other intently. After securing some prime cuts for the Reich, der Reichskanzler has "Ruanda-Urundi" for dessert. That's nine years before a single German ever sets foot on our soil. Still, you wouldn't want to call us a triple-canopied secret. Nor would you want to call our population scant, nor our economy aboriginal. Aboriginals, anthropology tells us, need vast tracts to feed tiny bands. It took all of aboriginal Britain to feed fewer souls than live in twenty-first-century Swansea. Yes, we can barely count. We're lost in an Africa thick with hyenas and thin with people. Still, our lost sultanates have put themselves together so complexly and so obsessively that in our fastness, we have for centuries been feeding a population among the densest on earth, as dense as the Yangtze, as dense as the Ruhr. We are, in our inspired improbability, that thoroughly African.
 
Dear Constance, True to Her Name
 
Mama and Papa could count but they had nine children anyway; nine kids, Mama, Papa, and guests in mud-brick quarters eighteen feet by eighteen feet with no electricity, no toilet, no running water. This was 1961, the year I was born, last of the nine.
 
I studied. At six I minded the nuns as if stepping out of line meant breaking my mother's spine. At sixteen I studied for my diploma as if holy salvation hung in the balance, and gaped as, late in a season of long rains, our book-struck brother Lando, eleven years my senior, suddenly sprouted wings and soared off on a thunderhead of scholarship.
 
One minute I saw him sitting cross-legged in the shade of ripe sorghum, reading anything and everything, dog-eared comic books, Scaramouche, Saint-Simon, Simenon. The next minute he was up and off, gone. Just like that, he jumped a puddle and turned midleap into a Tutsi-skinny stork; and not just any stork (for we have an abundance, saddle-billed, yellow-billed, open-billed, all homebound residents), but one of those long-legged, pale- arctic storks that leave us every Easter to roost in the chimney pots of strange northern places.
 
Right there in midair, I lost my favorite storyteller. Right there, our Lando snatched a stipend on the wing and soared off to a distant ice palace called Montreal, there to temper his African fever for words in a blue diamond realm of books and plays and music. There I resolved to join him.
 
We were Tutsi, but we were also Tsobe. My clan, my Tutsi father's clan, storky brother Lando's clan, the clan of our fathers, was the Batsobe. Our clan inheritance was the lore and ethic of illiterate scholars, abiru, who committed volumes of beauty and knowledge to memory, drawing on it as if they had a library card to the human brain.
 
The White Fathers couldn't teach in our native Kinyarwanda, the tongue that most pleased me, most pleases me, a tongue we Batutsi seem to have learned centuries ago from our sister Bahutu. Instead I studied in French, and as I studied, Habyarimana and his cronies began cutting Batutsi out of the school system. With luck, I went to university anyway and studied English and English literature. I tried for one foreign grant after another until at last I turned twenty-four and luck favored me with a scholarship and full stipend to the University of Delaware.
 
Everything was set. My passage was paid, cash on the line, departure date three days hence. The U.S. Embassy, then famously proprietary with its visas, said mine was in hand; all I had to do was bring in my passport for stamping. Except that I didn't have a passport. I had applied weeks earlier to the minister of education because that's how you had to do it. You couldn't just pay a fee, fill out a form, and wait. You had to have a proper reason, certified by a government minister, who would then okay the application for a passport. Now, three days before departure, with ticket and visa in hand, a letter finally turns up in our box at the post.
 
"We regret to inform you that you are not permitted to pursue your studies overseas."
 
Nobody in the family was in the public eye. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that the state had leaped beyond keeping us out of school. Now we couldn't leave the country.
 
At this, big sister, solid big sister, all six feet three and thirty-two years of her, marched into the passport agency as if she had six legs with which to march. The passpor...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0312209592
• ISBN 13: 9780312209599
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384