Every child instinctively fears the darkness of the night. In Bujumbura, in Burundi, we all become children again when night falls – uncertain about the horrors, some rumoured, some real, that it can bring.
And yet the night is also the time for revelling – and, in spite of the nervous silence of the town, Bujumbura still has its nightspots.
The Havana Club is the most interesting looking of these, carrying lots of promise in its jaunty name. Friday night was to be a special occasion, with a
rare appearance by the One Nation band, made up of musicians from both Rwanda and Burundi. But we got to the door to find that the gig had been cancelled, because the musicians had missed their flight from Kigali.
So our host offered to take us out for dinner instead in Bwiza, one of the nearby quartiers populairs – “people’s neighbourhoods”, as distinct from the quiet suburbs on the slopes above the town where the diplomats and aid workers and civil servants live.
The suburb was abuzz, Africa parading free and easy through the rutted roads, an exuberant nightlife after the stillness of downtown Bujumbura.
We dined in style on grilled goat’s meat at an establishment run by an entrepreneur who hailed from Mali, far away on the other side of the continent. Across the road was a similar joint run by a Senegalese, both houses doing a roaring trade.
Bwiza is the unspoken, African face of globalisation. Thousands of Malians, Senegalese, Rwandans, Congolese, Zambians, Ugandans, Ethiopians and Tanzanians form a thriving immigrant community here, conducting their commercial affairs in the regional lingua franca of Swahili – just a few kilometres away from other business deals being negotiated, for somewhat higher stakes, in French, English, Russian, Japanese and Hebrew under the shaky lights of downtown Bujumbura.
In many ways, Bujumbura is a thriving, international city. Yet under the surface, the lllordinary people still llgrapple lllwith an lllinterior conflict that is incomprehensible to the rest of the world.
When the latest wave of Hutu/Tutsi ethnic cleansings began in 1993, the foreign Africans residing in Bujumbura were generally felt to be safe from the carnage. They were not part of the internecine conflict. The Malian government did, nevertheless, take the precaution of putting an aircraft at the disposal of its citizens living in Burundi – and indeed, many of them opted for voluntary evacuation as Bwiza and other suburbs were hit by the growing holocaust.
But many more chose to sit it out, predicting, like their fellow African traders, and like the Indian traders in the Asian Quarter and the white traders in the downtown commercial district, that, however bad things might get, life would return to normal sooner or later, and business would go on as usual in the meanwhile.
Africa’s informal migrations have been going on forever, only temporarily inconvenienced by wars, colonial invasions, and the unreliable structures of post-colonial government. People move – in ones and twos, in groups, or in mass displacements. The people move.
So while these thousands of foreigners have steadily settled into the daily life of the periphery of Bujumbura, about half-a-million Burundians have fled south into neighbouring Tanzania to escape the massacres. Tens of thousands more are still living a precarious internal exile in refugee camps and “resettlement villages” hastily built by the government to keep the rural populations away from the influence of the various rebel armies. Yet more thousands have escaped to other countries in Africa-including South Africa-and to Europe or North America, refusing to believe that the killings will stop. And while it is not as bad as it was, the surges of violence do still occur.
It is a story of horror in the midst of normality. The smiles of the day, the gentle exchanges of greetings in a language that sounds like the chattering of doves, are replaced by the murderous bullets and machetes of the night.
In the morning it is as if nothing had happened. The perpetrators are nowhere to be seen, melting back into the rhythm of the neighbourhood, where life goes on as usual, and only murmured tales of misery attest to the spilling of more blood.
No one can understand it – the earnest aid workers, the impatient businessmen, the peace negotiators, least of all the Burundians themselves.
It is Sunday afternoon at Saga Beach, a few kilometres outside the town. City dwellers, a wide cross-section of those who live and work in Bujumbura, have come here to relax, drink beer or Coca-Cola, listen to music. The atmosphere is jovial, tempered by the presence of small military units patrolling among the revellers, reminding us of the ever-present possibility of indiscriminate attacks from the hills.
A few brave spirits are splashing about in the waves of Lake Tanganyika, throwing a ball back and forth. Most people stay clear. There is talk of an 8m-long crocodile, the biggest ever recorded in the world, which has been known to wander down this far.
The thought of the crocodile is fearsome, but not as fearsome as what men have shown themselves to be capable of.
A blind singer is fingering his battered guitar, singing softly, almost to himself:
“Our country, it is like a flower that displays all its beauties and gives off sweet perfume during the day; and yet, after the sun disappears from the sky, its sweetness vanishes, the petals curl and die, and fall to the ground, rotting in their own corruption.”
Those who can hear his words murmur their agreement. It is not so much a statement as a question for the heart.
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