After 10 days in Burundi, you find that you have become exhausted just from trying to figure out what the conflict is about. You have been made privy to all sorts of theories, most of them leading to a dead end.
The people are exceedingly courteous, not just to foreigners like me, but to each other. It is rare to hear a raucous voice, even rarer to see a heated argument. How, then, can there be such lethal confrontations, both sides being equally guilty of vicious attacks against each other? After so many
generations of intermarriage, who can then tell who is who, anyway?
I had been told that there are subtle differences of accent, little clues that someone born and bred in this society can spot at once, subtle traits that a foreigner can never learn to see, which distinguish a Hutu from a Tutsi. Again and again, you find yourself drifting into a pointless guessing game, trying to judge the ethnicity of a person passing in the street on the basis of your own obnoxious assumptions about various racial traits.
But the city is too mongrel a space to allow you to be able to accurately make a judgement about anything.
Once you drive up into the hills above Bujumbura, away from the cosmopolitan melting pot of the town, it hits you in the face. This is Hutu country. Eighty-five percent of the country’s population is Hutu and, although one would like to believe the romantic myth that everyone looks and sounds the same, my eyes, beginning to get accustomed to the play of the light, are telling me that it’s just not true.
The contrasts are sharpened by the fact that I am accompanied on this short stab into the countryside by a Tutsi family, pleased to be able to take their children for a little joyride into the hills on a Saturday afternoon. (The excursion has to be short because the roads into the hinterland are closed after four in the afternoon, because of the frequent and random attacks by various militias.)
My Tutsi friends look distinctly Ethiopian – the soft hair worn in a high crown, the slightly oriental eyes, the almost painfully delicate features, the children’s long, poised necks.
The people walking along the side of the road, and thronged in the dense villages that emerge at frequent but irregular intervals, are short, round-eyed, round-featured “Bantu” types like me.
There can be no question that the Tutsi invaded the Hutu domain from the north sometime during a past too distant to calculate whether this invasion was peaceful or not. In the same way, their ancestors had drifted into the highlands of what came to be Abyssinia from the desert regions around the Red Sea, and probably from even further east, the lands of the gypsies and the Hindu. A hybrid race had been born, of Africa, but apart from it at the same time.
Offshoots of this new race inevitably drifted south again, some small bands of them settling among the fertile hills and plains of Rwanda and Burundi. And, as with all migrations, there must have been times when the newcomers were good neighbours, and times when they were not.
So here, in the beautiful, lilting countryside, dappled with forests and clearings filled with tea and coffee and banana plantations, two different races, both belonging to Africa, began to co-exist. They both ended up speaking the same Bantu language, Kirundi. They became alike in many respects, but remained aloof in many others – subtle but important differences a stranger would never be able to pick up. But mostly there was harmony.
There were strangers on the way, though, who would have no regard for such subtle differences and who would instead take it upon themselves to amplify the paper-thin spaces that stood between Hutu and Tutsi until they became as wide and as brutal as a sledgehammer.
God knows how they pulled it off, but the Belgians, originating from a tiny European state that was not immune from its own inter-ethnic conflict, managed to take control of the whole central swathe of the African continent, including the impossibly vast Congo and most of the land around the Great Lakes. With them, they brought devastation from which the original inhabitants are still to recover.
Apart from their trail of brutal amputations and mass killings in the Congo, they left a legacy of murderous antagonism between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi – following on from the example the German colonists had set before them. The Tutsi, with their supposedly Aryan features, were given the status of superior human beings. Education and advantage, within the limitations of the colonial dispensation that put the Belgians permanently at the top of the pile, were the exclusive privilege of the Tutsi. The Hutu were consigned to the status of hewers of wood and drawers of water.
It took the Belgians only a few years to undermine the delicate balance of life in the Great Lakes region. The struggle to restore that balance is taking considerably longer.
And as usual, the victim is being left with the blame for his own appalling condition.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza