My friend Sibi and I took a walk in the night through Kigali, 10 years after the end of the genocide and the Rwandan civil war. There was much to talk about. We hadn’t seen each other for more than 20 years, and here we were, meeting in a place that had gone through a holocaust since we’d last met.
Sibi comes from Nairobi, which is where we had first come across each other through the agency of a mutual friend — who has since become his wife.
The earth has turned over several times since then. He was then an angry young Kenyan, I an angry young South African in exile, spending some weeks in his country to do an anti-apartheid movie for the BBC. The movie was based on Hilda Bernstein’s novel Death is Part of the Process. The shabbier areas of central Nairobi were standing in for 1950s Johannesburg, then inaccessible to all of us.
We did a lot of laughing. Angry as we were about the condition of our respective countries, there was a lot to connect us to a common sense of cultural history that went way beyond the politics of our respective homelands. And this is what we revisited in our walk in the night, through the hilly streets of Kigali — two men, now decidedly middle-aged, with a lot of water long passed under the bridge.
We dealt briefly with the obvious. South Africa, a seemingly impossible target for change in the mid-1980s when we first met, had become a liberated zone, with the then banned African National Congress unquestionably at the helm.
We had talked in hushed tones about the incarceration and sustained torture of Kenyan intellectuals and dissidents. He and other young Kenyans had told me about the security police building in central Nairobi that he pointed out to me, as if we were walking over the waterlogged basement where unseen and unheard victims were being held as we strolled to have lunch or dinner in a well-heeled restaurant.
We had to talk in hushed tones, because you never knew who was listening, even in the loudest restaurant and bar. It was like being in the South Africa that we were so obsessed about. But this was in supposedly liberated Africa. Such draconian acts should not have been happening at the time.
We were dealing with a conundrum — how could you point fingers at John Vorster and PW Botha when the same things were happening in post-colonial, black-ruled Africa? What was the real centre of the film we were involved in making, which would later be followed under touchy conditions back home? People of my generation, who were stuck in the battle back in the industrial heartland of the then Transvaal, would later recognise me in the streets of Johannesburg, noting that they knew me from watching movies such as this one under blankets to avoid detection, prying eyes looking through the windows of township houses in Soweto, Alex or Sebokeng.
So here we were, taking a walk in the night through the eerily quiet streets of Kigali — ourselves walking through fields of ghosts, walking over who knows how many unseen graves of unrecognised victims, walking down memory lane.
We were, once again, taking part as actors in a movie about another African holocaust. This time it was not about South Africa, it was about post-colonial Africa. It is one of many documentaries and fictionalisations of how that holocaust of 1994 unfolded in central Africa.
You can never get your head around how this all happened, although we tried to talk it through as we walked through the night. None of it makes sense, especially since, as Sibi said to me, and I said to him, you wouldn’t feel so safe walking through Johannesburg or Nairobi, whether during the day or the night. Kigali feels more humane and comfortable. The contradictions of Africa’s recent history.
We finally sat down in a pleasant restaurant overlooking one of the city’s many valleys, the lights of the city twinkling down below, life back to normal. The restaurant is black-owned, which is normal here in Kigali, although it wouldn’t necessarily be so in either Johannesburg or Nairobi. A liberated zone, run with perfect ease. I guess this says more about us than about what is really going on and the fact that life has moved on.
The critical sign about life having moved on shows in what the next stage of our conversation moves to. Sibi asks me if I have noticed something, not just in the course of our walk in the night, but as we wait for our nyama ku choma in the restaurant, half out in the open air.
The something he wants to bring to my attention is that these elegant Rwandans we are sitting among, talking in soft tones with seriousness and humour, in control of the country of which they are part, are all under 40. There are no middle-aged people, of our generation or older, around. Our walk in the night has revealed to both of us that a whole generation has been literally chopped to pieces. We are sitting among a generation of Rwandans recreating themselves more or less from scratch.
Nothing you see in Rwanda, 10 years down the line, gives you any explanation of what happened in that genocide of 1994 in which 800 000 people were systematically killed, by direct, hands-on violence. Reading about it again and again, from many different angles, makes this terrible African holocaust more and more baffling and no less horrific.