Читать книгу From Red Earth - Denise Uwimana - Страница 11

3

Refugee Childhood

MY PARENTS VIEWED the date of my birth as a good omen. December 13 was the third Sunday of Advent in 1964, the day they lit three candles out of four in expectation of Christ’s birthday. I was their second child, and the first daughter.

Kibuye Hospital, where I was born, had been built twenty years earlier by American Methodist missionaries to Burundi. Since Papa was on the hospital staff, our home – a solid brick house with wood beams and tiled roof – was part of the mission compound, as were the church and school.

Thanks to an altitude of six thousand feet, Kibuye’s climate is idyllic, and we children spent our days outdoors. My older brother Phocas and I often climbed avocado, orange, and guava trees. We would pick and eat the fruit or just enjoy our leafy world, above the rest of the human race.

At bedtime, we pestered Mama for stories of her childhood. While we huddled under our covers, she would describe volcanoes on Idjwi Island and on Lake Kivu’s far Congo shore. As a young girl, she had seen their glow reflected from the clouds at night.

Sometimes our mother stretched her memories, to describe demon-people and their offspring living in the fiery cones – stirring clay pots in the smoldering heat, eating the seething contents, laughing, singing, and spewing lava over the land. It was too dark to see the smile in Mama’s eyes – night comes quickly at the equator – but I heard it in her voice. I shivered happily under my blanket and begged for more.

When I was nearly six, I started school, setting off in my blue uniform like the twenty-nine other first graders. I could hardly wait to make the mysterious marks on paper that I had watched my older brother create. Dashing home a few hours later, I took some chalk and proudly demonstrated my new letters and numerals on our concrete floor.

When my parents were out of the room, Phocas helped me get down the heavy Bible. Cross-legged on the floor, I opened it and started dissecting letters from words, eager to read at last. But there was no meaning! Disgruntled, I told my brother to put the book away. This education business would take some time.

My parents were fluent in Kirundi, the language of our adopted country. That’s what we kids used for talking with our playmates, our teachers, and each other. But when they didn’t want us to understand their conversation, our parents switched to Kinyarwanda, their mother tongue – so our ears became fine-tuned to that as well. The two languages are quite similar.

When I was seven, my family packed our belongings and left the only home I knew. I didn’t understand why, but again the reason was Hutu–Tutsi strife. Following a 1972 uprising, Tutsi leaders in Burundi incited the killing of thousands of Hutu. We saw none of this violence in our village, and our parents never discussed it in front of us children – but they decided it was time to leave the country.

My father accepted his uncle Sekabarata’s invitation to Kaziba, in the Congo, to pursue further studies at a teaching hospital there. Only six years older than Papa, Sekabarata seemed more like a brother than an uncle to my father. Years earlier, they had undertaken their initial nursing training together.

The journey to Kaziba was an adventure for us kids – five of us now. After crossing the Ruzizi River, which separates Burundi from the Congo, we boarded the truck that would take us to our new home. Papa hoisted me onto its tailgate, and I pressed my way forward.

I hoped to cling to a side of the vehicle, to have a secure handhold and watch the scenery. Instead, as at least thirty others clambered aboard, I found my face mashed into the back of a large lady. All I could see was the swirling pattern of her cotton kitenge, the African wrap-around skirt. Just when I was sure I would suffocate between strangers, I felt a firm touch on my shoulder. It was Mama, reassuring me through the press.

The road’s deep ruts, formed during the rainy season and hardened like rock, made our vehicle lurch violently. Only our packed condition prevented me from falling over. For one stretch, the road led through mountains, with a cliff falling from its edge. I could not see this drop-off or the swamp hundreds of feet below, but the passengers’ outbursts fueled my imagination. Every time the truck tilted, I was sure it would plunge us all into the Nkombo Chasm.

After six hours of standing in the truck, our family arrived, exhausted but safe, in Kaziba, our new home deep in the Congo. Uncle Sekabarata told us we could stay in his house until the mission would provide our own.

Despite my great-uncle’s hearty welcome, I felt like an alien in the Congo. Kaziba’s population belonged to the Bashi tribe and spoke an unfamiliar tongue. School lessons were held in French and Swahili, two more languages my brothers and I had to master. Being refugees and strangers was challenging for our parents, too, until matters took a fortuitous turn.

The mountains surrounding Kaziba are home to the Banyamulenge, a proud people who measure their wealth by the size of their cattle herds. Although they have been in the Congo more than four hundred years, they originally came from what is now Rwanda, and they speak a form of Kinyarwanda similar to ours.

The Banyamulenge we came to know walked barefoot with dignity, the men in long coats and felt hats – cane in hand, to guide their lethal-looking cows through rocky terrain – the women fully draped, showing only their eyes. Their families would come down from the mountains to Kaziba for medical treatment, or to send their children to school, selling cattle to pay the fees. Uncle Sekabarata always welcomed the Banyamulenge. The house we shared with him smelled rancid whenever he hosted them, because they used butter both for cooking and as lotion.

The Banyamulenge salute – Uri uwo kwande muntu?, “Who do you belong to?” – led to our breakthrough. In answering this greeting, Papa discovered that we were distantly related to some of these folk. We had known we were linked by a shared past, but it was exciting to realize we had specific ancestors in common. Weary of being foreigners, my parents decided to join the Banyamulenge tribe. That’s how we freed ourselves from our refugee status and became citizens of the Congo.

Years later Mama, in true African style, arranged a match for me – with a Banyamulenge man. My siblings joked that she was inspired by her love of cattle, because she and Papa would have gained twelve cows from the transaction.

Sometimes I try to picture what my life might have been, had I agreed to her plan. I would probably be weaving cloth for my husband’s coat right now, or cooking over the fire in the center of a round mud hut, my shins burned from squatting too near the flames. Or maybe I’d be smearing my children with butter … The only certainty is that life would have been far more serene than it turned out.

After completing his training at Kaziba Hospital, my father was assigned by the mission to direct a health center in Kalambi, a village in the Congo’s eastern borderland. That meant another move. I was ten.

Kalambi turned out to be a primitive jungle community. Once again, everything was unfamiliar. Only the few houses belonging to the mission, including ours, had brick walls and metal roofs. The other homes, on both sides of a central dirt road, were built of mud and thatched with straw.

People going to the health center had to pass our house, and they often stopped in for a drink of water. Mama always gave visitors something to eat as well, especially the pregnant mothers. And as clinic director, Papa would go out at a moment’s notice, day or night, to deal with any accident, snakebite, birth, or death. In this way, my parents quickly gained the respect of most of the villagers.

Making friends was harder for us kids. We were the first foreigners the village children had ever seen, and they asked, in a mocking chant, which planet we were from. They despised my older brother when he stayed away from their manhood initiation rites. They eventually accepted us, however, when they saw that we could run and joke like them. They belonged to various tribes – Barega, Banyindu, Babembe, and Twa – and we gradually picked up their dialects.

Kalambi’s population lived mainly by subsistence farming, cassava being the staple crop. People also raised fish in manmade ponds and harvested food from the forest. A large spiny caterpillar, milanga, was a popular source of protein.

The first time Phocas, my younger brother Clement, and I saw milanga on the trees, we could not believe they were edible. As long as a man’s finger, and much fatter, this red-brown larva was covered with spikes. However scary they were to look at – and painful to pick up – collecting them in season was a gala event for the village. Mama said eating caterpillars was disgusting, and she forbade us to bring milanga into our house. On my own, however, I discovered how tasty they were.

My best friend Bishoshi, two years older than I, lived in the brick house next to ours. Her mother Marthe was a midwife who worked in the clinic with my father. I admired Bishoshi and spent most of my time with her. So when she offered me batter-fried milanga in her home, I enjoyed it without a qualm.

In October, and again in March, flocks of birds made shifting patterns across Kalambi’s sky. When they landed in the village trees, I saw that they were drab little birds – but I liked them. Decades later, in Europe, I recognized my small friends and realized they had visited us in Africa to escape their wintry homelands. I couldn’t blame them.

There was no lack of warmth in our steamy world. We would look out first thing in the morning to see nothing but thick white mist, which would disperse a couple hours later to reveal the dripping rainforest surrounding the village. There were regal palms and graceful bamboo, magenta bougainvillea, and lush undergrowth. Small yellow stars dotted the grass along the jungle’s edge. Brilliant butterflies flitted over these flowers or landed on the track to suck moisture from the mud. The place looked like paradise.

It was a dangerous paradise, however. As well as gorgeous blossoms, there were barbed thorns, stinging insects, and a bush that caused a painful, itchy rash if you accidentally brushed its leaves. Worse, any verdant vine or fern could hide a deadly snake. The villagers stored herbs to treat certain kinds of snakebite, but they warned that there was no remedy for others. We occasionally saw cobras, but most common were green mambas, slithering up tree trunks or draped in the branches.

One morning when I was eleven, I opened the outhouse door – and screamed. But I couldn’t move a muscle. An eight-foot black mamba was coiled on the cool earth floor. This species is actually gray or brown, but the inside of its mouth, revealed when it gives its warning hiss, is a threatening black.

Hearing my scream, my father’s brother Ezra – visiting from Rwanda – came running with a hoe and killed the snake. He and I were incredibly lucky. Feared for both their speed and the potency of their venom, black mambas kill hundreds of people in the Congo every year. Much later, though, I couldn’t help wondering: Would Ezra have preferred death by snakebite to the death he suffered at the hands of fellow human beings?

Because of the snakes, we children never climbed trees here as we had in Burundi, nor were we allowed to explore the mysterious jungle, from which we heard raucous birdcalls by day and eerie cries at night. So, to our disappointment, we could never see the monkeys at play in the treetops. One day, however, a man showed us the paw of a gorilla he had killed deep in the forest. I shuddered. The powerful paw was bigger than the man’s hand.

Like other village children, my brothers and I herded goats, collected firewood, fetched water, and tended our family crops. Phocas and Clement cleared brush with machetes, while I cultivated with a heavy hoe or pulled weeds by hand. Our father’s young sister Priscilla, who lived with us at the time, often helped.

Reaching the end of a cassava row one day, I was startled when a thick, mottled creeper – spiraled around a bamboo trunk at the field’s edge – began to slide. Glancing up, I met the glittering eyes of a python. I knew they killed by encircling their prey, tightening their muscular bodies till its bones cracked. Dropping my hoe, I fled the field.

Next day, on the way to our plot I burst out, “Let’s ask God to protect us!” Priscilla said a prayer, and that day we were spared the sight of snakes.

The four youngest children in our family were born in Kalambi, and our mother depended on my help at home. Our biggest task was processing cassava. With long knives, we peeled the roots and placed them, tied in cloth, into the creek to soften – and to get rid of their bitter flavor. Three days later, we took the roots from the water and laid them in the sun. When they were dry, we pounded them into flour, which we stirred into boiling water. The result was ugari, a filling starch that we served with fish sauce or vegetables.

I helped clean the house, hauled water, ran errands for my father, and looked after Fidel – my eight-years-younger brother – carrying him everywhere on my hip or on my back. A tall man now, Fidel likes to tease me, saying he’s the reason I’m so short.

When we weren’t helping our mothers, we girls contented ourselves playing hopscotch and other games in the village street. Needing some way to cool off, we often swam in the fish ponds – although this was forbidden, and the mud smelled foul – or waded and splashed in the creek.

Before returning home from an afternoon at the creek, Bishoshi and I would catch crabs for our mothers to cook, shrieking with laughter if one of us was careless enough to get pinched. We never spared a thought for the black stones under which the crabs hid. Only years later did prospectors discover our streambed rocks, which turned out to be valuable columbite, coveted for manufacture of electronic products.

In 1977, when I was twelve, Papa took Phocas, Clement, and me to visit his own parents in Rwanda. We had never met our grandfather, Ephraim. But we knew our grandmother, Damaris, because she had come to spend time with our family in Kalambi. I admired Tateh Damaris when I learned of the risk she had taken to visit us in the Congo; as a Tutsi, she might not have been allowed back into Rwanda.

Now the time had come to see her again and to meet Tateh Ephraim. I was thrilled. I would see the mighty Lake Kivu – thirty miles across at its widest, and fifty-six miles long – that Mama was always reminiscing about. And I would finally experience Rwanda, land of my ancestors, country of a thousand hills.

The first thing I noticed, on arrival in my grandparents’ village, was the red earth, so different from Kalambi’s black soil. Like us, our grandparents grew cassava, sorghum, coffee, soy beans, potatoes, and yams on their farm. But they also raised fruit near their house: banana, papaya, guava, and pineapple. They kept livestock too. They were quite wealthy.

Tateh Damaris rose early to prepare breakfast for her family and for the farm hands. During our month’s stay, I helped her tidy the house, grounds, livestock paddock, and paths. Next we would spread rushes on the floor, then feed the hens and gather their eggs. I walked the pastureland, collecting cakes of dry cow dung for fuel. In a large flat basket, I collected fresh dung as well, which Tateh Damaris and I plastered on the house walls as weatherproofing.

Phocas, Clement, and I revered Tateh Ephraim; after all, he was Papa’s father. A deep thinker, he enjoyed sharing his wisdom through maxims, jokes, and proverbs. “Do evil when good no longer exists on the earth,” he would tell us. We knew he meant: Do only good.

During the day, our grandfather tended his cattle, sheep, and goats. In the evening, he herded them into their enclosure, pulling thorny branches across its opening as protection from predators.

Seeing a mass of fish in a large crock one day, I happily anticipated a fish fry, such as we occasionally enjoyed in Kalambi. To my shock, however, Tateh Ephraim started hoeing the fish into the ground in his banana grove. His explanation – that fish made good fertilizer – startled me, but I never doubted him. His crops were excellent.

Although Tateh Ephraim had never been to school, he had taught himself to read. When his day’s work was done, he put on the pair of glasses Papa had sent him, relaxed into his comfortable chair, and read his Bible. One evening he called me to his side. “Scripture says hard times will come over the earth in the last days, my child,” he said. “People will change their ways for the worse.”

Another time he remarked, “When I read the Bible in Kinyarwanda, I understand it best. Kinyarwanda is the most beautiful language in the world!” I avoided Clement’s eye, afraid we might burst out laughing. Kinyarwanda was the only language our grandfather knew.

Sundays we joined our grandparents on their forty-five minute walk to church in Karengera. Tateh Damaris, a woman of style, wore an elegant mushanana. Usually kept for rare celebrations, this traditional garment is tied at one shoulder and falls in graceful folds to the ankle. Along our way, we had to traverse some rickety planks over a swirling creek. While I hesitated, my dignified grandmother traipsed confidently across in her high heels. I felt proud to see how respectfully my grandparents were greeted by everyone we met along the way – Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa.