Читать книгу Witboy in Africa - Deon Maas - Страница 6

1	GUERILLAS IN THE MIST Rwanda, 1998

I WAS STANDING IN the international terminal at the Johannesburg airport surrounded by a mountain of sound equipment. Its joint capacity could deafen a whole stadium of people for days. Despite the air-conditioning the guys carrying the equipment were sweating.

I was also sweating, but it wasn’t to do with physical exhaustion. This was my first trip into Darkest Africa. A product of white suburbia, I had been warned against “die Swart Gevaar” my entire life. Now I was walking into the lion’s den, much like Daniel. The only difference was that it was not my religious conviction that nudged me into the lion’s den, but a warped sense of adventure. I was doing it entirely voluntarily.

While the guys were still bringing in more stuff, it was my job to charm the cute young lady behind the counter, because we were in for an excess baggage fine. I had R10 000 cash in my pocket to sort out any problems, but as our whole trip lay ahead I had to keep the excess as low as possible.

The sticky, sweaty feeling I was experiencing wasn’t only due to my uncertainty about my first visit north of the Limpopo. The welfare of more than a dozen people weighed heavily on me. Well, actually not people, musicians. Musicians are a special subspecies. They lose passports, miss flights, get drunk and end up in people’s beds without knowing where the beds are. The cash might not last long.

It all started a few weeks ago. When my bosses at Gallo asked who would be interested in managing Lucky Dube’s Rwandan tour I was the one who waved my arm in the air frantically like a teacher’s pet. It was four years since the genocide in Rwanda and we had been a Rainbow Nation for four years. At that time Africa was still a fairly dark place for the average South African – especially if you were white.

Well, I thought, at least no one would confuse me with a Hutu or a Tutsi if anything did go wrong.

None of my black colleagues even considered going. The entire week before I left everyone at the office was extremely friendly to me. I had the distinct impression they thought they might not see me again. And the evening before our departure they even threw me a farewell bash.

My mother was terribly upset. The “but what are you going to do there, my child?” and the “why would you even consider going there?” questions were never ending. I never told her that I volunteered to go.

It’s difficult travelling in Africa when your skin is white. The chances are slim that you’ll be taken for a local and even if you are one, you’ll still stand out. This means you’ll be the constant target of beggars, curio salesmen, or anyone who sees you as a possible source of income. The reasoning is very basic: you are white, therefore you have money.

If you visit a bar on your own, your cell phone will inevitably be admired within minutes. Weird, but this is a favourite pick-up line in places like this. Numerous women (or rather girls) will sleep with you in exchange for a few dollars, an airline ticket out of the country or sometimes just for the chance to be seen with you.

I’m not into that kind of thing, but I’m the exception. One of the worst images in Africa is of a fat, perspiring Scot, Swede or other sinner with a pathetic hairstyle accompanied by three beautiful, clever back women who hang on to his every word. You just know he’d never get so lucky back home. And while he gets sloshed, the girls work up courage for the bedroom escapades. This happens everywhere and far too often.

Travelling becomes even more daunting when you are white, and just an ordinary tourist. Then you become the target for every single person sporting a uniform – the tweedledees and tweedledums of the bureaucracy. The expectation is that you will make some kind of donation towards their salary, funeral policy or their children’s school fund. Sometimes Mr Uniform is thirsty and only wants a Coke or a cigarette. But you will fork out something. Paying up is the name of the African travelling game.

When you’re travelling with someone like Lucky Dube, a total superstar in Africa, things change pretty quickly. You hang out with ministers. Your bodyguard is usually a senior security policeman – the kind you avoid like the plague when you’re an ordinary tourist. And best of all, you get a safe pass letter, signed by someone high up in the hierarchy, which guarantees your safety in any tricky situation. You are actually hanging out with the baddies, but what the heck, if it makes you safe, so be it.

In Africa (as in most of the world) people are only nice until they get power or money. Then they turn into power crazed megalomaniacs whose only mission in life is to get more power and money. In this elite group everyone takes good care of each other, presidents included, because they are all in the same boat: If someone rocks the boat they’ll all have to swim for their lives.

Rwanda is no exception and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case when the Belgians were in power. When people say Africa is not for sissies, they really mean Rwanda. This place is hardcore. Don’t be seduced by all the greenery – it harbours a vicious cruelty that is imbedded in the country’s psyche.

At the time of the last genocide most Rwandans poured scorn on political correctness. Muslims were called “penguins” to their face. Hutus knew they were “ugly and stupid”, and only good for looking after cattle because that’s what they had been told for centuries. If you don’t believe me, read the newspapers of that time. You’ll find it there in black and white, and we all know newspapers don’t lie …

Thanks to the Belgians, ethnic division is now part of the country’s genetics. Every coloniser in Africa was guilty of human rights violations and theft of precious resources. The Belgians, however, deserve special mention for cruelty and exploitation. Belgium never even officially colonised the Congo. In 1885 King Leopold simply claimed the country as his private property where he could do as he pleased. The state financed the infrastructure and the king pocketed the profits.

King Leopold’s exploits in the Congo are infamous. His philosophy was to scare people into working harder to increase his own wealth. At that time rubber was an expensive and sought-after product in Europe and in the process of extracting it in the forests of the Congo King Leopold’s henchmen murdered more than 10 million Congolese. People’s head and hands were cut off and the heads displayed on poles as a barbaric warning – all in the name of rubber.

During King Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo, neighbouring Rwanda was under Belgian control. The country had very few natural resources and this was before the days when the wild gorillas attracted international tourists. Even though the Belgian government couldn’t make the same kind of money from Rwanda that King Leopold made out of the Congo, they certainly used his tried and tested methods to increase production. Their technique to motivate workers was to give them eight lashes with a cane before work.

But the Belgian’s special legacy to the Rwandese was ethnic hatred. The area’s original inhabitants were the Twa pygmies who were not and to this day are not regarded as people by many Rwandese. In some remote parts of the country it was quite acceptable to serve them up for dinner. At least that’s what was alleged in a newspaper. Today they form only 1% of the total population.

The first time I mentioned the Twa in Rwandese company the conversation stopped immediately and everybody burst out laughing. Why a mzungu would be interested in these baboons boggled their minds. I once saw a Twa man in a Rwandan village, but children beat him with sticks because he had the audacity to show his face in town. He was trying to get to the local clinic.

The Hutus and the Tutsis are the two largest ethnic groups in Rwanda. The Hutus look like Idi Amin and represent 84% of the population. The Tutsis represent 15% of the population and look like models. They are tall and thin with narrow noses and a light skin. The Belgians decided that the Tutsis were clever and the Hutus stupid. In their infinite wisdom they introduced a dompas system with which to indicate every person’s ethnicity.

And to make absolutely sure that the two groups would never live in peace again, they decided that only the Tutsis could own land, and that the Hutus had to work for them. To top it off, a law was passed that only allowed Tutsis to receive any form of education. Not only were the Hutus stupid and ugly, but were now rendered illiterate. Their laws have a certain resonance with the ideologies of apartheid South Africa.

The Hutus were understandably more than a little peeved with the situation and in 1959 the first genocide took place. There were 100 000 deaths. The Tutsi king and about 200 000 of his followers had to flee the country and most of them ended up in Uganda. Among them was Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda.

When the Belgians decided to leave in 1962 they had to decide who would be granted power. The Tutsis were educated and had started to think independently. The Belgians did not think this was a good idea and so put the Hutus in power. In this way, the elderly white men of Europe argued, they could still control Rwanda from a distance. Suddenly the cow herders were in a position of power and the festering conflict, which was suppressed for centuries, erupted with unprecedented hatred.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s it was legal for a Hutu to murder a Tutsi with no consequences for the murderer. Tutsis were called inyenzi’s (cockroaches).

In 1963 there was another genocide and thousands of Tutsis were murdered. As the victims were black and there was no international media to carry the news to the outside world, no one actually counted the bodies. However, it has since been described as the biggest genocide since the Holocaust.

By 1974 the Hutus were resenting the fact that there were still so many Tutsis in professional positions, especially in medicine, academics and education. They were all forced to resign … and again there was a massacre.

This was the country to which we were heading to stage a pop concert – a country suffering from permanent post traumatic stress syndrome, not fully recovered from its nightmares of four years ago.

Music is cunningly used by many a despot to calm the masses. It wasn’t Lucky’s first invitation to a country with extraordinary problems. His passport also bore the stamps of Sierra Leone and Liberia.

The airport in Kigali, with the imaginative name of Kigali International Airport, must have been designed in the seventies by a depressed architect. We arrived at a drab building with two entrances, one marked Arrivée/Arrival and the other VIP Arrivée/Arrival. There was little or no control over people’s movements. The tarmac was like the local athletics track where eager television teams and radio and newspaper journalists dodged aircraft wings and jockeyed for first place to record the arrival of Africa’s biggest superstar. Kigali International Airport is clearly not frequented by loads of celebs.

Lucky entered the airport via the VIP Arrivée, while the rest of us mere mortals used the Arrivée entrance. In a country where one’s social status is the be all and end all, the news that you’re nobody is not conveyed very subtly. There was only one important person on this occasion and even the men in black wearing black sunglasses to patrol the interior of the airport hardly gave our impressive Rwandan visas with their gorilla holograms a second glance.

The weather was surprisingly mild and the airport almost empty. The dejected immigration and customs officials soon realised this was not a day to cash in. Any false move made by them would mean the end of the concert. This was clearly set out in the contract with the promoter and it was his duty to see to it that everything went smoothly – otherwise his investment would fly back without laying the proverbial golden egg. Lucky had also insisted that the concert fee be deposited into his bank account before he packed his suitcases. It was a question of once bitten, twice shy …

Kigali has 851 024 residents. On the way from the airport to the Windsor Umubano Hotel we saw 851 023 of them. As part of the marketing for the concert the promoter, Mister Vincent de Gaulle (don’t forget the all important “Mister”), decided to take us on a short trip. We drove through the whole of Kigali while thousands of people, sometimes up to a hundred deep in places, lined the sides of the road to cheer Lucky. He rode in splendid isolation in a massive 4x4 – not unlike the pope, minus the bullet-proof glass. The crowds threw branches in front of his vehicle and went seriously ballistic.

The rest of the group, all twelve of us, travelled in a ten-seater bus called a matatu. The 4x4 kicked up a lot of dust and we had to follow shortly behind it as people were stepping onto the road to get a better look at Lucky who was standing up, waving from the open sunroof.

The matatu carrying us was a Japanese import since in Japan all vehicles have to be written off after five years in service. An entire economy has been built throughout Africa around these imports. Once, a long, long time ago, the bus might have been five years old in Japan, but its African vacation had been going on for several years. The bus still carried Japanese lettering on its sides. No effort had been made to Rwandanise it and even the Rwandan number plate was rather scruffily hooked over the original Japanese one.

Sitting squashed between the window and one of Lucky’s massively proportioned background singers, I wondered how much more I’d have to sacrifice for other people's happiness on this trip. Staring out at the sea of faces outside I noticed that the citizens of Kigali were clothed in tatters. The signs of urban poverty were all around me: dilapidated houses with clay walls and rusted corrugated iron roofs, thin dogs and children with swollen bellies. It was fascinating to see how Lucky brought happy smiles to their gaunt faces, and how their expressions changed to sheer amazement the moment they saw my white face squashed against the window. Hippies and missionaries travelled in the back of a bus, not your average whitey.

But at long last I was where I wanted to be. Smack-dab in the middle of Africa, busy fulfilling a childhood dream of adventure. Viva Mandela, viva!

For the next week I answered every incoming call on my cell with: “I’m in Rwanda right now, can this wait until I come back?” I enjoyed every moment of saying that sentence over and over again and people’s reactions even more. I was a fearless adventurer and an intrepid pioneer. I was seeing and experiencing things that my friends, acquaintances and colleagues could only dream about. I finally realised what I wanted out of life – to travel as far and wide as possible.

This was before I knew the history of the hotel where we stayed. The Windsor Umubano Hotel, complete with an ornate crown on the W, was audacious enough to call itself “Kigali’s resort within the city”. This simply meant that there was a swimming pool. The hotel was situated on one of the many hills on which Kigali is built and surrounded by. All the important people lived on the hills of Kigali. This included the state buildings. The views are of the abject poverty in the valleys below. This conveyed the essence of the country’s psyche.

When I entered the hotel, I had a vision of what it must have looked like thirty years ago. Men in suits and ladies in glittering gowns attending a ball while waiters serving delicacies prepared by French chefs moved unobtrusively between groups of guests. In the background local musicians played live music, and captains of industry had muted business discussions. But I was greeted by piped pan flute music in a hotel that tried its damndest, but could not even serve a decent hamburger.

The archaic accounting system of the restaurant meant that every beer had to be registered by two elderly gents in bowties who sat behind a wooden table in a corner. They issued a completed form written out in neat calligraphy-like handwriting on a hotel letterhead. The waiter then took the form to the barman who issued the beer and signed the form. But before the beer could be brought to you the signed form first had to be delivered back to the two bean counters – dare I call them beer counters? The beer was never cold and at the end of the evening you had to wait for half an hour for your account because everything had to be added up, signed off by the manager and finally handed to you.

In the hotel a Primus, one of the excellent local beers, cost R20. On the sidewalk in front of the hotel it went for R2. On top of that you were offered a wooden chair from where you could listen to local music and watch the afternoon traffic go by. Needless to say, the sidewalk became my favourite spot. Of course the more beers I polished, the more blurred the passing traffic became. I enjoyed hanging out with the local guys and we tried to exchange stories in broken English while the hotel’s security guard stood as close to me as possible but without leaving the safe enclosure of the hotel. English may be the third most popular language in Rwanda following Kinyarwanda and French, but it is a very slow third.

On several occasions the guard warned me against the “bad people” I was hanging out with. It took me a while to realise he was referring to the Hutus. Physically I could not see a difference between him and the “bad people”. The words “bad people”, I soon realised, was the full extent of his command of the Queen’s English. When I entered the hotel just after nightfall, I had to thump Kigali’s dust out of my clothes while the guard who followed me shook his head and muttered under his breath. I was sure he complained bitterly to his wife every night. The mad mzungu who hung out with the “bad people” will surely feature in his memoirs.

In theory there was nothing wrong with the hotel. The lift was in working order, the toilets flushed and we even had hot water. But even as a fancy hotel in Africa it was still an anomaly. It was extremely clean and everyone knew their place. But the clinical aura bothered me and it was only when I found out more about the hotel’s history that I understood why.

The thing is, the Windsor Umubano Hotel had to be cleansed from all the ghosts of 1994. They had to get rid of the smell of fear – from people who did not know whether they would survive to see another day. People who hoped against all hope that the international community would intervene and save their lives. Bill Clinton, back in charge after trying to cover up his liaison with Monica Lewinsky by the fateful invasion of Somalia, was the man who prevented an intervention.

The USA’s stubborn refusal to declare the events in Rwanda a genocide meant that the United Nations could not intervene. This, and the fact that news teams from all over the world were concentrated in South Africa for the 1994 election meant that the 100 days it took to murder about 800 000 people in Rwanda went by almost unnoticed.

At that time the hotel was a hiding place for hundreds of refugees and was protected by a small number of UN troops stationed in the city. Some people stayed in the hotel and others slept in the garden or next to the swimming pool. But when the UN troops were withdrawn on short notice, Hutu murderers wasted no time in descending on the hotel and killing the refugees.

This was why I had such a feeling that the hotel felt clinical. They’d had to wash away and paint over the past to soften the desperate voices of the dead. At the time of our visit the hotel wasn’t fully operational. Some floors still had to be repaired. The floor that I stayed on had only one side open – overlooking the swimming pool. One night I opened the door to one of the rooms that was being refurbished. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see. Bullet holes in the walls? Blood on the walls? There was nothing. And when I stood in the dark room with the door closed, there was only silence. The past neatly covered with plaster so that it would not affect tourism.

Outside the hotel it was another kettle of fish. You did not have to search long and hard for stories about the genocide. It was the first item on the agenda. The Tutsis who arranged our day trips made sure of that. Have your breakfast, drink your coffee, get into the matatu and let’s go look at skeletons. On the third visit to a scene related to the genocide I put my foot down. Enough was enough.

Some of the bones were still in mounds and when they removed the tarpaulins the crows flew out from underneath. Thousands of skulls made a gross exhibition on wooden shelves. Of course the impact of thousands of skulls was much bigger than the piles of bones. The rest of the bones were buried in mass graves. What happened to respect for the dead? Or was it their fate to serve as grim reminders of what happened for the rest of time?

On each tour I was given a very simplistic explanation of what happened and why. It was explained to me very slowly, as if I was a school child. The moment I started probing deeper, they explained that things aren’t always what they seem. That you had to live there to understand how things worked. A little like a white South African at a dinner party in an overseas country in the 1980s.

But enough of death and philosophy. I was here to rock and roll – or at least to reggae. I was on the prowl for a party.

And prowl I did, but I sadly discovered that no amount of alcohol or disco lights could give Kigali a nightlife.

Denis, the Belgian UN representative, warned me not to expect too much. He invited me to lunch at his house in one of Kigali’s best neighbourhoods, where all the diplomats lived. I hoped he would give me the names of a few interesting bars, but he wasn’t of much use and on top of that the meal was a bland affair. It soon became clear that he had a hidden agenda: He wanted to meet Lucky. And after I arranged the meeting he never talked to me again.

As it became darker it also became quieter in Kigali. This was already a bad sign. Irrespective of how poor or backward any African capital city is you will always find a club that had its heyday in the late 1970s or early 1980s, but was still the life and soul of the party. It always had a pool table, a sound system that was turned up much higher than it could handle, prostitutes, and definitely Johnny Walker Black – a status drink that proved that your expensive clothes did not mean you had an empty wallet. This was the sure-fire way to distinguish the “Big Boys”, as they are referred to all over the continent, from the small fry.

But in Kigali the party never started. Even the standard home shebeen kind of thing was missing here. Well, maybe not missing, but it closed very early and at first I suspected that there might be a curfew. When I saw small groups of people who hung around after sunset to enjoy a beer I soon realised that they might not be the kind of drinking companions who would do my health any good – safe pass letter or not. I don’t think many of the local residents wanted to hang out with them either. The city was dead after sunset, because it was actually dangerous to be outside and people still lived in fear. Also, the police were not necessarily one’s friends.

For two nights I continued my search for the nightlife with a driver who did not share my sense of adventure and excitement. The hotel itself did not offer much in the way of action and the South African musicians were, well, musos. They were travel weary and weren’t interested in their surroundings. Then it hit me: in light of the lack of entertainment, I had to create my own. My grandmother always said that the devil finds work for idle hands and I’m a good example of this. Boredom always makes me get up to mischief.

One afternoon, as a result of overwhelming tedium, I took two street children to lunch at the grand Windsor Umubano Hotel. It was a most enlightening social experiment, which I undertook for purely academic reasons. The guard tried to prevent my guests from entering the hotel and the waiter refused to serve them, but I insisted, ignoring the icy atmosphere that ensued. I argued that other people were allowed to bring prostitutes to the hotel as guests and no one had a problem with that. I also demanded that we be seated at a table in the centre of the restaurant instead of one in the corner that the waiter recommended.

The restaurant wasn’t full, but my fellow diners, businessmen with their expensive watches and brand new cell phones who only returned from self-imposed exile in Belgium after the genocide, were clearly not impressed with the company in which they found themselves.

The waiter addressed the two boys in Kinyarwanda and from his tone of voice I gathered that his remarks weren’t complimentary. My guess was that the two boys were aged between eight and ten but they didn’t take much notice of him. Suddenly they were in a position of power and no one could take it away from them. They knew I would protect them and they gave the waiter hell.

After a veritable feast of hamburgers and many Fantas some of our musicians brought their djembes and started playing their drums in the restaurant while the street children taught them Rwandese folk songs. By this time even the waiter’s attitude began to change and when his manager had to leave for a few minutes he joined in the singing and showed us a few dance steps. For the first time there was a smile on his face, but it did not reach his eyes. They were still dead, hidden behind a wall around his memories.

Two hours later I accompanied the children to the hotel’s exit. In the few days I’d been there I had seen how disobedient children were hit with rubber sticks. It was the norm and I wanted to prevent my new friends’ day from ending badly. As we walked out the waiter breathlessly caught up with us and said something to the children in Kinyarwanda. This time there were smiles on their faces while he good-naturedly rubbed their heads.

The children walked around the block to the back of the hotel where the waiter gave each of them an enormous bag of food to take home. The image of the two boys walking down the dusty street kicking an empty sardine tin will remain with me forever, their loud and animated discussion of their afternoon adventure punctuated by carefree laughter.

It was at that point that it was decided that I was in need of a bodyguard. To this day I don’t know whether it was at the insistence of the hotel or the promoter. My errant behaviour beyond the safe confines of the hotel fence, as well as inside, started to freak people out. Whether the bodyguard was appointed to protect me from other people or them from me, is open for discussion.

The important people around me did not like all my political questions and the fact that I got along with everyone made them uneasy. The last straw was when I exchanged my dollars for francs on the street and not in the hotel. I got a much better deal outside and it was much more exciting to have a forty-minute negotiation in a backstreet alley. Yes, I was busy creating my own entertainment.

I immediately christened my bodyguard “Brick”. I don’t know what his real name was and frankly I couldn’t care. If Brick were a South African, he would have been a white rugby player who sold second-hand cars or insurance. On Saturday night after rugby games he would have hung out at escort clubs and perhaps dabbled in illegal diamonds now and then. But Brick was a much snappier dresser than his South African equivalent.

Brick

Brick always seemed to know when I’d got up in the morning and shortly after he would knock on my door. He couldn’t speak English and the only French sentence I knew wouldn’t have strengthened our relationship. I forbade him to eat or drink with me. He had to get his own table, but this did not dissuade him: he even stood guard when I went to the toilet. In short, he was a first-class nuisance. He had a good laugh at all the mosquito repellents I brought along and threw them on my bed with contempt, until I told him to put them back where he got them. I soon realised that he was a feared man in the community, because people suddenly gave me a wide berth. He tried hard to act like a tourist guide rather than a policeman but his speciality was not to be too likeable.

Basically I was under hotel arrest. This dawned on me when he made himself comfortable in my hotel room under the pretext that he wanted to be my friend. Brick settled into his new role as my friend and guide by offering me his fourteen-year-old sister as a sex partner. When I strongly declined, he offered his twelve-year-old brother. This was followed by an offer of heroin, a drug that for some reason was easily available and cheap in Kigali. Heroin is a drug that magically transforms the worst situation into something good. I could understand why it was so popular, but I still found it weird.

His final offer was dagga. Now that was the best offer of the entire week.

Before I continue, I have to make a quick remark about my feelings about dagga. Dagga has caused many problems in people’s lives. So have chocolate, alcohol and nicotine. Dagga is a natural plant and the only reason why it has been banned in so many places in the world is because the Americans insisted on this as part of their business agreements with several countries. Dagga is banned in America because nylon manufacturers had to get rid of the hemp plant to create a larger market for their new material.

Too much of anything is bad for you. The same applies to dagga. I look upon dagga like cognac. It’s something I indulge in every now and again and really enjoy it, but I’m not interested in making it a daily habit. I like living in the real world and don’t want to be removed from it constantly. One night, probably when I was stoned, I decided that because dagga comes from the soil of a country it reflects the soul of that country. I know it’s a real stoner philosophy, but that’s what dagga does to you.

It was time to taste the soul of Rwanda. The dagga was dark green, almost black. It left tar on your hands when you touched it. I was arrogant enough to think I was strong enough for it. Against Brick’s wishes I accompanied him when he went out to buy the dagga. Only rock stars allow other people to bring them drugs and I wasn’t a rock star. It also meant that I wasn’t ripped off too much when it came to the price.

The seller was a guy called Richard. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, a pair of fake Ray-Bans and a gold watch that gleamed against his pitch black skin in the afternoon sun. In typical African style it was so loose around his arm that it glided up and down between his wrist and elbow. He clearly enjoyed his own stock and didn’t have a problem smoking while he worked.

The fill was wrapped in a piece of newspaper. It cost 20 cents. Back in my hotel room I rolled a nice fat joint. With the first pull I already knew I was playing out of my league, but by this time I was so entrenched in my role as the arrogant white idiot who thinks Africa can’t get him down, that I ignored my sixth sense. Brick’s complexion also became a shade paler, but he kept his poise. When we finished the joint he left. He knew where to find me. I wasn’t going anywhere.

Before he was out the door, I fell like a stone onto the bed. My body refused to obey my brain’s commands. Ideas flashed through my mind at record speed, but disappeared before they could register. I was in the middle of the fastest edit I had ever seen, filled with split second images, memory flashes and visions. I saw the past, present and future all at once. As a film, it may not necessarily have received critical acclaim.

And that was the good part. Within a few minutes I was in paranoia hell. I took hold of the rest of the dagga and crawled to the bathroom to flush it down the toilet. I could already hear the police coming down the corridor. At any moment they would kick down the door and arrest me. The prospect of spending quality time in a jail cell with mass murderers awaiting trial wasn’t very attractive. In Rwanda, the most macho country in Africa, inmates’ uniforms are pink – probably to discourage them from escaping. No respectable man in Rwanda wants to be seen in pink in public.

I eventually succeeded in flushing the dagga. I had to keep my fist closed and hold it in the bowl while I flushed desperately to get rid of it. I could still hear the police in the corridor coming closer. The only solution was to push the bed in front of the door. In total panic I dragged the mattress from the bed, which was just a spindly frame of pressed wood, and pushed it up against the door. At last I could breathe a little easier. The enemy’s first attack was averted. It was time to safeguard the perimeter further.

The window was next. On a building on the next hill, about 700 or 800 metres away, I could see a sharp-shooter who was ready to shoot me if the police couldn’t break through the door. The only way to cover my view of the swimming pool was to use the mattress, which covered about two thirds of the window. I covered the rest of the window with duct tape – we all know it's bullet-proof.

Although I could still hear the voices in the corridor, I felt safer. The many voices in my head now discussed what I would do once the police burst into the room. There wasn’t any dagga left and thanks to the entire can of deodorant that I sprayed into the air, I was certain they could only accuse me of spraying too much perfume in an enclosed space. Surely that would not be a crime even in such a macho country as Rwanda?

I thought about other incriminating things in my room that could lead to a stint in prison. As my brain continued to work in its uniquely disturbed way I worried that there might be very strict rules about nudity. So I tore up a photograph of my wife in her bikini and then burnt it, just in case someone tried to tape it together again.

Then, thankfully, I passed out. Twelve hours later I woke to someone hammering on my door. It was time for Lucky’s show. After the concert I returned to a hotel room that was all straightened out. Nobody ever said a word.

The night before I left Kigali, Brick came to say goodbye. It wasn’t a friendly farewell. He insisted on some kind of compensation for looking after me so well. It wasn’t a request, it was an order. He chose my most expensive Diesel jersey. Needless to say we never became pen pals.

The sun had just set over Kigali’s soccer stadium. Most of the men in the crowd had taken off their shirts. Lucky’s set went on till well after two o’clock and the audience were dripping with sweat. You could smell the crowd. In front of me 65 000 people sang: “Hey, you, Hutu man; hey, you, Tutsi man, you’ve got to come together as one” on the beat of Lucky’s big hit “Hey, you, Rasta man; hey, you, European …”

Lucky Dube

The concrete stadium looked like a trampoline as thousands of people jumped up and down hands in the air – one inyenzi mass that put their feelers up. People shouted exuberantly as if they needed to get rid of years of frustration. Talk about a wow moment – 65 000 people all doing primal scream therapy. The crowd got what they came for – this was one of Lucky’s best concerts in years. It was impossible to hold back the tears. I looked to my left and saw all the guys from the support team quickly wiping their eyes and hoping that nobody would see them crying.

If only the preceding week had gone as smoothly. There were issues about who had to pay for meals, what sound equipment had to be used and there were problems with our transport. We had to fight for everything and nothing happened as it was supposed to. Everything was an effort. De Gaulle, the promoter, obviously felt that since Lucky and his team had arrived, it was time to begin cutting costs. But Lucky was not to be bullied.

The food and transport issues were sorted out quickly, but when De Gaulle realised that a new sound system had to be imported from Uganda because the only available sound system in Rwanda was insufficient, he became as petulant as a two-year-old child. The sound system arrived on Saturday morning, a few hours before the concert was due to start. It gave Lucky very little time for his sound check. When he arrived at the stadium about 10 000 people had already gained entry, despite clear instructions that Lucky would refuse to do a sound check if there were any people in the stadium. They had arrived early to secure the best spots; it was not as if anybody had a job to go to.

For half an hour I tried to get the small crowd out of the stadium. From the middle of an empty stage I shouted instructions over the microphone, but I was greeted by silence. There was no way they were going to take me seriously. Nobody moved an inch. I’d like to think that the fact that they were French speaking and that I addressed them in English explains why they ignored me. I didn’t even get the sarcastic applause that you’d expect to get in South Africa if you tried the same trick.

After years of managing concerts I knew I was fighting a losing battle. So I discussed our dilemma with the promoter, but in a matter of milliseconds he lost his ability to understand English. I then went to the head of security who merely shrugged in a very French way, rolled his eyes skywards and continued the conversation he was having with someone else. I felt completely helpless. Was there no respect for white people in Africa anymore?

There are two kinds of policemen in Rwanda. One group looked like refugees in their badly fitted green uniforms and no one took them seriously – or at least not until they whacked you over the head for no apparent reason. The other group wore black uniforms, never took off their sunglasses and carried automatic weapons. People avoided them like the plague, nobody even looked at them. They were almost like the Johannesburg Metro Police, only worse. They even smelled like evil.

At first I did not consider approaching them even though they were responsible for security in the back stage area. But finally, at my wits end, I explained the situation to their commander.

He got onto the stage and spoke just two sentences. Within seconds there was a stampede to get out of the stadium. Problem solved. The concert could go ahead.

After less than a week in Rwanda I started to understand how things worked.

In fact, after surviving Rwandese dagga, Brick the Bodyguard and possible death by boredom, I could begin to imagine a future as a modern day Livingstone. I decided that it was not time to go home yet and that I should stay a while longer. I wanted to explore Africa’s most densely populated country. After all my hard work it was time for a holiday.

Upon my arrival in Rwanda I received a letter from the man who was appointed “security chief” for Lucky’s tour. The letter was a safe pass and clearly stated that anyone who even thought of messing with me would be held accountable by the forceful, albeit slightly overworked, Rwandese legal system. I had my own “get out of jail free” card and for once, I felt like a very powerful man.

When the security chief wanted it back a week or two later, I knew it was time to leave. With his dead eyes and face pockmarked by hand granade shrapnel he was no oil painting. He was a secretive ex-secret policeman who didn’t reveal much about his background. A few days later our once jovial relationship took a drastic turn for the worse when in a drunken stupor he almost sent me home in a wooden box …

Back in the good old days Gisenyi’s weather and its lake was a big draw card for rich colonialists and local businessmen who wanted to let off a little steam. Actually, if you were one of the chosen few, things have always been great in Rwanda. This small town in the northwestern part of Rwanda was also the entry point for missionaries, ransackers and other adventurers into the war-torn, anarchistic eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). To Livingstone Maas it sounded like the ideal holiday spot.

Tourist brochures describe Rwanda as the land of a thousand hills. I wouldn’t know if there are exactly a thousand, but there were enough. Kigali itself is situated on a central highland. Any travelling inevitably entails incessant ups and downs and because there are no railway lines, all transport is by road. On top of that, only 9% of the 13 500 kilometres of road in Rwanda is tarred. Mercifully the road I was on was part of the 9%.

Bicycles and heavily laden trucks, unroadworthy buses and pedestrians all competed for a spot on the narrow road that wound its way through the jungle to Gisenyi. And the jungle was fighting a determined battle to take over the road. Most of the time two vehicles could scarcely pass each other. In a situation like this, most reasonable people would slow down to avoid metal scratching against metal, but Rwandese drivers didn’t get that. They drove as fast as possible, hooting at anything smaller than them, and making it the other driver’s problem to avoid carnage.

The range of interesting scratches along the side of the bus attested to the fact that our driver’s life’s mission was to knock down as many cyclists as he could. As the bus did not have a television set, he took it as his personal responsibility to entertain his passengers. He was supposed to, but never hooted when he was about to pass someone on a bicycle. Each time he scraped someone, a few ringleaders in the bus jeered excitedly. I could understand why life expectancy in Rwanda is only 48.

Would I shut my eyes to this irresponsible game or be the outsider who interferes? It didn’t take me long to take out my safe pass and shove it under the driver’s nose. I told him to stop his games. He was surprised, but decided to listen to me. The rest of the passengers didn’t speak to me again. Were they angry with me or afraid of me?

I knew there was only one real city in Rwanda, so I didn’t expect much from Gisenyi. What I found was a shanty town. Some of the streets were tarred and the few shops were all built in the Belgian colonial style of architecture with lean-tos and columns. Some were painted and it was clear that blue was the overwhelmingly favourite colour. Advertisements for Primus beer brightened the otherwise drab buildings. Hundreds of people braved the roads on Chinese motorcycles that swarmed through the streets like demented killer bees.

It was possible to hire someone with an umbrella who would walk with you, providing shade against the harsh sun. You could also rent bicycles with wooden wheels to carry your shopping home. It might have been illegal to exchange money on the streets in Kigali, but here it was done openly through wooden shutters. Tailors advertised their wares next to the road in true African style and colourful French adverts tried to entice would-be shoppers. Children had their fun by mixing up Muslims’ shoes outside the mosque.

Gisenyi was a thoroughfare into the Congo. My first feeling was one of a frontier town in the Wild West. I waited with bated breath for the sheriff to throw a troublemaker out of the bar. As we drove into the town, I involuntary started whistling the theme song of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. For the first time in hours my fellow passengers took notice of me again.

The Izuba Hotel was a big surprise. The lawn, which always looks greener and lusher in the tropics than anywhere else was neatly cut. The garden consisted of a variety of interesting plants, trees and flowers I had never seen before. The swimming pool was big and perfectly blue. From the swimming pool the lake shimmered in the distance like a gem. A layer of mist over the lake made the mountains, a good 100 kilometres away, look like a water-colour painting from a master’s hand.

The hotel, which was in good order, had to have another use than only housing holidaymakers. I discovered my fellow guests were indeed mercenaries, prostitutes and blood diamond traders. There were anti-aircraft guns on the roof, sandbags at the entrance and armed soldiers in all the public spaces of the hotel. They weren’t there for a rowdy party. The Wild West was closer than I thought.

I soon found out how explosive Gisenyi really was when I started a riot on my first visit to the local market. Before I set out on my journey I decided to take a series of photographs of children. I was spellbound by the eyes of the Rwandan children whose gaze was much older than befitted their young faces and bodies. Many of them had marks on their necks caused by blunt hacking-knives. As medical assistance was out of the question during the genocide, the skin grew over the open wound, taking on the appearance of a gutted prawn.

Everywhere I went in Rwanda I asked children whether I could take photographs of them. Now and then a child said no, but in general they granted my request. In Gisenyi it was another story; no one wanted their photo taken. A possible explanation could have been the fact that thousands of Hutus were housed in refugee camps just across the border.[1] Among the refugees were members of the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia who led the genocide. They weren’t refugees in the true sense of the word and were busy regrouping. People feared what might still happen in the near future – and a photograph could be used to identify you.

The rubbish-littered market reflected the town’s economic status. The products were aimed at the impoverished masses and the stalls specialised in cheap Chinese flip-flops and second-hand clothes from Europe. The market was held on a large open piece of ground without any protection against the sun. Pieces of raw meat were covered by a thick crust of flies. It was only after a day or so that someone took me to a storage place where thousands of local art works, carved bone, fetish dolls, witch-doctor goodies, elephant tusks, hippopotamus teeth, leopard skins and gorilla hands were on sale.

At the market I asked a few children whether I could take their photograph, but without success. Then a bashful teenage boy with a wooden bicycle approached me and asked whether I wanted to take his photograph. He was older than the other children I had photographed so far, but it would have been rude to say no. After I took the photo I gave him the equivalent of R2. Within moments another boy was next to him, trying to grab his R2. I was dumbfounded. All of a sudden I was a spectator at a fist fight that quickly escalated into a full-blown wrestling match. Everyone around me began shouting hysterically.

The market, which had been quiet and fairly empty up until then, suddenly swarmed with people. It was as if some animal instinct took over. Nobody knew what the fighting was about, but everyone wanted to be part of it. And I’m not talking about four or five people – from nowhere a group of about 60 people appeared and gathered around us.

The fighting was relentless and as the accidental instigator I felt I had to do something about it, but there was no way that I could try to break up the fight. Then I saw a knife glistening in the sunlight. The situation had become too hardcore for me. Seconds later I heard automatic gunfire as a lorry with soldiers rounded the corner at breakneck speed.

I noticed a movement to my left. A taxi driver opened his door: “Time for you to go,” he said. I did not argue and never returned to the market. The trip to the hotel, which was shorter than a kilometre, cost me 50 dollars.

The hotel was a nice enough place, but as in Kigali there was not much to do there. After the first day the prostitutes realised that I wasn’t a potential client and left me alone. I relaxed next to the swimming pool and paddled about in the glistening lake, accompanied by an armed guard. I initiated conversations with mercenaries and diamond smugglers in the bar.

One night, after a few stiff drinks, one of the diamond dealers showed me the contents of his reinforced Adidas sports bag. It was half-filled with diamonds. The next day I saw him boarding a smoking aircraft in dire need of a service on an untarred runway just outside town. The same night he returned with more diamonds. Several days later I recognised him when he walked through customs and immigration at OR Tambo with the same bag. No one investigated its contents.

For some reason the security chief who issued me the safe pass took a liking to me. Out of the blue he arrived in Gisenyi to see what I was up to. He had an interesting proposal: Would I like to see what the DRC looked like?

Gisenyi’s neighbouring town is Goma. In actual fact, it’s more or less the same town with a passport control point in the centre. At that time, as today, the eastern part of the Congo was a mess. There were so many rebel factions that nobody knew who was on whose side. Sometimes they didn’t even know themselves.

Gisenyi didn’t have any nightlife. Every night I could hear the parties in Goma while I searched for an English channel on television. I was a frustrated party animal. The security chief’s offer was tempting, but I told him that I did not have a visa for the DRC. He said it was not a problem, since Rwanda controlled much of that region, and that he could organise that I go through without one. He wanted to show me exactly how powerful he was.

To spend a day with the gorillas in the mountains would have cost $500, but I couldn’t afford that. What it would cost to see the guerrillas wasn’t clear yet, but at least I was about to find out.

The road that linked Gisenyi and Goma was obstructed by a single cross-bar. The soldiers who manned the control point took a great deal of pleasure in taunting everyone who wanted to go through. Here they played God as they decided who could go through and who could not. Women were pawed and men humiliated to make sure everyone knew who was boss. Strangely enough, it did not seem to bother most people – they accepted that this was how things worked.

The soldiers didn’t exactly look fighting fit, but they were certainly well armed. Each of them carried that all too popular symbol of power in Africa: the AK47. They prodded people into rows with the barrels. Some were called out of the line and taken around the corner for interrogation. The people who stood in the rows did not make eye contact and looked steadfastly at the ground. Even if the person in front or behind them was pushed around, they did not show any reaction.

When I got to the front, the security chief ordered me to leave my passport at the control point. My courage failed me. This was flagrantly disregarding the number one rule of international travel – you should always have your passport on you. “I’m the boss here. You leave passport. We pick up when we come back,” he barked at me. I doubted the wisdom of my decision, but I had to concede even if it was unwillingly.

Goma and Gisenyi may be sister towns, but they certainly had different fathers. A different set of rules applied in each of the two towns. Although no road or river linked Kinshasa and Goma, it was still more Congolese than Rwandese. Goma was a bustling little town. There were cars and taxis and street café’s and pool tables where people drank beer. The roads were in an even worst condition than those in Gisenyi.

The town smelled strange and “dark” in a way, something I attributed to a flight of fancy before I realised there were active volcanoes close by. This also explained the dirty, black layer of silt that covered everything.

Our first stop was a local bar where the security chief shooed people away from a table so that we could sit down. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The table was vintage plastic garden furniture; the walls were unpainted and for drinks you could choose between whisky, gin or cognac. South Africa was represented by Amarula and Castle. The security chief explained loudly and with large gestures how Goma and the countryside surrounding it also belonged to Rwanda. The locals looked at him with disdain, but he didn’t give a damn. He was Mr Big Shot and no one would be able to burst his bubble.

There were huge petrol depots for vehicle and aircraft fuel. The explosion I’d heard a few nights previously at the Izuba Hotel happened at one of the depots. Apparently someone tried to steal fuel and the soldiers shot at him. The thief and the soldiers all died in the explosion. The thief’s burnt body was still lying there, his arms outstretched as if in a final plea to God. Nobody seemed terribly bothered by the corpse and the security chief regarded its presence as a very public warning to others not to steal. “These people …” he said, while he waved his arm with loathing over the town. He definitely wasn’t there to win friends and influence people.

The official reason for the presence of Rwandan troops in the eastern part of the Congo was to prevent another attack by the Interahamwe, whose members had fled to those parts. In theory they were safeguarding the entire area against them. In reality Rwanda was a poor country and the eastern part of the Congo was every capitalist’s dream. Its natural resources were a big draw card for all kinds of entrepreneurs. There were diamonds in abundance and their most important mineral was used to manufacture tin. While the Rwandan troops were busy “safeguarding” that area, they were also busy with large-scale theft to fill their own and their government’s coffers. You could see the signs of prosperity everywhere: gold watches, new cars and shiny shoes that were wiped clean every so often.

A few beers later the security chief decided it was time to move on for lunch. He did his fellow boozers proud – by this time he’d already had half a bottle of whisky. I seriously doubted that we would get a decent meal in this war-torn town. He pushed the nose of his Toyota 4x4 (another standard issue in many parts of Africa) in a westerly direction. The town became a jungle for a few kilometres until high walls unexpectedly rose up next to us. The entrance to the premises was packed with sandbags and there were soldiers carrying Brownings.

We entered a magical world. A beautiful, snow-white colonial house commanded our attention. Kilometres of lawn were neatly mowed and the garden was manicured up to the edge of the lake where luxurious yachts and speedboats worth hundreds of thousands of rand bobbed in the water. The waiters wore waistcoats and their bowties and starched cloths worn across their arms were brand-new. Here you would not see any signs of war, only the people who benefited from it in a big way. I even spotted a Hummer in the parking area.

The lunch menu wasn’t complicated. You could choose between pizza, pizza and pizza at 40 American dollars a piece. The cheapest whisky was Johnny Walker Blue. The pizza crust tasted like bread and the cheese was hardly visible over the half-baked effort. Around me everyone feasted. How else did one spend the spoils of war?

Everyone always tells you that “there is no such a thing as a free lunch” and this valuable lesson I learnt in Goma’s country club. The security chief got drunker and drunker and more people joined us at our table to be introduced to the brave mzungu. The next moment someone got out a television camera. The same television team who had waited for us at the Kigali airport, reappeared in Goma and suddenly wanted to interview me.

Then it struck me what the invitation was really about. The plan was to show that Rwanda had had such success in cleaning up those parts of the Congo that it was safe enough for a white tourist to lunch there. I agreed to the interview, but I talked so much politics and went into such detail about how Rwanda was stealing the Congo’s resources that I doubt it was ever used.

I was ready to go home, or at least back to Gisenyi. I had had enough exposure to Big Boy’s arrogance and people who benefited from other’s misery. The pizza didn’t do much to lift my spirits either and the beers began to affect my better judgement.

But Mr Security Chief, quite peeved that his PR stunt had not gone according to plan, had more up his sleeve. He was intent on showing me exactly how far his influence extended into the Congo and rejected any resistance on my part. He had the keys and I was at his mercy. Armed with another bottle of whisky for the road he drove in a westerly direction and we went deeper into the war zone.

We got through the first roadblock without any trouble. The second one was bad enough to make my urgent need to pee disappear and the third one was the cherry on top. At the third roadblock Mr Security Chief, in his drunken arrogance, got involved in a brawl with a soldier who was even drunker than he was. He insisted on being let through, but the soldier was set on stopping him.

The soldier’s uniform was decorated with freaky fetish symbols that would make any sane person tremble. A split second after he put his AK47 rifle through the open window at the security chief’s side, I was already standing next to the vehicle. My beer pee was back and more pressing than ever. I could not wait for the outcome of their fight; I had to go and walked into the bushes. I had just opened my fly, when I saw a man sleeping in the grass. That was very strange, especially given everything that was going on only a few metres away. I stepped closer to inspect him and then I saw the small, round hole in the centre of his forehead. I nearly wet myself. He would never wake up again.

When I looked around I realised there were seven or eight more bodies. I didn’t hang around for an exact body count or to find out if they were all indeed dead. But I did grasp immediately where the fighting at the roadblock was leading. I ran back to the bakkie to find the security chief standing next to the vehicle with his pistol against the soldier’s head and the soldier’s AK47 against his. I began to plead with them and took the bottle of whisky from the bakkie as a peace offering for the soldier. I had some success in calming everyone down and at last I got the security chief back into the bakkie. At that point I demanded to GO BACK IMMEDIATELY. The details of that particular conversation were lost in the adrenaline of the moment.

I regained consciousness when we entered Goma just after sunset, where the security chief demanded another beer. I could see the lights of my hotel beyond the security post. I left him there and had a huge fight at the control point until my passport was back in my hands. The next morning the security chief – who clearly didn’t sleep a wink – woke me with an incessant knocking on my door. By then the whisky bottle looked like a natural extension of his hand. He wanted his safe pass letter.

A few hours later I was on an aircraft back to South Africa. Nyiragongo, the volcano near Goma erupted some years later. For some reason the lava missed Gisenyi, but flattened Goma. I secretly hoped that a certain security chief was busy drinking there when it happened.

The Rwandan anthem is entitled Rwanda Nziza, which means “Rwanda the beautiful”. In Zulu siza means to help or aid someone. I have always found the similarity between these two words very ironic.

[1] The 1994 genocide was instigated by the Hutus and lasted about four months. It was brought to an end when a Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, defeated the Hutu-controlled army. Because they feared the Tutsis’ revenge thousands of Hutus fled to the Congo. They were interned in refugee camps, which caused another humanitarian crisis.