The other side of the road. And some heavy academics.

(I wrote this while in Uganda but couldn’t post it!)

I'm breathing out a huge sigh of relief.  I hadn't realized that I'd been holding my breath but here in Uganda, I'm welcoming the calmness, the openness, the pureness, in comparison to the vastly different Kigali.  We'll be gone from our home base in Kigali for a total of two weeks to visit Rwanda's northern neighbor, Uganda.  We crossed the border on foot—border patrol made us exit the bus and we all climbed over the haphazardly crooked gate that apparently signified a switch in a nations.  When we got back on the bus and were bumping over Uganda's rough roads of jagged asphalt, we suddenly realized that the bus had crossed to the other side of the road.  (They drive on the left here, just like their colonizer, England.)  But it's really more than just switching sides of the road; Uganda incredibly different.

If Rwanda is like a wrinkled tablecloth someone has carelessly balled up in the center of the table—crowded, hilly, squished—Uganda is like someone took the land and flattened it neatly out, with only a stray wrinkle here and there.  The stress on the land in Rwanda is noticeable: on every of Rwanda's one thousand hills, some ambitious—or desperate—farmer is trying to cultivate a slanted portion of the hill to sustain his family and attempt to make a living.  It's one big, competitive scramble.  Here in Uganda, the far-reaching flatness occasionally resembles Indiana's waving cornfields, and the land has none of the cramped, uneasiness that permeates Vermont-sized Rwanda.  Here it strangely feels more “African,” as problematic as that is.  The tall trees sprinkled across a savanna, the untouched beauty of rolling hills, the periodic sighting of some exotic bird.  Even the towns—yes, they are more chaotic than carefully planned Kigali—but they feel more “real.”  They're dirty and loud and unorganized.  They're overcrowded, dirt poor, and underdeveloped.  Perhaps it feels more “real” because Uganda seems to fit my stereotypical image of Africa more than heavily westernized Kigali.  But it could be more than that.

We've been studying the Rwandan government's development plan quite thoroughly over the past few weeks, since clearly it has major implications for the country's reconciliation and peace process.  Essentially, Kigali is Rwanda's hub.  The government has a lofty plan to entirely reorganize the capital city by 2020, a plan known as Vision 2020.  The idea is to modernize, become more efficient, develop a  private sector competitive enough to attract many foreign investors, and ease into a competitive, market-based economy.  As a result, Kigali itself now looks phenomenal.  The streets are cleaned everyday, the city is well-lit, street vendors have been banned to make the city appear less cluttered, high rise buildings are beginning to sprout from the city's center, even neighborhoods are being reorganized to eliminate crumbling houses and make basic services (like health care, education, and electricity) more accessible.  According to an official who works at the Rwanda Development Board, Rwanda is considered the 4^th easiest place to do business in the world and is ranked the most competitive place in East Africa.  In terms of development, Rwanda appears to be excelling.

This development trajectory was paramount to the post-genocide government's plan to rebuild the devastated country.  But is development really the only measure of success?  The only measure of reconciliation and moving forward?  I don't think so.  This was a very political choice on the part of the Tutsi-dominated RPF government who has kept the same leader, the seemingly well-loved Paul Kagame, in power since the genocide's end—almost two decades.  In the eyes of many, particularly the international community, the RPF's military sweep through the country in 1994 is credited to have stopped the genocide.  This is undoubtedly true—as the RPF moved south, they expanded the liberated area to include more and more traumatized Tutsi survivors in their safety zone and scattered the genocidaires into the Congo.  The genocidal killings stopped—at least in Rwanda.  The fleeing extremist Hutus, who perpetrated the genocide in Rwanda, then continued wrecking havoc in their exile: the mess that is eastern Congo (another story for another blog). 

This is the accepted narrative.  Because of the guilt that the international community feels for doing nothing to stop the genocide, they accept this narrative and appear to wholeheartedly support the man and the army who ended the killings (Kagame and the RPF).  The RPF government has promoted itself as an exemplary model of a post-conflict country by rapidly implementing a development plan that is strikingly familiar to the US's own model, hence receiving the stamp of US—and other western countries'—approval.

That's essentially what we've been learning.  It's hard not to be biased.  But from the majority of lecturers—government officials, university professors, government-approved NGOs—it's been the same story.  And really, it's entirely convincing.  Development IS incredibly important in a post-conflict country and Rwanda is seriously rocking it—the numbers show it.

But, FASCINATINGLY there's another side:

This past week, we visited a refugee settlement in southern Uganda called Nakivale.  The camp itself, being my first refugee camp, was powerful.  It took us about 2.5 hours on a rough, bumpy, poorly-maintained road to finally reach the camp, a journey that if the roads has been decent, would've only taken about 45 minutes.  The camp is not actually a camp but a settlement, the difference being that in settlements, refugees receive a little land to cultivate in order to feed their families and try to make a living.  This settlement houses over 70,000 refugees from all over, although they mostly come from Congo, Somalia, and Rwanda.  We spoke first with the camp director and then walked around in small groups with a local guide who spoke English.  Blocks of houses cluster together into neighborhoods whose names mirror the home countries of their inhabitants: New Congo, Kigali, Somaliland, etc.  The homes stand shakily, with basic mud walls and roofs of UN-provided tarps piled with rocks and branches to keep from blowing off.  Every person we passed looked up at us and smiled or waved; they were ecstatic about our presence.  While the guide spoke with us and pointed out various things along the way, we trailed a huge line of grinning children, all wanting high-fives and to hold our hands.  One little girl even got so excited about holding my friend's hand that she started to pee her pants—yet kept grinning and holding this muzungu's hand while she made little pee footsteps in the dirt behind her.  So our group of five that began the tour became probably 25 by the end.

The settlement houses Rwandan refugees who fled over the course of the years and for various reasons.  However, some general trends emerged, after speaking with residents and observing.  Most of them are Hutu.  Some of them fled Rwanda because they are perpetrators of the genocide and don't want to be jailed.  Some don't have homes to return to since other displaced refugees within Rwanda had moved into them.  And some fled Rwanda out of fear for the RPF, fear of speaking out against the government, fear of being Hutu and hence being labeled either as opposition or as genocidaire. 

And this is a government that is heralded by western countries as being a model for developing countries, an example for other post-conflict nations.  Yet their repressive tactics of silencing opposing voices—hidden under the guise of the RPF government being “genocide-stoppers,” of implementing an impressive western development plan, and of promoting the “necessary” stability of keeping one leader in power in a post-conflict nation—are keeping fearful refugees from returning.

An author we've been reading, named Mamdani, can articulate this much better than I can, but essentially, the RPF regime has developed very distinct categories of people.  Their official stance is that political privilege should never be based on ethnicity and the labels of Hutu and Tutsi should be erased from political and social spheres.  They favor the implementation of a national identity (everyone is a Rwandan, first and foremost) rather than an ethnic one.  However, Mamdani argues that the RPF separates Rwandan citizens into political categories that actually require a particular ethnic identity.  In post-genocide Rwanda, there are 5 groups of people: returnees (those who returned when the genocide ended, considered to be only Tutsi), refugees (those who still remain outside of Rwanda, considered only Hutu), victims (considered only Tutsi), survivors (only Tutsi), and perpetrators (only Hutu).  The assumption is that all Tutsis are victims and all Hutus, guilty by association, should be blamed for the genocide.  So this idea of a national identity may actually be a very specific tactic on the part of the RPF to maintain their hold on power and suppress the majority group, the Hutus.  It definitely makes one think.  More later.

(I'm not sure all of that made sense to anyone but myself.  But there's a glimpse into my head!)