As I was saying before I was rudely interrupted by janjaweeds, hyenas and other demonic gluttons, November 1964 found us trekking from Bambo, Eastern Congo Kinshasa, towards the Uganda border. Now, there is nothing particularly spectacular about walking a 100-plus-kilometre distance in any rural, African setting. The only snag comes when you have to pass through impenetrable jungle, infested with all kinds of man/woman-eaters. Add to that the fact that the human convoy included children, the disabled as well as old women and men. All of them tired, hungry and thirsty. Hungry because we had not learnt the wonders of the charcoal stove. But maybe again, even our elite had not known that something called a ‘cooking stove’ existed. This was despite the fact that these were men of merisereza, teregali, sengeli and nilo, a nylon shirt. I say this with reverence and awe because a young man dressed in merisereza or teregali trousers, with a sengeli under his nilo shirt, was next to a white man in importance. He owned whatever he wanted and was also the fountain of modern knowledge, and his clothes were the seventh wonder! Those days it was beyond imagination to have clothes that you could wear without pressing them with a flat iron first. This because the moment you washed them, other ordinary clothes looked like a goat had vigorously chewed them, when they got dry. So you had to press them, which was a long process. You had to get hot embers, put them in a stone iron-box that was the weight of a light boulder. Then began the process of pushing the ‘rock’ back and forth!
So, wash-and-wear clothes were the in-thing. They were prized treasure, to be worn by the cream of society, which meant people who had finished all the schools. Only the RR-class could wear them; this class meant the people who could pronounce the French language so well that you only heard ‘rh-rh-rh-rh’, as they pumped the air with their shoulders and made noises with their pursed lips. They just got these clothes washed and the rest was only to wear. No ironing, no putting starch. Before these clothes were discovered, smart dressers had to always press their clothes. Still, there used to be a group of sleek dressers who could not be content with only the creases made by an iron box. Those were not stiff enough, so the sleek dresser used starch to make the creases sharper. The shorts that were really well done with starch could not bend. To the extent that if you wanted to put them on, you stood them on their legs, stepped in them, and simply pulled them up. If you are not getting my drift, imagine the way you put on your boots. You put in your feet and then pull the boots up. Maybe you could not afford the starch that was officially sold in shops. No sweat: all you had to do was to get a solution of cassava flour in water and sprinkle it on the cloth as you pressed it! Our smartalec, of course, will be praying that he will not be made to sit anywhere. Because once the starched shorts bend, they will not stretch out again. I am sure it would not over-stretch your mind to imagine what you would look like walking in shorts that are still in a sitting position! Those are misfortunes that befell many a teacher, in the Rwanda of the early fifties, before the advent of teregali. Now was the time of exile, however, the sixties, and the elite clothes were good for their long life and not needing too much care.
Back to the trek for the border, how could a charcoal stove have helped? Maybe you saw your brethren on their return from exile in the then Zaïre and Tanzania, in late 1996 early 1997. If you did, I am sure you noticed that they were tired, but not exactly famished. This was thanks to the stove, if you observed carefully. As they trekked back to Rwanda in single file, some of the returnees could be observed holding a stick, one person in front and another behind him. On the stick dangled a stove on which was a sufuria, cooking pan, of boiling beans, sweet potatoes, etc. When they settled for repose as night fell, the food was ready! During our time, that was a small shuguri that had never occurred to our thinking elite. Everybody had thus to do with whatever little had been prepared and kept, for the whole trek to Rutshuru. This was the nearest inhabited centre, which was over 60 kilometres away. And so, a column of fugitives, ourselves, slowly moved through the fields of Bambo to the mountain of Kirumba. It was after Mt. Kirumba that you entered the impenetrable Bicumbi National Park, where you had to deftly dodge a lion or leopard here, an elephant or buffalo there! Miraculously, the wild animals seemed to sympathise with our predicament, and with time they actually protected us from silly animals like hyenas that wanted to snatch away the young and the vulnerable. We young ones had eventually grown so used to the animals that we started playing hide-and-seek behind the legs of the elephants, or playing around with lion and leopard cubs! Not at all surprising, considering that we were in that forest for over four days and nights.
Emerging from that jungle after days of darkness, since no sunlight penetrates it, is like coming to civilisation from the dark ages. Somehow some UN peacekeeping personnel appeared, as they always do when problems are over, and gave a few people a lift to Rutshuru Trading Centre. Not that in this case the problems were over, but at least people were out of that forest. There they were dumped in the local stadium, to await their relatives on the road. A few days of rest feeding on game meat, hunted by those UN peacekeepers, and every one was back on their feet, trotting to the Uganda border. Many made it to Gisoro, Southern Uganda, where lorries received us hungrily – they lined up as if for iposho, free food rations! — to ferry us to our final destination. The sight of us all standing, crammed in the back so closely that you were held upright by the fellow next to you, was not the most enjoyable! It was as pitiable as the sight of grasshoppers fizzling on a hot saucepan, only not as appetising. Still, better to suffocate in the back of a lorry than to walk 200 kilometres. Of course things could have been worse, as indeed they were for some people who strayed to Goma, the main town in that part of Congo Kinshasa. Not only did they have to contend with having to stop flying bullets, but they also had to fly as if in a real coffin.
Without having to go into the details of the harrowing experience that they underwent in the hall they were packed in, I will tell you how they suffered testing the luxury of flying by aeroplane for the first time. For one, the plane was a cargo aircraft able to carry tons and tons of loads. For another, they were made to stand the way we also were made to stand in our packed lorry and the chairs were removed! Now, as you well know, the floor of the plane may be level but the sides are not always as upright as those of a lorry. Since the sides are curved, it means that if you are pushed there is nothing to hold on to. Which meant, in their case, that the people on the sides had to devise ways of not falling on the side metals every time their neighbours accidentally pushed them. They did this by opting to lie on the sides, which meant that their neighbours had to follow suit. In the end, you had human heaps lying on the sides of the plane and the rest sitting on the others in the middle. Which was all very well until the time of ‘cutting’ a corner arrived. Again as you very well know, a plane does not travel on the road the way you, or the next lorry, will do. It travels in air, and therefore rolls around whenever it turns, and leans forward or backward so as to land or rise into the air. So, by the time our friends from Goma, Eastern Congo, reached Mwese, Southern Tanzania, they were cursing the day the plane was invented!
