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