R&R - Rwanda and Uganda

While driving through Rwanda, it was almost impossible to not think about the genocide. Even before we stepped on to Rwandan soil, the genocide was present: the river that separates Tanzania and Rwanda cascades into a waterfall at the border – a waterfall that would have been beautiful if I could have looked at it without thinking of how bodies floated down that very river during the genocide and accumulated at the falls … or of how my neighbor was one of a group of men who volunteered to remove and bury those bodies. The reminders didn’t stop at Rusumo, either – there were memorials in every town we drove through. Even without the memorials, the shadow of the genocide would still be there. Not only because the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children cannot and should not be forgotten, but because there’s something about Rwanda today that feels a little off. It wasn’t just the smoothly paved roads or the drainage canals that had E and I staring with wide-eyed excitement … it was the cumulative effect of little things like the absence of any litter whatsoever, the strictly observed traffic laws, the flowers planted in every front yard, and knowing about laws that have made all sorts of things illegal (plastic bags, cutting down trees for firewood, razor wire on top of walls, discussing ethnicity ) or legally required (front yard gardens, monthly volunteerism, motorcycle helmets). It’s almost as if in less than two decades, the country has gone from one extreme (inhumane chaos) to another (unnatural orderliness).

For all that it was so difficult to not think about the Rwandan genocide, it was somehow quite easy to spend days in Uganda without about Idi Amin’s ethnic cleansing and the subsequent years of violence and instability. I was actually shocked to discover how hard it was to imagine a thoroughly looted Kampala full of buildings and buses riddled with bullet holes. And even more alarmed to realize how easy it was to forget about the LRA and their ongoing insurgency in northern Uganda. I don’t know why this is. Perhaps it’s because the Rwandan genocide was slightly more recent than Idi Amin and Obote’s respective reigns of terror – although that certainly doesn’t explain why it’s easier to remember a genocide that ended when I was 8 than a viciously violent war that’s been plaguing Uganda for my entire lifetime. Perhaps it’s because I studied the Rwandan genocide in several classes at Princeton but never covered Uganda. Or perhaps it’s because Uganda (or at least the part of Uganda I visited) seems to have a firmer grasp on its sanity. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Rwanda and don’t mean to imply that it’s poised for a nervous breakdown. It’s an absolutely beautiful country and by all accounts, Kigali is one of the safest cities in sub-Saharan Africa today. It’s just lovely and tragic at the same time … and while the same can be said for Uganda, Uganda still just feels a little more normal – while Rwanda feels like it’s trying a little too hard to prove its normalcy.

Or perhaps the well-maintained infrastructure and absence of garbage were too much of a shock to my system, and I’m grabbing at straws to try and explain this African anomaly … hard to say, really. :-D