Day 1 in Burundi: Gishora’s Drummers and Kibira’s Century-Old Guardian

When I boarded my flight to Entebbe, I politely asked the flight attendant whether she could help me make my next flight, which was scheduled to leave for Bujumbura just forty-five minutes after our arrival. Much to my surprise, she said yes, and sat me in the row right behind business class. The plane took off five minutes ahead of schedule, and it arrived by the gate in Entebbe a full ten minutes ahead too. Still, I felt stressed, so when the business class passengers started leaving, I asked another flight attendant to let me leave with them. In the blazing Ugandan sun, I rushed across the tarmac into the airport building where the airport staff already stood waiting for people transferring for their Bujumbura-bound flight. They sped me through customs and up towards the departure gate in no time.

Two surprises lay in store for me at the gate. Firstly, the plane for Bujumbura did not start boarding until about half an hour late, during which time I responded in full to a few messages and emails. Secondly and more importantly, the plane we were boarding was the plane I had just left. I found the situation comical rather than embarrassing, so when I climbed back on board, I greeted the flight attendants like old friends.

The flight was a bumpy one, with the rainy season blowing in several layers of clouds above the Great Lake region. My neighbour at the emergency exit had stated very confidently during the safety demonstration that we would not need to know how to open the emergency doors, since he did not use them during his flight from Kinshasa. He did not look as confident as he gripped his armrest in the rattling aircraft. Once we had landed, we made conversation, which ended up with him helping me find a taxi driver in front of the airport and negotiating a good rate for me.

I had booked tours for both my days in Burundi. On the first day, my guide and driver picked me up at my hotel at half past seven for a day trip to the centre of the country. To find the road that winds its way up the mountains hemming Bujumbura in the East, we first had to navigate the bustling city. Despite its population of over one million, Bujumbura has few buildings that are more than three stories tall, sprawling far along the shores of the lake and up the mountain sides. It also lacks a clear urban core: every part of Bujumbura looks like a quarter just outside the central business district in a larger African city.

We made it to the edge of Bujumbura just as a convoy of trucks arrived from Tanzania carrying gasoline. My guide had told me that gas was becoming increasingly scarce and expensive, and perhaps it was because of this knowledge that I fancied there was a strange solemnity to the arrival of this long-expected caravan. We then began our drive up the winding mountain road. It seemed to me that as we rose higher and higher, the sky began to show patches of blue and the sun shone through with greater frequency. Turning around, I realised that I could see a layer of clouds hanging over Bujumbura as they rose from the lake and found themselves unable to pass over the mountains.

Even past the crest, the road kept winding as it ran up and down between the villages. In the larger ones on the way to Gitega, the street vendors ran up to any slowing car to offer carrots, onions, tomatoes, lettuce, and plastic packs of round yellow berries that my guide kept unhelpfully referring to as strawberries. When we passed through these villages again in the afternoon, there were more ready meals on offer – especially goat meat skewers and corncobs. As the driver slowed down to buy skewers for himself and the guide, we attracted the attention of all other meat merchants in the near neighbourhood, and we soon had a man pushing two live chickens into the driver’s window and another man parading around the car with the headless carcass of a goat.

In the smaller villages, especially after the road branched off to the north at Mpehe, the young people were hard at work. Children and teenagers, both girls and boys, were hoeing along the roadsides to make channels for water. After another turn onto the country road, the main preoccupation of the children was carrying firewood and shouting “mzungu” at our car.

Our first stop was a tea plantation just outside Kibira National Park. We picked up our local guide somewhere on the road and carried him just to the parking lot. He was a spritely man whose improbable monologues kept eliciting bursts of laughter from the guide and the driver. He said he was “over a century old” (though I doubt he was any older than seventy) and kept insisting that we see him not merely as a living encyclopaedia but as a poet. It was only by affording him this poetic license that we could entertain his ramblings about how Queen Elizabeth II only drank tea from Burundi and how by breathing in the clean mountain air we were adding fifty years to our lifespans.

After walking up a hill and through part of the tea plantation, we crossed into the forest. I am sceptical anyone has seen chimpanzees in these parts in a long time, but our guide’s booming voice certainly took care of any remaining chance we might have had. Energetically slipping and tumbling over the trees fallen across the path, he hurried us through the forest to a waterfall and all the way back again. He explained the medicinal qualities of some of the plants: the bark of one tree, he said, granted men sexual potency, and he asserted this with such conviction that I wondered whether he was a regular user.

From Kibira, we had to backtrack a little to return to the Route Nationale, which led us on to Gitega. As the guide told me, Burundi’s new capital is not as new as one might assume. Indeed, Gitega was the centre of the Kingdom of Burundi, which existed from the 1680s as a sovereign state until its absorption into German East Africa in 1890. After the First World War, Burundi became part of the Belgian mandate of Ruanda-Urundi, whose capital was Usumbura (renamed to Bujumbura after independence). In 2019, the Parliament of Burundi confirmed the President’s decision to move the capital back to Gitega again.

We had a quick lunch at what I imagine to be one of Gitega’s very few upscale restaurants, though the word “upscale” is perhaps a bit too generous to a place where cleaning a table consists of covering the remnants of previous meals with a new tablecloth. Gitega’s population is reportedly about a tenth of Bujumbura’s, and it shows. While the skeletons of one or two apartment buildings are emerging from the hillsides, the vast majority of houses have no more than two stories, and single-story houses fill the entire periphery.

We did not spend much time in Gitega but continued northward to the famous Gishora Drum Sanctuary. The history of this sanctuary – as far as the internet is concerned – dates to King Ntare II’s defeat of another local ruler towards the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. I am not sure how to square this information with the story my guide told me, which was that the drums date to a time when the king took refuge in the sanctuary after being betrayed by his two sons to invading armies. The man who welcomed the king to this land gave the king two cows, but instead of keeping them, the king had them slaughtered and gave away the meat, after which their hides were turned into the first two drums at the sanctuary. These drums are still on display in one of the houses.

The guide took me through each of the buildings, which were circular houses with thatched roofs. The main building, of course, was the king’s residence. The guide told me that when making love to his wife, the king would be cheered on from under the bed by his eunuch. There was also a house where the king would visit the court priest, who would give him advice from behind a firepit spewing forth a constant stream of smoke.

As we toured the royal residence, the drummers prepared themselves for their performance. I was the only tourist around at the time, but since the drummers are paid by group, they do not wait for a critical mass to assemble (which would, all things considered, take several days). Clad in sleeveless tunics in Burundi’s national colours, the drummers filed onto the courtyard beating the giant drums they carried on their heads. What followed was perhaps the most energetic performance I have ever seen: the drummers arranged their drums in a semicircle and as they drummed away, they took turns at the drum at the very centre, leaping into the air and swaying back and forth while rubbing their drumsticks across the beads on their necks. As the only tourist, I made sure to show each performer the attention he deserved, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see that all the village women and children had gathered at one end of the courtyard to watch their fathers, brothers, and sons play.

The drive back to Bujumbura took us perhaps two hours, prolonged by a few purchases my guide and driver wanted to make on the way, and by the congestion that began at the edge of the city. It reminded me of how, on the previous day, I had spent some fifteen minutes at a crossroads waiting for the president’s cordon to pass.