Day 2 in Burundi: On the Trails of Bloody Histories

The night before leaving for Burundi, I had an interesting conversation with a political scientist from Nigeria. I had asked him why French and British Africa were so different, and why much stronger connections exist between Paris and its former colonies than is the case for London. For all their faults, my political scientist friend said, the British had gone much further than the French in building lasting institutions and educating the general populace. Not only that: the British colonial venture involved a broader segment of society and faced somewhat more democratic scrutiny. He pointed to the former colonies of Belgium as a case in point for how autocratic colonialism destroyed society. It was in Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi that some of the worst violence broke out in the decades after independence.

Be that as it may, my impressions of the differences between Kigali and Bujumbura have convinced me that the colonial experience cannot have been fully determinative. While Kigali is well-paved, well-lit, orderly, and tidy, Bujumbura is only saved from a harsh assessment by its relative smallness, which renders its imperfections bearable. Save two or three roads, one of which leads to the airport, most of the paths in Bujumbura are full of potholes and rocks. Travelling from one end of the small city to the other can take even two hours, with drivers often having to prioritise not damaging their car over staying in their lane.

Our first activity of the day was a boat ride in the Rusizi Delta Nature Reserve. As far as I could understand, there was only one guide and one boat, so we had to arrive at an appointed time to make sure we would not be disappointed. The guide was a woman in her fifties with red hair done in braids. She was able to focus on searching for hippos and birds for the first ten minutes of the journey, after which her ramblings got the better of her, and I was inundated with stories and pictures of her recently deceased relatives. We saw a few pelicans and herons, as well as some kingfishers. The guide did point out a few other birds to me in French, but having no ornithological vocabulary in the language, I quickly forgot what they were called.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the boat tour was when we reached the actual point where the brown, turbid current of the Rusizi met the dark waters of Lake Tanganyika. The two bodies were not just distinguished by their colour but by all the debris that gathered at the very edge of the brown patch where the river left all the branches and bits of wood it had collected. On the very verge of this meeting point, we looked over the side of the boat to see the brown clouds sinking deeper and deeper as the guide told us that where we stood, the bottom of the lake was three hundred metres deep.

Throughout my two days in Burundi, I often asked about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose beautiful blue mountains I could always see like a curtain above Lake Tanganyika. Since the entrance to the national park brought us to the western end of Bujumbura, my guide offered to show me the border crossing to Uvira. We drove some ten minutes towards the growing mountains, passing by many hitchhikers. The last stretch to the gate itself was surrounded by salespeople. Of all the things they were selling, I can only remember the cartons of milk, which I felt to be a very strange item to be selling out in the open at a border crossing in the midday heat.

As we made our way south again, we stopped by a hotel on the shore of the lake. It is an unfortunate reality of Bujumbura that some of its most scenic views of Tanganyika are monopolised by private establishments that will only open their doors to a friend or a bribe. We then crossed the city itself. Some ten kilometres beyond its southern reaches, we arrived at the Livingstone-Stanley Monument. The rock commemorates two nights that Doctor David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley spent in 1871 during their explorations around Lake Tanganyika. Next to the rock stand the statues of Livingstone and Stanley extending hands and raising their hats in greeting, and local guides claim that this is where Stanley found Livingstone first met. In reality, Stanley found Livingstone in Ujiji in Tanzania some two weeks previously, after which they shared part of a journey from which only Stanley would return alive.

While Livingstone was, of course, a famous missionary and anti-slavery activist, Stanley left behind a darker historical legacy. Employed in the service of Belgian King Leopold II, Stanley mapped a significant portion of the Congo Basin and lay the groundwork for the establishment of the horrific Congo Free State. The British had in fact refused to call on Stanley again, following reports of his alleged cruelty during previous travels to Africa. Interestingly, Stanley is popularly credited with founding Kinshasa, though the area of his trading post had already been inhabited.

Returning to the city, we visited two more monuments: the Burundian Monument of National Unity and the Mausoleum of Prince Louis Rwagasore. The first of these was built in 1991 to promote unity among the Hutus and Tutsis and is an abstraction of the proverbial bundle of sticks – weak apart but strong together. Ever since Burundi’s independence, attacks on Tutsis by Hutu militants and reprisals by the Tutsi-led regime had killed over a hundred thousand people. The monument, however, was a premature sign of optimism, as the violence eventually spilled over into a full-fledged civil war, which lasted from 1993 to 2005 and resulted in the deaths of some three hundred thousand Burundians.

The Mausoleum of Prince Louis Rwagasore consists of three arches: a red one for God, a white one for the King, and a green one for the Burundian people. To the front left of this monument stands a cross, while a locker-like shape protrudes from the monument on the right side bearing the names of Burundi’s old provinces. The tombstones of Rwagasore and several of his family members lie in front of the arches. Louis Rwagasore was the son of Burundi’s penultimate king and the first democratically elected prime minister of the country. Only two weeks later, the independence leader was shot dead with the probable support of the Belgian Resident.

We finished our excursion a little before one and spent an hour waiting for our lunch at a restaurant. There was nothing on the programme for the rest of the day, however, besides the drive back to the airport. The only hitch in the otherwise tight plan was that my flight from Entebbe was delayed by four hours, which meant I did not make it home until almost three o’clock in the morning.