at a moment’s notice, day or night, to deal with any accident, snakebite, birth, or death. In this way, my parents quickly gained the respect of most of the villagers.
Making friends was harder for us kids. We were the first foreigners the village children had ever seen, and they asked, in a mocking chant, which planet we were from. They despised my older brother when he stayed away from their manhood initiation rites. They eventually accepted us, however, when they saw that we could run and joke like them. They belonged to various tribes – Barega, Banyindu, Babembe, and Twa – and we gradually picked up their dialects.
Kalambi’s population lived mainly by subsistence farming, cassava being the staple crop. People also raised fish in manmade ponds and harvested food from the forest. A large spiny caterpillar, milanga, was a popular source of protein.
The first time Phocas, my younger brother Clement, and I saw milanga on the trees, we could not believe they were edible. As long as a man’s finger, and much fatter, this red-brown larva was covered with spikes. However scary they were to look at – and painful to pick up – collecting them in season was a gala event for the village. Mama said eating caterpillars was disgusting, and she forbade us to bring milanga into our house. On my own, however, I discovered how tasty they were.
My best friend Bishoshi, two years older than I, lived in the brick house next to ours. Her mother Marthe was a midwife who worked in the clinic with my father. I admired Bishoshi and spent most of my time with her. So when she offered me batter-fried milanga in her home, I enjoyed it without a qualm.
In October, and again in March, flocks of birds made shifting patterns across Kalambi’s sky. When they landed in the village trees, I saw that they were drab little birds – but I liked them. Decades later, in Europe, I recognized my small friends and realized they had visited us in Africa to escape their wintry homelands. I couldn’t blame them.
There was no lack of warmth in our steamy world. We would look out first thing in the morning to see nothing but thick white mist, which would disperse a couple hours later to reveal the dripping rainforest surrounding the village. There were regal palms and graceful bamboo, magenta bougainvillea, and lush undergrowth. Small yellow stars dotted the grass along the jungle’s edge. Brilliant butterflies flitted over these flowers or landed on the track to suck moisture from the mud. The place looked like paradise.
It was a dangerous paradise, however. As well as gorgeous blossoms, there were barbed thorns, stinging insects, and a bush that caused a painful, itchy rash if you accidentally brushed its leaves. Worse, any verdant vine or fern could hide a deadly snake. The villagers stored herbs to treat certain kinds of snakebite, but they warned that there was no remedy for others. We occasionally saw cobras, but most common were green mambas, slithering up tree trunks or draped in the branches.
One morning when I was eleven, I opened the outhouse door – and screamed. But I couldn’t move a muscle. An eight-foot black mamba was coiled on the cool earth floor. This species is actually gray or brown, but the inside of its mouth, revealed when it gives its warning hiss, is a threatening black.
Hearing my scream, my father’s brother Ezra – visiting from Rwanda – came running with a hoe and killed the snake. He and I were incredibly lucky. Feared for both their speed and the potency of their venom, black mambas kill hundreds of people in the Congo every year. Much later, though, I couldn’t help wondering: Would Ezra have preferred death by snakebite to the death he suffered at the hands of fellow human beings?
Because of the snakes, we children never climbed trees here as we had in Burundi, nor were we allowed to explore the mysterious jungle, from which we heard raucous birdcalls by day and eerie cries at night. So, to our disappointment, we could never see the monkeys at play in the treetops. One day, however, a man showed us the paw of a gorilla he had killed deep in the forest. I shuddered. The powerful paw was bigger than the man’s hand.
Like other village children, my brothers and I herded goats, collected firewood, fetched water, and tended our family crops. Phocas and Clement cleared brush with machetes, while I cultivated with a heavy hoe or pulled weeds by hand. Our father’s young sister Priscilla, who lived with us at the time, often helped.
Reaching the end of a cassava row one day, I was startled when a thick, mottled creeper – spiraled around a bamboo trunk at the field’s edge – began to slide. Glancing up, I met the glittering eyes of a python. I knew they killed by encircling their prey, tightening their muscular bodies till its bones cracked. Dropping my hoe, I fled the field.
Next day, on the way to our plot I burst out, “Let’s ask God to protect us!” Priscilla said a prayer, and that day we were spared the sight of snakes.
The four youngest children in our family were born in Kalambi, and our mother depended on my help at home. Our biggest task was processing cassava. With long knives, we peeled the roots and placed them, tied in cloth, into the creek to soften – and to get rid of their bitter flavor. Three days later, we took the roots from the water and laid them in the sun. When they were dry, we pounded them into flour, which we stirred into boiling water. The result was ugari, a filling starch that we served with fish sauce or vegetables.
I helped clean the house, hauled water, ran errands for my father, and looked after Fidel – my eight-years-younger brother – carrying him everywhere on my hip or on my back. A tall man now, Fidel likes to tease me, saying he’s the reason I’m so short.
When we weren’t helping our mothers, we girls contented ourselves playing hopscotch and other games in the village street. Needing some way to cool off, we often swam in the fish ponds – although this was forbidden, and the mud smelled foul – or waded and splashed in the creek.
Before returning home from an afternoon at the creek, Bishoshi and I would catch crabs for our mothers to cook, shrieking with laughter if one of us was careless enough to get pinched. We never spared a thought for the black stones under which the crabs hid. Only years later did prospectors discover our streambed rocks, which turned out to be valuable columbite, coveted for manufacture of electronic products.
In 1977, when I was twelve, Papa took Phocas, Clement, and me to visit his own parents in Rwanda. We had never met our grandfather, Ephraim. But we knew our grandmother, Damaris, because she had come to spend time with our family in Kalambi. I admired Tateh Damaris when I learned of the risk she had taken to visit us in the Congo; as a Tutsi, she might not have been allowed back into Rwanda.
Now the time had come to see her again and to meet Tateh Ephraim. I was thrilled. I would see the mighty Lake Kivu – thirty miles across at its widest, and fifty-six miles long – that Mama was always reminiscing about. And I would finally experience Rwanda, land of my ancestors, country of a thousand hills.
The first thing I noticed, on arrival in my grandparents’ village, was the red earth, so different from Kalambi’s black soil. Like us, our grandparents grew cassava, sorghum, coffee, soy beans, potatoes, and yams on their farm. But they also raised fruit near their house: banana, papaya, guava, and pineapple. They kept livestock too. They were quite wealthy.
Tateh Damaris rose early to prepare breakfast for her family and for the farm hands. During our month’s stay, I helped her tidy the house, grounds, livestock paddock, and paths. Next we would spread rushes on the floor, then feed the hens and gather their eggs. I walked the pastureland, collecting cakes of dry cow dung for fuel. In a large flat basket, I collected fresh dung as well, which Tateh Damaris and I plastered on the house walls as weatherproofing.
Phocas, Clement, and I revered Tateh Ephraim; after all, he was Papa’s father. A deep thinker, he enjoyed sharing his wisdom through maxims, jokes, and proverbs. “Do evil when good no longer exists on the earth,” he would tell us. We knew he meant: Do
