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 had its heyday in the late 1970s or early 1980s, but was still the life and soul of the party. It always had a pool table, a sound system that was turned up much higher than it could handle, prostitutes, and definitely Johnny Walker Black – a status drink that proved that your expensive clothes did not mean you had an empty wallet. This was the sure-fire way to distinguish the “Big Boys”, as they are referred to all over the continent, from the small fry.
But in Kigali the party never started. Even the standard home shebeen kind of thing was missing here. Well, maybe not missing, but it closed very early and at first I suspected that there might be a curfew. When I saw small groups of people who hung around after sunset to enjoy a beer I soon realised that they might not be the kind of drinking companions who would do my health any good – safe pass letter or not. I don’t think many of the local residents wanted to hang out with them either. The city was dead after sunset, because it was actually dangerous to be outside and people still lived in fear. Also, the police were not necessarily one’s friends.
For two nights I continued my search for the nightlife with a driver who did not share my sense of adventure and excitement. The hotel itself did not offer much in the way of action and the South African musicians were, well, musos. They were travel weary and weren’t interested in their surroundings. Then it hit me: in light of the lack of entertainment, I had to create my own. My grandmother always said that the devil finds work for idle hands and I’m a good example of this. Boredom always makes me get up to mischief.
One afternoon, as a result of overwhelming tedium, I took two street children to lunch at the grand Windsor Umubano Hotel. It was a most enlightening social experiment, which I undertook for purely academic reasons. The guard tried to prevent my guests from entering the hotel and the waiter refused to serve them, but I insisted, ignoring the icy atmosphere that ensued. I argued that other people were allowed to bring prostitutes to the hotel as guests and no one had a problem with that. I also demanded that we be seated at a table in the centre of the restaurant instead of one in the corner that the waiter recommended.
The restaurant wasn’t full, but my fellow diners, businessmen with their expensive watches and brand new cell phones who only returned from self-imposed exile in Belgium after the genocide, were clearly not impressed with the company in which they found themselves.
The waiter addressed the two boys in Kinyarwanda and from his tone of voice I gathered that his remarks weren’t complimentary. My guess was that the two boys were aged between eight and ten but they didn’t take much notice of him. Suddenly they were in a position of power and no one could take it away from them. They knew I would protect them and they gave the waiter hell.
After a veritable feast of hamburgers and many Fantas some of our musicians brought their djembes and started playing their drums in the restaurant while the street children taught them Rwandese folk songs. By this time even the waiter’s attitude began to change and when his manager had to leave for a few minutes he joined in the singing and showed us a few dance steps. For the first time there was a smile on his face, but it did not reach his eyes. They were still dead, hidden behind a wall around his memories.
Two hours later I accompanied the children to the hotel’s exit. In the few days I’d been there I had seen how disobedient children were hit with rubber sticks. It was the norm and I wanted to prevent my new friends’ day from ending badly. As we walked out the waiter breathlessly caught up with us and said something to the children in Kinyarwanda. This time there were smiles on their faces while he good-naturedly rubbed their heads.
The children walked around the block to the back of the hotel where the waiter gave each of them an enormous bag of food to take home. The image of the two boys walking down the dusty street kicking an empty sardine tin will remain with me forever, their loud and animated discussion of their afternoon adventure punctuated by carefree laughter.
It was at that point that it was decided that I was in need of a bodyguard. To this day I don’t know whether it was at the insistence of the hotel or the promoter. My errant behaviour beyond the safe confines of the hotel fence, as well as inside, started to freak people out. Whether the bodyguard was appointed to protect me from other people or them from me, is open for discussion.
The important people around me did not like all my political questions and the fact that I got along with everyone made them uneasy. The last straw was when I exchanged my dollars for francs on the street and not in the hotel. I got a much better deal outside and it was much more exciting to have a forty-minute negotiation in a backstreet alley. Yes, I was busy creating my own entertainment.
I immediately christened my bodyguard “Brick”. I don’t know what his real name was and frankly I couldn’t care. If Brick were a South African, he would have been a white rugby player who sold second-hand cars or insurance. On Saturday night after rugby games he would have hung out at escort clubs and perhaps dabbled in illegal diamonds now and then. But Brick was a much snappier dresser than his South African equivalent.
Brick
Brick always seemed to know when I’d got up in the morning and shortly after he would knock on my door. He couldn’t speak English and the only French sentence I knew wouldn’t have strengthened our relationship. I forbade him to eat or drink with me. He had to get his own table, but this did not dissuade him: he even stood guard when I went to the toilet. In short, he was a first-class nuisance. He had a good laugh at all the mosquito repellents I brought along and threw them on my bed with contempt, until I told him to put them back where he got them. I soon realised that he was a feared man in the community, because people suddenly gave me a wide berth. He tried hard to act like a tourist guide rather than a policeman but his speciality was not to be too likeable.
Basically I was under hotel arrest. This dawned on me when he made himself comfortable in my hotel room under the pretext that he wanted to be my friend. Brick settled into his new role as my friend and guide by offering me his fourteen-year-old sister
