We are really looking forward to our bus ride. We had been led to believe that it would be 36 hours long, and having braced for that we feel lucky that it will only be 28. Moreover, there will be Zanzibar on the other end.
We've been up to odds and ends lately. We went out to visit the farm of a businessman that I've been working with some. The government has been giving him a hard time about their land, so we went to go look at it. It's sort of interesting how land should be totally comprehensible in the abstract -- it's just lines on a map, after all -- and yet going and looking at it always reveals new things. This guy's land is in an interesting spot. It's just 20 km from the city. But it was apparently abandoned for a while during the civil war, and not everyone has been willing to move back yet. This guy's mother moved back, and he has been improving it pretty quickly. Cows, bees, ducks, rabbits, pigs, goats, a palm plantation, other veggies. It was a really nice, pastoral spot. His brothers are farmers -- not just gentlemen farmers like him -- and yet they aren't willing to move back because they aren't sure it's safe. The guy, it turns out, pays monthly 'taxes' to the rebels that are on the other side of the hill to keep them from bothering him and his mother. He's a businessman in the capital and so he is a bit above the fray, but I wonder whether people feel more pinched by the rebels hanging out in the hills, or by the government that sends police once in a while to chase people off their land. But then again, some people aren't pinched at all. This guy, and his mother, seem to be taking it in stride. She invited Clara to go up for lessons in "real Kirundi."
Clara's grandmother Grace asked for some information about the Tutsis and the Hutus. I wish I could refer her to someone else. It is a really interesting question. But it's sort of messy, and I have to admit that hearing "Hutu" and "Tutsi" in the same sentence is sort of like hearing about the Bengals and the Colts, or whatever. I mean, I realize there is some drama there, but then the meaning of the drama depends on what division each is in, and whether it's season or post-season, and how they did against the whatevers last week, and all these other things that are really hard to care about. Do you know what I mean? It turns out that ethnicity was never the source of conflict, and it isn't the sources of conflict now. The conflict has always been about control over state-managed resources. For a long time the group in power was a sub-group of Tutsis. They used Tutsi nationalism when it was convenient, and opponents used Hutu nationalism when it was convenient, but really it was a narrower ruling class that was competing to keep hold of resources. The civil war of 1993-2003 resulted in the Hutu majority taking power. But in the process of that happening, the Hutu political groups fragmented and started competing with each other. Now, the Tutsis -- they remain a wealthy and therefore powerful group -- are minorities in government, but they are just sort of laying low as they watch a pretty intense struggle between the historically Hutu political groups. The ruling party (a historically Hutu party) is repressing opposition Hutu parties pretty severely -- outlawing parties, killing opposition members, arresting opposition journalists -- while the historically Tutsi party is playing by all the (de facto) rules, not complaining too much, and getting to keep a few senior government posts as their reward.
The social dynamic is harder for us to read because the social cues are less obvious -- including ethnicity itself, which I can't see. Interestingly, it does seem that I end up meeting with lots of Tutsis. Much more than Hutus, I think. I'm not really sure about this until I go to someone's house and see a photo of the last Tutsi president on the wall, or something like this. I guess I am meeting more Tutsis because they remain, on average, a more educated and wealthier class, and they continue to hold lots of important social positions, such as teachers and civil servants and things like this. So they are more accessible to an outsider. It's an interesting example, I guess, of how sticky social relations are. (For Clara's part, most of her film-making colleagues are Congolese.)
Sorry, Grace -- but you asked for it so there you go!
On a much lighter note I'll pass on a, um, documentary film about Clara's documentary film work. I got envious seeing all these filmmakers in our house every day creating things, so I decided to try my hand at it, with my iPhone. Their work, scheduled to premiere Jan 15, will be much, much better. Anyway, this is what has been going on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IPdqcjToPY
Merry Christmas everybody!
B
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