The River Rukarara

I was born on the banks of the Rukarara, but I have no memory of it. My memories come from my mother.

The Rukarara flows in my imagination and my dreams. I was just a few months old when my family left its shores. My father’s job required our relocation to Magi, a village at the top of a tall, steep incline that overlooks another river, the Akanyaru. Beyond the Akanyaru is Burundi. For us to go down to the river was out of the question. Mama forbade her children to climb down the hill, even the intrepid boys, for fear of seeing us tumble to the bottom, where crocodiles and hippopotami crouched in the papyrus, waiting to devour us—not to mention, she added, the Burundian outlaws who lurked in the swamps along the banks, ready to spirit children away in their canoes and sell them to the Senegalese, who traded in human blood. For me, as for my brothers and sisters, the Akanyaru remained an inaccessible stream visible far below, like a long serpent amid the papyrus that barred our access to the unknown world stretching beyond the horizon—a world in which other rivers surely flowed, other rivers that I swore to myself I’d explore someday.

When my family, like so many other Tutsi, was deported to Nyamata, in the Bugesera district, the truck convoy carrying these “internal refugees” had to cross an iron bridge over the Nyabarongo River. Neither the unbelievable din nor the jostling of the vehicles on the metal overpass could trouble my sleep in my mother’s arms. But Gitagata, the settlement village to which we were assigned, was far from the Nyabarongo. I went with the other girls to fetch water from Lake Cyohoha or, for solemn occasions, at the source of the Rwakibirizi, whose copious flow seemed to surge by the grace of an improbable miracle in this arid landscape. The deportees mentioned the Nyabarongo only to curse it. With its clay-reddened waters like a bad omen, it seemed the liquid wall of our prison, and that iron bridge, which I had to cross to and from school in Kigali, was the site of every humiliation and brutality, perpetrated by the soldiers at the guard post. At school, I learned that the Greeks, to get to hell, had to cross a black, freezing river called the Styx; I knew of another that led there: the Nyabarongo.

In our exile in Nyamata, my mother spoke constantly of the Rukarara. When one of my two youngest sisters, the ones born in Nyamata, got sick, my mother, Stefania, lamented: “Poor little things, they’ll never be healthy, they’ll never be lucky. I didn’t wash them in the waters of the Rukarara.” We, the older ones, who were born near the river (I myself had just barely made it in time), were inoculated against all sorts of ailments, against most of the evil spells that others would surely try to cast on us, and against all the poisons with which the envious would season our food; we might even, my mother hoped, avoid some of the inevitable misfortunes that weaved the fabric of every life. For her, the most effective baptism was not the one we’d received from the priests, but the one she had administered by washing our newborn bodies with the far more beneficial waters of the Rukarara.

According to Stefania, the banks of the Rukarara abounded in riches and treasures. Its waters, which filled the cattle troughs, had always protected cows from the plague epidemics that regularly decimated Rwandan herds. She disconsolately compared the half-barren, drought-ridden fields of Bugesera with the unparalleled fertility of the lands irrigated by the Rukarara. If my mother had been able to read my father’s Bible, no doubt she would have added the name Rukarara to those of the four rivers that, the Good Book told us, flowed from the primordial stream in the Garden of Eden.

It’s true that the Rukarara must have harbored many mysteries. The river’s source was in the heart of the great virgin forest of Nyungwe, at the edge of which we’d built our enclosure. Nyungwe was the monkeys’ domain. My mother bitterly defended our fields against their constant incursions. “No use fighting them,” she would say, “they’re too strong. But they do have wise leaders.” She claimed to have negotiated with their chief the amount of tribute that they would skim off our harvests and that, like it or not, we had to pay them. She made sure the pact was maintained, but at the troughs, the monkeys always went ahead of the cows. At night, at the hour when tales were told, Stefania revealed to us that the monkey king held his court at the source of the Rukarara. The monkeys chased away any other animal that attempted to drink from it, and they themselves respected its purity by merely dipping in leaves, which they then licked to slake their thirst.

A few years later, nearly all the members of my family who had remained in the Rukarara valley were massacred. The survivors reported to my mother that the river ran red with blood and corpses floated on its current.

***

“I was born on the banks of the Rukarara.” In the worst days of exile, I would repeat that sentence to myself, as if seeking reassurance that I indeed came from somewhere. For me, the river’s name was a more certain identity than the one that would be written on the travel permit granted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Bujumbura, which everyone was desperate to get.

Before dawn, the crowd of refugees, so numerous that they blocked the streets, besieged the old colonial villa that housed the offices of the HCR. Some, especially the women, their babies crying on their backs, were waiting for the sacks of rice allotted to families. Others were there to claim a promised sewing machine with which they could set up shop in the Kamenge quarter of Bujumbura, to which the Burundian tailors already in business responded with intense hatred. But most came to procure a mysterious certificate that would allow them to obtain other certificates that would ultimately result, after countless procedures, if all the necessary conditions were met and all the documents duly assembled, in the issuance by the Burundian authorities of a residence permit or, for students and intellectuals, of a travel permit, which we hoped would open the doors of Senegal or the Ivory Coast or, better still, Belgium or even France or Germany, or, while we’re at it, why not the United States or Canada, especially Canada, yes, Canada …

The guards around the HCR offices enforced a haphazard discipline, letting through those who shouted, bullied, and shoved their way up to the fence, and barring entry to others who had patiently stood in line all day. Sometimes a man would exit carrying a sewing machine on his head, and everyone would applaud; the unsuccessful ones would hurl a litany of abuse at the international authorities, whom they accused of blatant partiality and persecution—always the same persecution, dogging them without respite … Little boys sold, for two francs, a handful of peanuts in a cornet of newspaper or, when the sun parched people’s throats, ice cubes of orange Fanta diluted with a fair amount of water from the Mutanga River, which serves as Bujumbura’s sewer.

I  reached the gate ten minutes before the offices were due to close. A guard shrugged and let me through. Behind the window grille, the HCR employee, no doubt a Senegalese or a Malian, kept his head down while asking the ritual questions on the form.

“Family name?”

I answered “Mukasonga,” even though it wasn’t really a family name, since we don’t have them in Rwanda. It’s your father who names you, that’s all.

“Muka-what?”

I spelled it out.

“First name?”

“Scholastique.”

He raised his head slightly. “That’s a name?”

“Yes. Like ‘scholastic,’ but with an –ique.”

“Fine, I’ll put ‘Scholastic.’ Born where?”

I heard myself answer: “On the banks of the Rukarara.”

This time, the functionary leaned back in his chair and gave me a long once-over.

“And where is this Ruka-whatever?”

“Between Gikongoro and Cyangugu.”

“Fine, I’ll put Cyangugu, that one I know. I’ve been there, it’s next to Bukavu.”

I finally obtained the travel permit from the HCR. It was a declaration of statelessness: it forbade me from returning to Rwanda and closed me off from most other countries, whose embassies, upon seeing this paper marked with the infamous stamp of the refugee, would, naturally, deny me a visa.

In my despair, I closed my eyes and found myself back on the imagined banks of the Rukarara.

The Rukarara was, in a sense, inscribed on my flesh. I had only to plunge my hand into the bushy thickness of my hair and, feeling along my skull, trace the long furrow of a scar—a scar I more or less owed to the river. When Stefania would delouse her daughters on Sunday afternoons, she couldn’t help recounting yet again the circumstances surrounding the mark. Her fingers would slowly follow the bulge of skin the scar had left behind; then she would tell the story of the accident.

I had, she would say—and she still blamed herself for it—escaped her watch for only an instant. “You could never stay still,” Stefania sighed, “even before you knew how to walk!” I had thus ventured on all fours into the field on the edge of the river. My big brother Antoine was digging a channel to irrigate the sweet potatoes. He hadn’t seen or heard me coming and, while trying to pry out a clump of earth, he planted his hoe in my skull. Panic-stricken, my brother rushed toward the house, shouting my name, and ran into my mother, who was just as frantically searching for me. “I saw your skull split open,” she said, “and it wasn’t blood that was pouring out but a white froth, your brain, your brain escaping from you!” Stefania was proud of how she’d treated my injury: she had cleansed it with water from the Rukarara, then filled the gaping wound with mud scooped from the riverbed. Later, no doubt to encourage the wound to heal and scar over, she had gone to the middle of the current, where the river ran deepest, to collect some black silt, with which she slathered my head from brow to nape. I had to stay that way for several days. Each morning she anxiously checked the gash until, one day, she saw that all the black silt had been absorbed and the wound definitively scarred over. “That’s what saved you,” she would say exultantly. “The water and mud of the Rukarara saved you, but it might also explain why you always have something to say, why you can’t sit still, like the Rukarara. You will go far, my daughter. Perhaps Antoine’s hoe reversed the flow of your thoughts!”

***

For a long time, the Rukarara remained for me simply the river that bordered my family’s enclosure and fields. What became of it beyond that valley didn’t interest me. It was only while writing my novel Our Lady of the Nile, in which I imagined a girls’ school that I perched atop the crest of the Congo-Nile Divide and which I located as close as possible to a presumed source of the Nile, that I realized my little Rukarara might be connected to that mighty waterway.

Just like Veronica, one of the characters in my book, I tried to follow the fine blue line on the map that represented the Rukarara. It wasn’t easy to distinguish from the other rivers and tributaries that descended from the crest. The Rukarara, for its part, flowed directly from the Nyungwe forest, ran south, bifurcated capriciously toward the east upon meeting the Mushishito, then went back up in a northeasterly direction to merge with the Mwogo River and thus become the Nyabarongo, which encircled the heart of Rwanda with its majestic curve (the Nyabarongo, which the kings bearing the name Yuhi could not ford). Joining with the Akanyaru, it took the name Akagera; then, after combining with the Burundian Ruvubu, it finally poured into Lake Victoria, from which issued the river called the Nile.

After all these transformations, my beloved Rukarara thus becomes the Nile! It was even celebrated as “the most distant headwater of the longest river in the world,” as I discovered on the internet. I learned that a team of “explorers,” led by an Englishman and two New Zealanders, had set out to retrace the Nile to its source on small inflatable boats. The expedition left from Rosetta, near Alexandria, on September 20, 2005, and was expected to reach the source about ten days later. Was it in Burundi or Rwanda? That hadn’t yet been determined. After an encounter with the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, which resulted in the death of a man who came to the party’s aid and the wounding of the “explorers,” the expedition was postponed until March 2006. The “explorers” ascended the Rukarara and, after continuing on foot once the stream became too shallow for their boats, arrived at a trickle of water bubbling up from a muddy pool at an altitude of 7,966 feet. That minuscule source of the Rukarara was proclaimed the most distant source of the Nile, whose length had until then been estimated at 4,108 miles and now went up to 4,174: thanks to my Rukarara, it grew by 66 miles!

Not to devalue the deeds of those “explorers”—though I do find it anachronistic to speak of explorers in the twenty-first century—but the Rukarara had been recognized as a likely source of the Nile well before then. In mid-August 1898, a German named Richard Kandt also reached the source of the Rukarara and declared it the source of the Nile. He wrote as much in letter XXVI of his book Caput Nili.[1]

Here are a few notes gathered as I read excerpts of this book, like a bouquet of flowers cast into the Rukarara in Kandt’s memory:

Richard Kantorowicz was born on December 17, 1867, in Posen, Prussia (now Poznań, Poland), into a family of Jewish merchants. He began medical studies but didn’t complete them; even so, he was known as “Doctor.” In an effort to assimilate, he converted to Protestantism and changed his name to Kandt: Dr. Richard Kandt. In Berlin in 1896 he studied anthropology, ethnology, and geography. He dreamed of becoming an explorer and, toward that end, learned Swahili. It is said (though this might be apocryphal) that while in the Vatican Museum pondering a statue depicting the Nile as a bearded man, he decided, like so many others before him, to seek the sources of the great river. Felix von Luschan, who was then an assistant at the Berlin Ethnological Museum and is best known as the inventor of a chromatic scale for classifying skin color (ranging from no. 1 for the whitest skin to no. 36 for the blackest), told him about Rwanda as a possible place to look. After fruitless attempts to find sponsors for his expedition, he decided to finance it himself, borrowing against his inheritance.

His solitary trek defied conventional wisdom: Oscar Baumann, the Austrian explorer, had maintained that the Ruvubu, in southern Burundi, was the most likely source of the Nile. But Richard Kandt was betting on the Nyabarongo.

In March 1897, Kandt disembarked at Dar es Salaam. Staying just long enough to obtain the necessary authorizations and assemble his caravan—one hundred and forty porters, three guides, three servant boys, seven askaris (African soldiers)—he then headed inland. He stopped for several months in Tabora, where he bought a house. On March 29, 1898, he departed for Rwanda. His first action was to visit King Yuhi Musinga, whose court was in Mukingo, near the western border of the country. He was impressed by the densely populated land and its inhabitants, especially the Tutsi. Their physique and bearing corroborated the portrait sketched by the first European to enter Rwanda, Count von Götzen, which Kandt summarized as: “A caste of Semitic or Hamitic origin, whose ancestors, originally from the southern regions of Abyssinia, had conquered all the territory between the lakes … [and] whose giant stature—six and a half feet—recalled the world of tales and legends” (Caput Nili, letter XXIII). Kandt evidently subscribed to anthropological myths already woven around the Tutsi, rumors that would cling to them like the Shirt of Nessus.

The closer Kandt got to the capital, the more caravans he saw carrying tributes of foodstuffs and products to the royal court. On May 16, 1898, he reached Mukingo, seat of the royal residence.

In a flowery paragraph, Kandt describes the confluence of those many tributaries toward the royal enclosure:

Strange image: hundreds of black silhouettes, their lances gleaming in the sun, the bright colors of the multicolored cloths and several litters festooned with yellow braids, long caravans with pots and baskets—very much like streams flowing toward a lake—clear lines of innumerable intertwined paths on the yellow-green crests and slopes, passing by huts and courtyards, between fields of ripe millet and banana plantations, paddling across reed-filled swamps and lazy streams, converging in ever larger groups, and finally coming to rest like a giant, multicolored serpent around the outer enclosure of the Residence. (Caput Nili, letter XXIII)

After some procrastination by the court notables, Kandt was admitted into the royal residence for an audience with the mwami, the king. According to the information he’d been able to gather, Yuhi Musinga should have been around sixteen years old, but to his stupefaction, they introduced him to

a man of about forty, his eyes half-closed with sleep and with the copper-hued skin of an Indian. And yet, he was wearing the kingly attributes: a headband about eight inches wide made of white pearls, from which hung six zigzagging lines of pink pearls. From the upper edge of this strange headpiece, thick tufts of long, white, silky monkey’s fur fell onto his nape. From the bottom edge fell about fifteen braids of artfully mixed white and red pearls that covered much of his face down to his upper lip. He was dressed in a short, finely tanned pagne that covered his posterior and that, in front, was folded back twice in the area of his genitals, the leather directly on his skin, with a flap at the upper edge onto which was sewn a decoration consisting of rows of hundreds of small pearls. From the lower edge of the leather hung about twenty strips of woven snakeskin … On his arms, he wore a hundred fifty or two hundred copper or pewter bracelets, most of them bearing a fat blue pearl or small sleigh-bells cast from the same metals. Around a hundred iron wire bands encircled his ankles, which accounted for his heavy gait. (Caput Nili, letter XXIII)

The conversation, as interpreted by Kandt’s cook, was held with a dignitary. The king did not participate, merely giving an occasional nod. Kandt requested provisions for his men. He was promised some. After a quarter of an hour, discouraged by his interlocutors’ obvious lack of interest, Kandt withdrew and rejoined his camp. Later, once Kandt had won Musinga’s trust, it was divulged that the fake mwami was actually Mpamarugamba, a powerful ritualist of the cult of Ryangombe, master of the Spirits, with the power to block the harmful forces that these mysterious white visitors no doubt brought with them and thereby protect the person of the king, whose youth made him vulnerable.

The Rwandans took their time coming up with the requested provisions. But, faced with the white man’s impatience, the court eventually complied. Kandt could finally head out toward his intended goal.

First he passed through a highly populated region covered in banana plantations. Trees were few and far between, only a few large, solitary ficuses, noting that they were “devoted to the memory of a deceased tribal chief.” After “two weeks of pleasant walking,” he reached the confluence of the two rivers that would give birth to the Nyabarongo: the Mwogo and the Rukarara. The two waterways looked very different:

Like a tired, trembling old man, the Mwogo comes from the south, winding among the marshes … while the Rukarara leaps over stones and stumps like an unbridled flood, fresh and clear as youth. (Caput Nili, letter XXVI)

As Kandt noted, the Rukarara’s current was much stronger than that of the Mwogo, which suggested that he should follow the Rukarara to reach the possible source of the Nile. While this was the obvious choice, it didn’t appeal to him, for the source of Rukarara was reputed to be located in the middle of “a harsh, inaccessible jungle.” But the expedition pushed forward nevertheless, hugging the river’s increasingly steep banks as closely as it could. The houses, formerly so numerous, became scarce; on the fifth day, they disappeared entirely as the expedition penetrated “into the darkness of the virgin forest.” The chill surprised him, and the members of his caravan even more so: one servant boy woke Kandt in a panic to show him his water bucket, covered “with a layer of ice an inch thick.” In the morning, frost whitened the grass and trees, and on the following nights, Kandt abandoned his tent to sleep between two large fires, where they installed his bed.

It was in mid-August that Kandt finally reached his goal:

At that point, the Rukarara was no more than a rivulet about twelve inches wide, springing from a gorge with no egress, embedded in lush vegetation. I went in the next day with a native and several of my men. It was very difficult. It took us nearly an hour to go five hundred feet. But with hatchets and machetes, we managed to clear ourselves a path, wading into the swamp up to our waists, advancing on all fours in the glacial waters, painstakingly climbing the gorge; after several hours of punishing efforts, exhausted, soaked, and covered in mud from head to toe, we reached a small basin at the bottom of the narrow pass from which the source emerged from the earth, not bubbling up, but drop by drop: CAPUT NILI. (Caput Nili, letter XXVI)

In reality, judging from the tourist map I have here in front of me, the source that Kandt had just discovered was not that of the Rukarara but of one of its minor tributaries. The map labels it “Kandt’s Source”; the actual source of the Rukarara is starred as the “Source of the Nile” a bit farther north.

I’ll leave Dr. Richard Kandt to his fate, he who, before the missionaries, was the only European to live in Rwanda: botanist, cartographer, unofficial resident on behalf of the German authorities, and then, in 1907, official Imperial Resident, mainstay of Musinga’s power, and founder of Kigali, where you can visit his restored home (now the Kandt House Museum); on holiday in Germany when World War I broke out, called up for service, gassed on the Eastern Front; he succumbed in the military hospital in Nuremberg on April 29, 1918.

I’d rather imagine Richard Kandt in his camp in Rwanda: Night has fallen. The songs, laughter, and shouts of the porters, exhausted after a long day’s march, slowly die down. He has taken the bath that his servant boy has drawn for him, dined absent-mindedly on a filet of the antelope he killed the day before. As every day, he tries to read a page of Nietzsche, whom he greatly admires, but Zarathustra’s words get jumbled as Kandt’s thoughts drift back to the troubling encounters he’s been having since entering Rwanda. Who are these people, whose “discreet, reserved, serious, even blasé attitude” contrasts so sharply with the open, exuberant welcome he’d received up to now? And why are those young dandies of the court so disdainful of the richly brocaded silk fabrics, “the long Arab cloaks, the short multicolored jackets ornamented with rich silver threads,” and even the red uniforms of the Prussian hussars that he offers them? Why do they prefer “fabrics with dark, discreet patterns, preferably monochromatic”? Are they the barbarians that the members of Kandt’s caravan laugh about, who don’t know the value of precious silks and opt instead for simple cottons? Or are they like that aristocratic woman to whom Kandt described “magnificent Parisian finery,” and who answered that the jewelry was no doubt very beautiful but “more suited to a banker’s wife”!

Spotting the royal residence from the top of the cliff, why did he feel like a pilgrim making a long, arduous trek to the holy city?

Finally we scaled the last cliff and from its summit we saw the sovereign’s residence on the opposite crest. It’s a vast complex of round huts with a close tangle of interwoven enclosures surrounding large courtyards. The posts of the enclosures are fig trees which have taken root and which, with their large crowns of leafage, give the ensemble an attractive color. Huts of all sorts form a huge circle on the crests and slopes of the hills, the largest ones for the nobles, the smallest for the vassals … But your eye is constantly drawn back to the residence itself, which provokes a strange impression and awakens in me familiar images coming from hazy memories, without my being able to determine what period in my past they relate to. I search my memory during a brief rest stop the caravan takes to regroup. I rack my brains, and am not comforted by the faces that emerge as if from a long sleep, from a buried corner of my mind …

And finally I’m overcome by a feeling that has come to me several times during this journey, when I’ve witnessed particularly strange things: the dark, oppressive feeling that I’ve already seen and felt all of this in another, forgotten life. (Caput Nili, letter XXIII)

When he finally enters the royal enclosure, it’s like penetrating a medieval fortress: “The imagination begins working again and, in that remote part of Africa, brings to life the pennants of knights and pages, as if they were springing from ancient prints or books.”

But those “hazy memories,” the “dark, oppressive feeling” that Richard Kandt experiences—and reproves, since he is of course convinced of his superiority as a white man, not to mention a citizen of the German Empire—vis-à-vis those “Watutsi giants,” are but the funhouse-mirror image by which Europeans will constantly view Rwanda and its inhabitants. The greatest misfortune to have befallen Rwandans is to live at the source of the Nile, where, since antiquity, a myth had risen of a primordial land, a lost, unattainable paradise. To seek out the sources of the Nile, Caput Nili quaerere, was apparently, for the Romans, an expression that meant “to seek the impossible.” Rwanda was the one of the last remaining blank zones on the map of Africa that explorers delivered to colonialization. Maybe, just maybe, this final terra incognita harbored the last marvels, the last Mysteries, of a continent that was otherwise profaned by the sordid banality of colonial life. At the sources of the Nile, one could invent—short of actually encountering them—creatures straight out of Fables, a quasiprimordial race able to reenchant an Africa that had been debased by industry and mercantilism. And the Tutsi, so tall, with such elegant features, such imposing bearing, were tailor-made to play the part … Instead of Rwandans, one saw Egyptians directly descended from the pharaohs, Ethiopians related to the Queen of Sheba, Jews split off from the ten lost tribes of Israel, Coptic Christians who just needed to have their memories jogged …

So did Dr. Richard Kandt, born Kantorowicz—Jewish, intellectual, and a solitary explorer to boot, and for all those reasons subject to the sly contempt of soldiers and missionaries[2]—really come so close to recognizing those fascinating, disquieting Tutsi as distant brothers? Were the huts of Mukingo really, for him, a ghostly image of Jerusalem?

***

I note with relief and a twinge of disappointment that the Rukarara has today returned to the ranks of ordinary rivers. They built a hydroelectric plant on it, which doesn’t seem to be yielding as much as anticipated, but at least the people who live nearby might someday hope to enjoy the benefits of electricity: the schoolchild studying under bright neon lights, the young intellectual recharging his phone, the rich man and his cronies spending their evenings guzzling shish kebabs and beer served by a charming young Rwandan girl, in front of the TV.

The source of the Nile itself is now accessible to tourists. A tour operator can give you directions. You leave from the Gisovu Tea Estate, but it’s best to telephone twenty-four hours in advance to reserve a guide. It is recommended to go up to Gisovu from Kibuye on the edge of Lake Kivu rather than from Gikongoro. From Gisovu, a path leads you to the source (the real source, not Kandt’s) in less than an hour. We’re assured that the walk is not strenuous.

[1] It’s regrettable, for Rwandans and for anyone interested in Rwanda who, like me, doesn’t read German, that this book—Caput Nili, eine empfindsame Reise zu den Quellen des Nils (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1904)—has not yet been translated. Only a few excerpts were quoted in French by Bernard Lugan in the journal Études rwandaises (vol. XIV, October 1980), published by the Université Nationale du Rwanda. I’m grateful to my friend Henri Moncomble, a professor of German, for translating the excerpts from letters I, XXIII, and XXVI of Caput Nili quoted in this piece.

[2] In his biography of Monsignor Classe, Un audacieux pacifique (Namur: Grands Lacs, “Collection Lavigerie,” 1948), Father A. Van Overschelde dips his pen into the most anti-Semitic of inks to sketch a portrait of Kandt: “Richard Kandt was a Jew, very intelligent, a minor poet, short, stunted, with olive skin. The bile that caused this color was not merely beneath the skin: he was evil. His stature and perhaps also his ancestral habits did not incline him to act openly. He excelled at destroying from the shadows, with little swipes reminiscent of felines” (70).

Translated from French by Mark Polizzotti.

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