SOMETHING was required to explain why the entire Rwagasana family—Pascaline, Antoine, and their children who were still living in Burundi—needed to come to America immediately. The fact that they were in mortal danger was not an acceptable argument. From America, they would make their way to a third country, where other family members were already living, and there they would ask for political asylum. It wasn’t possible to go to that country directly, because it was flooded with asylum applicants from disintegrating Third World countries and had stopped giving visas to them. So we scheduled a wedding. Janvier, the Rwagasanas’ fourth child, who had immigrated to the New World five years earlier, was marrying an American girl. I drafted a letter to the vice-consul in Bujumbura explaining that we would be financially responsible for the Rwagasanas during their visit to the United States. (If only one or two people had been going toJanvier’s wedding, it probably wouldn’t have been necessary for me to go to Bujumbura in person, but the whole family was a tall order.)

    As it happens, twenty-one years earlier the Rwagasanas had used a marriage to escape from Rwanda. Antoine had then been a secondary-school forestry teacher and Pascaline had been working in a bank An Nvanza where the last king had held court. Their four eldest children had been born by then, and they had built a four-bedroom house. They were bien, as well-off as possible for Tutsis in postcolonial Rwanda. The bottom line was that they were alive, having survived massacres in ‘59, ‘60, ‘63, and ‘67: Antoine’s father had been killed and mother and a younger brother had been imprisoned in the last flareup.

     The friction between the Hums and the Tutsis goes back centuries. Rwanda and Burundi were independent kingdoms until 1899, when they became colonies of Germany; after the First World \Var, Belgium took them over. The Tutsis had been the ruling class, and the colonial administrators, in both colo riles. In 1959. as Rwanda looked toward independence, the Hums began killing Tutsi chiefs and subchiefs, burning Tutsis’ huts, and chopping off their feet—literally cutting them down to size. in April, 1973, the Rwagasanas, having barely escaped a pogrom two months earlier, learned that another pangawielding mob was headed their way. There wasn’t even time to pack. They hired a Hutu with a truck to drive them to "a wedding in Kigali.” Antoine and his two brothers rode in front, and Pascaline, her widowed mother-in-law, Irene (who by then was out of prison), and the four children in back. After some distance Antoine’s brother Damasone held a knife to the driver, and said. "I don’t want to kill you. We are just trying to save our family. We aren’t going to Kigali Drive us to Burundi.”

     When they reached the border, they found the guard asleep. Albert, the third brother, who could pass for a Hutu, slapped him awake and asked impatiently, Has Minister Sezirahiga passed?” Sezirahiga was the minister in charge of carrying out the "social revolution”—as the purge of Tutsis was euphemistically called—in southern Rwanda. The guard didn’t know what to say. “I’ll bet he passed here,” Albert went on. “And you were asleep! And how could you let these Tutsis escape? Open the gate immediatelv. So tine guard let them through.

     If zinc Rwagasanas had thought that Burundi would be an improvement, they were sadly mistaken. “When we came here, we found what we had left, only in reverse," Pascaline recalls. “The soldiers made Hum functionaries carry our bags ten kilometres, to a military camp, because, the commandant said, ‘your brothers drove these people here.’ “ The year before, Burundi had had a “social revolution” of its own—a Hutu insurrection followed by devastating reprisals on the civilian population, and in the end a total of about a hundred and fifty thousand Burundians lost their lives. The Hutu elite—all those with a secondary-school education or who were prominent in any way—had practically been wiped out, so there were openings for the refugee Rwandan intellectuals and former Rwandan government officials who were pouring into Bujumbura. By June, Antoine had found work, as the manager of a Belgian-owned coffee plantation. He knew he could be replaced by a qualified Burundian at any time, but he lasted in this job until 1991, when there were massacres in Burundi for the third year in a row. In that particular area, long a hotbed of Hutu rebel activity, the Army was merciless: Hutus were bayonetted on the way to Mass. The horrified Belgian coffee-growers sold the plantation to some Burundians, who replaced Antoine and promptly ran the plantation into the ground.

JEAN and I got off the bus at our destination and walked through the market, where several dozen women were selling fish, banana beer, clothes, and produce they had grown in the lush fields outside the town and brought to the market in baskets on their heads, with their babies strapped to their backs. A procession oflyre-homed Ankole cattle ambled by. We found Pascaline, a short, solid woman of fifty-two with a frank, expressive face, sitting at a sewing machine in a dress shop, just off the market, which she owned in partnership with two friends. Pascaline had come to our wedding, in 1990—a three-day blast in a Banyarwanda refugee village in Uganda, which was where my wife grew up.

     The Rwagasanas lived on the other side of the market, in the quartier commercial—a mixed neighborhood of Zaireans, Banyarwanda, and mostly Hum Burundians—in a beautiful house behind a hedge. They had built the house in 1983. It had a gracefully roofed front porch, but most of the time everyone sat on the cozy back porch, off the kitchen. The walls were brown stucco, the roof corrugated iron sheeting. The house had running water, electricity, a television, and a telephone; it was one of the nicest in town. Jean wasn’t sure that Pascaline had accepted the idea of losing everything for a second time. There might have to be a chaude discussion. I told Pascaline that I had staved up the previous night reading about the gruesome history of postcolonial Burundi— an account of one brutally crushed Hutu insurrection after another—and had been forced to conclude that things weren't going to get better anytime soon. I knew that each member of the family had had his or her moment. Jean’s had been on the bus in Bwiza two weeks earlier. One of his sisters had been raped at school by two Hutu boys some years ago, then beaten to a pulp and left for dead. Last October 22nd, the day after President Ndadave’s assassination, a mob carrying pangas had stormed the parochial school that Gilbert, the fifteenyear-old. attended. One of the priests had given a rifle to a student whose father was in the Army and who knew how to shoott. and the student had driven off the attackers, killing one. Up the road. in the commune of Kibimba, a Hum headmaster had locked sixty-four of his Tutsi students in a room, doused it gasoline and set it on fire, burning them alive. "I don’t think there is really any choice,” T said to Pascaline. “You cant stay here.”
I know that we must go, for the sake of the children,” she said. “But it isn’t going to be easy, starting again at zero at our age. I’ve always worked for myself, and I can’t stand being sans activité.”
Antoine, in his fifties, was already considered an elder, and was addressed by the respectftul title muzehe. What was he going to do, away from his coffee bushes and his cows? Thinking of a teen-age relative of theirs who had hanged himself in the late eighties in the country where they would be seeking asylum, I said, “No, it isn’t going to be easy. You’ll be blacks in a white society, second-class citizens.”

     “That won’t be anything new,” Pascaline said. “As Banyarwanda, we have known nothing but discrimination since we came here. All in all, I think I would rather be discriminated against by whites. At least you know where you stand.”

     “And the winters are brutal,” I continued. “The weakness of the light can lead to depression.”
“Is it true that half of this country’s land surface is covered with ice?” Jean asked.

   I felt like the Angel of Exile, who had come to take the Rwagasanas away from everything they knew. But it wasn’t as if they hadn’t already lost their country twenty years ago. At least, they would have each other, and a chance, at last, to lead a decent, normal life.

     SINCE its bloody “pacification” three years earlier, the Rwagasanas’ province had been calm. Only thirty-five people had been killed in the province following the October outbreak; most of the carnage had taken place in eastern Burundi. Still, the situation for the Rwagasanas remained very threatening. People had stopped coming to Pascaline’s petit cabaret—two thatched huts in the front yard, which had been the town’s most popular bar. She couldn’t even shop in the market anymore—the women, who were Hutus, would take her money and then not give her the food—so the Zairean house girl made the purchases. Antoine didn’t dare to check on his thirty cows, which grazed on ten lush acres outside the town. For three of the past seven months, the couple had slept in the bush, as they had in 1989 and again in 1991, and for another two-month stretch they had stayed locked in the house, not leaving it even once. In the middle of the night, people would throw stones onto the roof and shout, “We’re going to get this house!” In January, some Hutu neighbors reported to the provincial authorities that Pascaline and Antoine had put up Paul Kagame, the commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. That was a malicious lie, whose purpose was to discredit the Rwagasanas.

   ‘We are marked,” Jean said.
    “Yes,” his father said, adding, “We are alone.”

     The sad thing was that Antoine and Pascaline were apolitical country people, who had no use for the Hutu-Tutsi mind-set Antoine never even mentioned that six of his brothers and sisters and their spouses and children—twenty-eight relatives in all—had just been killed in Rwana; I learned this later from his son. In fact, his closest friend was a Hutu named Romain. Romain had been Antoine’s student in Rwanda as a refugee from Burundi, after fleeing the 1972 purge of Hutus. Now he was a powerful man, one of the local deputies of the Hutu-dominated party that had come into power last August. The party had been pressuring him to break off his friendship with his old teacher, Romain told me that evening as we sat drinking beer in the deserted cabaret. “But I refuse Such a friendship as the one that existed between Antoine and Romain was not frequent,” they both admitted. it was as rare as a white man and a black man becoming bosom buddies in the Old South.

      Romain's s wife, Odette, was one of Pascaline’s partners in the dress shop. Odette’s mother was a Tutsi, and Odette herself looked sufficiently Tutsi to have been in danger during the October killing spree. so she had fled with her children to Rwanda (which was other relatively safe but where, if they had staved, they would certainly have been killed), and Pascaline had sent them food and money. No one can unfriendship,” Pascaline said, chuckling. How could I be helping Hurus in my former country, from which I had been driven out by Hutus?" This friendship gave the Rwagasanas a measure of protection that the other Banvarwanda in the commune didn’t have. The others, who had lived farther out in the countryside, had all lost their homes to arson and were now camped near the Army barracks down the road.

     The family’s cows could be sold for only a third of what they were worth— not even fifty dollars a head—and only through an intermediary. They barely paid for their keep with the milk they gave but in the Tutsi culture cows were symbols of wealth. Antoine would not leave until they had been properly disposed ot A Hum cattle-keeper had told Antione, We aren’t going to give you mvthinz for your cows, because we’re going get them anyway.”

      Pascaline asked if she could take her best plates the white porcelain ones with gold trim, which she kept in the dining-room cupboard. The answer could only be no, and someone said, “It has to look as if you were just coming for a visit.” Antoine went around with me as I took pictures of each room and then of the outside of the house from different angles. It was important to have a record of it for futurc generations.

       THE Rwagasanas’ refugee status, like that of the hundreds of thousands of Banyarwanda who have been living in Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zaire, many of them since 1959, was permanent and immutable. The Banyarwanda were not allowed to have passports— only travel documents, or titres de voyage. It was very difficult to get an American visa with a titre de voyage, so Jean had been trying to get Burundian passports for the family. But the process wasn’t as far along as I’d hoped. He had only just “penetrated the milieu,” as he put it. The afternoon I arrived in Bujumbura, he and I had gone to see a Banyarwanda woman he knew in the Asian quarter, and she put him in touch with a Burundian woman who had a friend in the Department of National Documentation and Migrations who could fix us up with the necessary passports for seven hundred dollars. That evening, Jean went to see the go-between, and gave her three hundred and fifty dollars as a down payment, the balance to be paid upon delivery of the passports, which the woman assured Jean would be ready in two days.

      Meanwhile, I reported to the American Embassy, which had been pared down to essential personnel; families and dependents had been flown home a week earlier. I met the consular officer who would decide whether to issue visas to the Rwagasanas. She had been up for three days straight helping with the evacuation of two hundred and eighty-four Americans from Kigali, and she looked beat. I told her that my wife’s relations wanted to come to America for a wedding and would be applying for visas, and she said, “Well, they’d better have proof of ties. They need to convince me they’re coming back to Burundi. I won’t take their word for it.”

      “My impression is that they’re not going to cut us any slack,” I told Jean that evening. “So your documents will have to be impeccable. You’re going to have to get the deeds to the house and the land, and anything else that will show you have a reason to return.” Most of the Burundians who flocked to the American Embassy on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings to apply for visas, I discovered by chatting with them in the waiting room, had fishy stories supported by spurious documents, and I later learned that most of them were turned down. Some of the applicants, whose passports were hot off the presses and were possibly forged, were told by the consular officer to come back after they had travelled to a few other countries. But this was not an option for the Rwagasanas. They had to get out now, and not look back. Refugees from Rwanda—including interahamwe—were pouring into their province, and the situation was heating up.
 

click here to read the next page