Kigali

View of downtown Kigali 

This has been one of the most intense, exciting, exhausting, enlightening, and stimulating trips I’ve experienced in a long time. The sheer variety of enduring friendships and relationships at the ICETE consultation in Nairobi still rings in my mind. I am truly blessed to be relating to such interesting, gifted, creative people. 

I write from the Rwandan capital city, the “city of a thousand hills.” The French version of this name, la ville des mille collines, is a truly fitting descriptor of the city, which flows over hills and valleys, knit together by continuously curving roads. The downtown area sits high on one hill, the airport on another, and the diplomatic and administrative center on another. Like all African cities, it has a vibrant street life, yet the pace is distinctly less harried than Nairobi, Accra, or Lagos. If there is something that really strikes me about Kigali, it is its orderliness. This impression bases itself in the tree-lined avenues, the seemingly spotlessly clean streets and gutters, and the overall tidiness of the place.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon – the first free hours I’ve had on this trip – wandering through a market district near my guest house on the edge of town. The streets were packed with tiny cell phone shops, a block of papeteries (the English “paper shop” just doesn’t capture this), hole-in-the-wall tea rooms and restaurants, tailors, and barber shops/beauty salons. I continue to be impressed with African sign shops as an art form. Some of them are truly spectacular. Africa – in all of its diversity – is so full of life.

A few months ago, I wrote from Khartoum how the words “the separation” (the 2011 split of South Sudan from the north) surfaced so frequently in conversation, reflecting a kind of mass wound to the national psyche. You can’t engage in too many conversations in Rwanda before the words “the genocide” enter in, reflecting a national psychic trauma that makes most others look like a paper cut. Only 18 years have passed since this country literally tore itself apart. The orderliness of Kigali today stands in stark contrast. But it’s here, lurking beneath the surface, and reminding us of our humanity. To make any further commentary upon this seems somewhere beyond trite.