I don’t know whether this will be the only post for today, but it occurred to me that there were a bunch of observations I had made about Kigali that I had not recorded anywhere. Here are some of them.
Update: Yes, this will be the only post for the day: I spent all of the afternoon studying a grammar of Kinyarwanda, trying to understand the placement of dummy vowels in loanwords. I think I understand it, and I think the interpretation I came up with makes more sense than what the author said. I would write more, but I do not think many people are interested and typesetting phonological rules well is really hard!
Unpaved Roads
Main roads are paved throughout the city. In the city center, and in upscale areas like Kacyiru and Remera, most of the rest are too. In Nyamirambo and in Nyakabanda, where I am living, it is only the main roads. The rest are clear of grass and stuff, but are covered with a kind of reddish dirt that I have only otherwise seen in Arizona. I think this is because of high iron content, a feature of soils in many parts of Africa that hinders agricultural potential but is very distinctive. The unpaved roads vary from pretty flat to exceedingly uneven, often seeming like they are just rock-formations smoothed only by human feet.
This really takes a toll on motor vehicles, which are often old and usually look even older. I was talking to a guy about cars, and he agreed that Toyotas were really reliable, but he was shocked to hear that my family had one that still functioned after ten years!
Birds
They are everywhere, and they are beautiful. There are some that are the size of hawks, though differently colored (black and white), called ibisiiga. There are cranes, called imisaâmbi, that are really majestic in the way they fly: legs splayed out, body undulating with each beat of their wings, with the legs swinging forward to grasp branches as they land—and with a wingspan of about 3 feet. There are birds that look like sparrows, except a bit larger and with bright orange beaks; I think these are called intaâshya.
Rwanda is apparently a birdwatching hotspot, with hundreds of uncommon species, but what amazes me is the sheer prevalence of just a few very large, very attractive ones in an urban area. The irony is that the songs of these birds each sound like a different part of a very old car: a screeching brake, an engine struggling to start from a failing ignition, a horn that can no longer hold a constant pitch. I think it’s worth it, though!
Beggars
There are a lot of them; it might be comparable to the number of homeless people in Midtown, Manhattan, but it tends to be sadder. First, in the U.S. there is at least a pretty well-developed infrastructure of food pantries, shelters and programs to provide the homeless with basic needs, as well as a government that can offer certain public goods that do not exist in Rwanda. Second, the proportion of these people who are somehow maimed—missing limbs, physically disfigured or visibly injured—is shocking. This, in addition to the proportion of women and especially single mothers living on the street, makes more sense (though is no less sad) in light of this country’s recent history. Foreigners and well dressed Rwandans especially get asked for money a lot; it is hard to say no, and also much easier to give a small amount that can go a long way.
Clothing
The range of clothing one sees walking around Kigali is fascinating. Probably a majority of people, especially men, wear standard Western clothes: T-shirts and jeans (never shorts). I get the feeling that many of the shirts, especially, are sold second-hand via American thrift shops. (These are exceedingly questionable, by the way: clothing is one thing Africans have always had, and flooding the market with cheap, trashy hand-me-downs has served to profit Americans and destroy local textile industries.) The shirts often have English writing on them, perhaps a sports-team’s logo, maybe a sarcastic comment: the most awkward I have seen said “I ♥ FEMALE ORGASMS.”
There are also a fair number of people who wear Western business attire, especially in the city center. Traditional-looking African textiles are all but nonexistent among men, and somewhat uncommon but still prominent among women. Characterized by bright colors and beautiful patterns, I see them much more away from the urban part of the city, and still much more among older women. On the opposite end, one sometimes sees a foreigner wearing foreigner-clothes: tank-tops, shorts, whatever. Finally, there is a small but visible Muslim population, especially in Nyamirambo, and people of both genders wearing religious attire are not uncommon.
People With Stuff on Their Heads
You know the stereotype. This one is true. It is really impressive. In commercial areas, it is very common to see women, especially, carrying baskets or cartons on their head, with far too much in them to appear safe—and they somehow manage to maneuver themselves through crowded areas and uneven terrain. I have never seen one lose her balance, and even using a hand to help balance is uncommon.
The small number of men that do this would still be really notable in the U.S. The most impressive feat I have seen, actually, was a guy who jogged down the a hill carrying eleven twin mattresses on his head (I counted), turned a sharp corner and did not lose a single one.
Telephones
The way cell phones work here is interesting, and very different from what I am used to. At least for a majority of people, there are no contracts or monthly plans. You buy a phone, which has a SIM card (simakadi) in it from one of the three main carriers (MTN, Airtel and Tigo) in it. You then load money onto the SIM card by finding a person on the street wearing a vest for your carrier, who will sell you a little paper tab that represents the amount of money requested. (These people are on almost every block, and many have cards of multiple carriers.) There is a scratch-off code on the back of the card that you dial into your phone; after dialing, a confirmation message comes confirming that the money has been loaded.
Everything, from my experience, is dirt-cheap: I can send text messages for less than 2 cents each, and make international calls for something like a dollar every fifteen minutes. Calling and texting between phones on the same carrier, though, is even cheaper, and most phones have multiple SIM card slots. This leads to many people putting two or even three SIM cards in their phones, and being careful only to call numbers on their own networks. It is fascinating how this system has arisen that so accommodates an information-hungry but still cash-poor society.
Foreigners
Rwanda has a large expatriate population for an African country, for a number of reasons. First, and maybe most importantly, there are many foreign humanitarian workers who came on the wave of international penance following the Genocide. Second, because of the economic progress the country has made, there are a decent number of foreigners who have come here for business purposes, to staff branches of international corporations or to fill spots at Rwandan companies for which there are not yet enough qualified Rwandans. Finally, for both of the above reasons and also the lovely climate and welcoming people, there is a significant population of foreigners who come for adventure or novelty, to stay for some time and then move on.
One interesting consequence of this is that white people in Kigali are disproportionately young, educated, socially conscious and upper-middle-class, or else well-off businesspeople. This does not exactly give Rwandans the nuanced perspective they would get by actually visiting, say, America, and understandably contributes to the perspective that all bazuûngu are rich.
Still, foreigners are a small minority; there are some places one can go and find lots (e.g. hotels, or Bourbon Coffee with its free Wi-Fi), but walking around central Kigali for several hours last week I think I saw four. In rich areas, probably more; in Nyamirambo and Nyakabanda, next to none.
Possibly more common than Euro-Americans, at least in the contexts in which average Rwandans will see them, are people who come from India and the Middle East to open businesses. There are lots of shops, foreign exchange bureaux and food stores owned by Indians or Arabs, sometimes Kinyarwanda-speaking, sometimes not. Uncommon but increasingly prominent are East Asians, especially those coming to work on or oversee one of several high-profile Chinese-funded construction projects in the city.
Security
In all of the residential areas I have been to (admittedly not a representative sample of the whole city), it is customary for properties to be walled and gated. The gates are usually of thin sheet-metal, and the walls vary widely from semi-improvised bamboo fences to very solid brick walls. In my experience, this is out of concern for security; perhaps it is also Genocide-related, I do not know. In a way, it reminds me of the disturbing paranoia I saw in Houghton Estates, Killarney and other rich, insular suburbs of Johannesburg (where every house is surrounded by fortress-like walls with electric fences, advanced security systems and 24-hour guards). There are some key differences, though: those South African communities have paved roads and well-funded police forces, and given the extent to which they invested in their security they probably don’t actually have too much to be concerned about. Here, there is real poverty, and police presence (during the day, at least) is nonexistent. That said, the security is also a lot less rigid: the walls are smaller, the gates are often open and there are lots of people who walk freely on the street without concern.
In the central business district of Kigali, policemen are very visible; they look very official, well-groomed with nicely ironed uniforms. They are kind of like policemen in the U.S., except they patrol on foot and carry assault rifles. It’s funny that that does actually make me feel safer: maybe not the rifle itself, but the visibility of someone whose job it is to make sure nothing goes wrong. At night, they are supplemented by soldiers, who patrol on foot, even in the more removed places near where I live. It is the kind of security one sees around September 11 in the U.S., or at large public events. Again, it actually does make me feel safer.
The more modern shopping centers, banks and supermarkets usually have metal-detectors and security guards at the entrances, kind of like very small-scale airport security. It kind of mystifies me: generally, one puts his bag in a little basket next to the metal-detector but does not empty his pockets, then walks through, picks up the bag and moves on. I have set off every single one I have walked through; sometimes a guy takes a handheld device and confirms that I do indeed have metal things in both of my pockets; sometimes he doesn’t. Either way, they all just smile and take it on faith that it’s a camera and a cell phone. It is, of course, but they never check, and they don’t even look in the bag. I suppose the appearance of security is still meaningful to people, but it seems like an awfully expensive placebo and I wonder whether it has ever actually foiled anything.
Insects and Other Vermin
They are not as much of a problem as I had thought they would be. There are mosquitos, yes, and sleeping under a net is a responsible thing to do given the possibility of malaria. At least at this time of year, though (which is admittedly the dry season), the quantities of mosquitos we see are really tame in comparison with upstate New York.
There are also flies, which might be bigger than American ones but don’t seem to do much differently. And I saw bees at the market yesterday, which looked a lot like American honeybees. In Nyamata, outside the city, I did see a couple of frighteningly large beetles or wasps or something, but they didn’t try anything. And I have seen a few spiders, though not really scary ones. There are also butterflies, which are nice.
It’s an urban area. I am sure they must have rats and cockroaches, but for whatever reason I have not seen any. I have seen a couple of lizards, or geckos, or something: 6-inch-long reptiles that like to climb on walls. Somehow I am not as concerned about them as I would be about rodents or arthropods; in any case I have only seen one in the house, which seemed content to rest behind a picture-frame in the living-room until I stopped paying attention.
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