Kigali is not easy to photograph. I mentioned this before, a little bit, in the post about Nyabugogo. People do not always like to be photographed, for whatever reason, and that kind of restricts the things I feel comfortable brazenly pointing a camera at.
This is also a city where there is not really a lot in the way of tourist attractions. There are a couple of memorials, one other museum that I know of and precious few public parks or monuments.
So the things that are worth photographing in Kigali—and there are a lot of them—usually relate to the culture of the city, and the frame invariably includes the people who make that culture what it is!
A great case-in-point is the market, a wonderful environment that is exquisitely different from anything I have experienced elsewhere. I want to take pictures to remember it by, and to show my friends and family. People are sometimes reluctant to be in the pictures, and after being so turned down once I’m often too timid to walk a bit and immediately ask again. And a photograph of the interior of, say, Nyabugogo Market without people in it is not only implausible—the guidebook aptly describes it as “frenetic”—but would also fail to adequately portray that environment.
I was thinking about this today because of a walk I took. I live in Nyakabanda, but to catch minibus taxis I usually walk to Nyamirambo, another district the boundary with which is only a few blocks away. I then take one of several minibus lines that run the length of Nyamirambo and drop off in the city.
Nyamirambo is an area that is distinctive for a variety of reasons. I read that it is the oldest inhabited part of present-day Kigali, which was not founded as an urban area until 1907. It is now home to the highest concentration of Muslims in Rwanda. It is also one of the livelier parts of the city: full of small shops and music and diverse backgrounds, and one of not very many places here where people can be found walking the streets after 9:00 or 10:00 p.m.
I have seen Nyamirambo go by from the windows of many different kinds of vehicles now—it is almost every day that I go in the direction of Town for at least a little while, and that inevitably means driving the length of the Boulevard de Nyamirambo. I have noticed the things passing by, often with great interest, but I realized that I had never actually seen them up-close.
So I decided to explore on foot. It is not a long walk, and once I got past the areas I had walked around before there was something interesting on every corner. A length of a dozen blocks or so of the Boulevard de Nyamirambo, and a couple of blocks on either side, are packed with small shops: almost all one story, many just one small room. Lots of them are colorfully painted on the outside, and clever names are common—my favorite is probably Shalom Saloon, but I should really write some of the others down.
The more I walked, the more it seemed like the stores actually repeated themselves. It actually reminded me of a video-game environment where a few templates for shops had been designed and then drawn from to randomly fill a huge number of spots. The proportion of stores that were papeteries (stationery), video stores/studios, hair salons, butchers, Internet cafés, alimentations (deli-ish things), bijouteries (clothing?) and quincailleries (no idea on this one) was probably upwards of 90%. Then again, I did not go into many of them, and I am sure there is more variety than is apparent. What is interesting is to think that these are the archetypes of things that the community needs to survive, and apparently they are sufficient for it.
The neighborhood does feel livelier than other places I have been: certainly more so than Town, and its competition comes mainly from the markets at Nyabugogo and Kicukiro. It also feels substantially less orderly, though not much less secure. I walked around for about an hour and never felt uncomfortable. The only things that made me feel the tiniest bit antsy were the people staring at me, and that happens everywhere (though admittedly more here, because there are more people in the street).
This gets me back to the earlier point. The environment in this place, to me at least, is very much worth taking pictures of. In addition to being interesting on its own, it represents an interesting contrast between the general orderliness of this city and the lively African feel of this particular neighborhood. But a key factor there is the presence of people—not huge crowds like in Times Square, but enough that any well-framed shot would feature several at least walking on the sidewalk and several more sitting outside shops. And they might not all take kindly to being subjects.
I should really just try pointing the camera and see who reacts. Or maybe ask permission. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe I could even shoot out the window of a minibus. Whatever my strategy, I do plan to go back to Nyamirambo on foot and get to know some of the stores I just walked past: I bought some candy and popped into a video store briefly, but I didn’t stick around much anywhere for the sake of getting home before sundown.
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