8 Nyákáanga 2013—Mu Isókô ryáá Nyabugogo

Yesterday, I inadvertently reenacted a previous year’s A.L.P. Theater Night skit with my comical moto-ride to the wedding ceremony. Today, more intentionally, I experienced another one: this past spring’s, about an American visitor who goes to Nyabugogo Market in Kigali with his Rwandan friends.

Once again, there were some discrepancies in plot: the skit involved an argument between clothing-vendors and, ultimately, a call to the police. While this would have been entertaining, I was also just fine with all of the sellers getting along with each other.

So I met a friend there, and we walked around a bit. Unlike me, she had actually come to shop, so while she was trying on clothes I got to wander a bit. I did buy two things: a stupid American T-shirt with “PLAYER ONE” written on it in Galaga targets (Fr. 4,000/$6) and a Red Sox cap (Fr. 2,000/$3). I wanted these as novelties: American clothing that made its way all the way to Africa, and will now come back. I had neither the interest nor the room in my suitcase to seriously shop for clothing.

So I got to explore: my companion was buying clothing, so I did not want to wander too far from there. She later told me that this kind of behavior raises eyebrows: for someone to walk around in a market setting without buying anything is seen as suspicious. I do not get the reasoning, but she said people were commenting about it.

I did not notice any of that. Lots of vendors did try to sell me their stocks, and many asked what I was looking for. This seemed like expected, behavior; they were trying to be helpful, I thought, and I didn’t get the suspicion vibe. Similarly, I have gotten quite used to being stared at wherever I go in Rwanda, so that did not set off any alarm bells either. I guess these are the advantages of exploring with a Rwandan.

I could understand being a little bit confused. I did not want to rush the fitting process, so I tried to radiate out from my current location, seeing what was for sale and then moving on, then radiating back every few minutes. Once I found what looked like logical boundaries, I did not go farther in those directions—I did not want to get lost, after all, or stray too far. The result was that, on a couple of occasions, I did circle back along the same routes several times.

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The Market at Nyabugogo is a maze. It is also enormous. The facility itself is a repurposed prison, which explains a lot about the layout: solid brick walls on the outside; a dank interior lit through the holes in the corrugated metal roof; several distinct blocks of stalls connected by a small number of corridors; small stalls, situated along aisles, which with that knowledge really do look like cells without doors.

I really wanted to take pictures, but people were quite reluctant to be photographed. The guidebook had warned about this, and when I gestured that I wanted to photograph people tended to wave their fingers. J. (the friend) explained that there is a silly belief that tourists will somehow try to sell the photos they take, and many people feel they are being wronged if they do not share in the profit. I have to wonder where that impression comes from, but it is apparently very prevalent.

(Funny story: At one point a guy saw I was carrying a camera and asked how much it was worth, and then he actually tried to buy it from me. I explained, a little bit confused, that I was not, in fact, selling it. Then I tried to take his picture. Oya, said his finger.)

We only saw a small portion of the whole market, which is several block-lengths long and several more wide. I was astonished by the range of materials I saw on display just in that area, though: bags, shoes, clothing and bedding, all in just about every variety imaginable. Other parts of the market have food, crafts, spare parts, raw materials, toys, furniture and all manner of other things. I had the strong feeling, walking around, that one could find literally anything in that market with enough determination. I guess I’ll just have to go back!

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If my morning was filled with a pretty African experience, my evening was quite the opposite: it was trivia night at Sol e Luna, an Italian restaurant near the Rwanda Development Board at the western edge of Remera. I met my friends from Harvard and we competed, as a team of six, with over a dozen other teams—of which maybe two included someone of African descent.

The enormous expat population has nourished a number of muzuûngu-oriented restaurants in Kigali, which usually serve high-quality, expensive foreign cuisine. This was my first visit to one—in the name of breadth of experience, perhaps—but, given that trivia nights happen every Monday, it likely will not be my last.

The structure is as follows: there is a trivia quiz of about 50 questions, developed by the winners of the previous week’s competition. Teams may compete with up to six people. This begins with a “fun round,” a printed sheet given to each time with matching-columns or fill-in-the-blank questions in a few categories. The remainder of the questions are read out by a quizmaster, and answers are written on the back of the aforementioned sheet.

There were some good questions. I was happy to see that one of the fun-round categories was “match the Virunga volcano with its literal Kinyarwanda meaning.” (I killed it.) Many of the items in the “match the uncommon word with its definition” were absurd: only three of the ten appear on Dictionary.com, and the linguist in me couldn’t help but point out that if a word does not exist in anyone’s lexicon it cannot really be classified as such. (Case-in-point: I highly doubt any English speaker has ever non-sarcastically used the word “sgiomlaireached” in conversation.) Nevertheless, I like things like that because they are an opportunity to guess at etymologies, which is fun.

I was disappointed that I did not know the expanded form of Bralirwa: Brasseries et Limonaderies du Rwanda (which I subsequently looked up in time to include in yesterday’s post), though I was happy when I guessed that imbangukiragutabara (given the explanation that it is a compound whose components mean “rush” and “help”) was Kinyarwanda for “ambulance.” In fact, the next day I saw an ambulance drive by with that exact word stretching from one end to the other on both sides (the first ambulance I have seen here, I might add).

Our team did not win, but we were somewhere in the top third. I think it would be really cool to write those questions, but just the experience of a trivia night with friends was enough fun that I will probably be back there next Monday too!