My only real activity today was to go into town for a short time, use the Wi-Fi at U.T.C., acquire my first two samples of Kenyan money—I will have to write a post about currency at some point—and then return. It was a day to catch up on writing and eat dinner at home, two things I had not done much recently. (I am noticing, quite predictably, that the amount of money I spend on things increases dramatically when I pay for my own food!)
Something occurred to me on the way back. I am kind of getting to know the way minibuses work in Kigali. From home, I know where I can catch them to get to Town and to Nyabugogo, and from Town I know at least some parts of the routes that go to Nyamirambo, Kimironko, Remera, Kacyiru and Kicukiro. This is just a small fraction of all of the lines that minibuses cover, though.
There is no map showing all of these lines. This is partially because there are so many of them that adequately showing all of the detail would be a daunting task (doable, though, I am sure—the way transit maps are made is really interesting, but that’s another story). Another reason, I think, is that they change so frequently. Finally, frankly, it all works and people here have more important things to do.
The result, though, which I think is fascinating, is that all of the nuance of Kigali’s transit infrastructure is recorded only in the collective conscience of its operators and passengers. Any given person will know a small part of it well, as I know the routes that connect Town with Nyamirambo, and have some familiarity with several other pieces. Due to detail and practicality, though, I doubt there is anyone who has an in-depth knowledge of the entire machine.
This is really interesting to me. Coming from the document-oriented United States, it is enough of a wonder to just watch it all work without being mapped or scheduled. Then I start to think of the implication that, as the routes evolve to match the demands of their passengers, the knowledge of that previous state is overwritten and, within a short period of time, disappears.
The state of any community is ephemeral, I suppose: never perfectly recorded, always changing. I am repeatedly struck, though, by just how much this is true of Kigali. It is developing so rapidly that a student returning after a year or two abroad can barely recognize the city center. Few bother to make maps, as they are inevitably out-of-date by the time they are printed. My guidebook was published in 2012, but already much of its information is not timely.
History is often very visible in this place, and painfully so: the homeless man with no limbs, the street salesman with a dent in his head. This legacy is one Rwandans are determined never to forget. With time, though, the rest is fading away: Old landmarks are still recognized, but slowly superseded by names that are more meaningful in the present. A minibus in Nyamirambo announces its route as “Gereza–ETO–Rubangura–Surufo”; the first two stops are named for sites no longer in existence, the third a very new shopping center and the last an industrial warehouse. It’s unlikely that that route was so delineated two years ago, and two years in the future it will probably have changed again. Today’s Kigali is different from yesterday’s, and it will be different again tomorrow.
Part of me wants to lament the information that lost to oblivion, but another is just content to sit back and be a spectator to this society’s development. Maybe this is just what progress looks like—and here, of all places, there is a lot to move past.
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