I told A. and V. I would be ready to go at noon on Tuesday; we would all have to eat lunch early because the place they wanted to take me was pretty far away. A couple of times now, I have heard about this place with horses where you can go and, I don’t know, ride them, or maybe just look at them. It is highly unlikely that anywhere in urban Kigali has suitable (i.e. flat) terrain for horses to live, or enough open space for them to actually move, so it made sense to me that it would be far away.
I kind of thought that was where we were going. So when they didn’t come by at noon, or 1:00 p.m., I figured they had realized that this place must be closed for Independence Day. (1 July is Rwanda’s independence day; see my post from a year ago for an explanation of why that is interesting.) So I ate lunch and went back to working on my Kigali transit map (which is coming along quite nicely, though I can’t show you just yet).
It turns out I had misunderstood two key points. (Not fluent yet!) First, I was supposed to come find them when I was ready—which I did, but only after they called my hosts to ask where I was. Second, we were not going to see the horses, but rather to meet some more family members. Because of the limits on my language ability, my shyness about trying to say sentences that might be ungrammatical and also my general shyness, I didn’t figure this last bit out until we were sitting in a living room with no horses in sight!
The people we were visiting were cousins of A. and V.—in English, that is. In Kinyarwanda, these in particular are referred to as siblings: Kinyarwanda has a lot of really unusual ways of expressing family relations, which I won’t go into much here except to say that there is no direct translation of “brother,” “sister,” “aunt,” “uncle,” “niece,” “nephew” or “cousin.” Because the mother’s sisters and the father’s brothers have special linguistic or cultural significance, children of those people are referred to as though they were siblings. (The word that most generally means “cousin” refers to children of the father’s sisters and the mother“s brothers.) These were the daughter and two sons of A. and V.’s mother’s sister.
What we did there isn’t especially worth blogging about: talked in the living room for awhile, went to see these cousins’ mother, who was sick in bed but still way too happy to see a white person. (She hugged me a lot and said a prayer for me.)
What was interesting, though, was where they lived. They are in Gisozi, which is a big hill pretty directly north of the plateau on which the city center is built. (The word igisozi, by the way, means “big hill.”) The Kigali Genocide Memorial is on the near side of Gisozi; the Université Libre de Kigali is on the back left (northwest) side. We were going to the back right side, where there isn’t anything of great significance, so the minibus stop is referred to by the name of a nearby girls’ elementary school (FAWE, which must be an acronym for something).
Gisozi, viewed from near the city center (last year).
I was excited to be there because, first, the only time I had been to Gisozi was to visit the memorial last year, and second, relatedly, it meant taking a new minibus route. The place we got off actually does have some significance, though only from a transit perspective: there are minibus routes that go both directions around Gisozi hill, starting from Kinamba on the other side, and FAWE is the place where they meet before continuing on to Kagugu.
Anyway, it’s a rather barren-looking bus stop; as we walked northward, down the hill, toward our destination, it didn’t get much less barren, but it did get quite a bit stranger. The road was unpaved, as are almost all roads aside from main thoroughfares; it was lined with large, modern, multi-storey houses with big walls and stylish gates outside of them. The strange part was that the place was deserted!
Those houses that were finished were brand-new, and had not yet been purchased; the rest, a majority, were still under construction, though their outsides looked pretty well complete.
This was the frontier: the next stage of the master plan for Kigali’s development. Redeveloping areas that are already populated would be difficult—even installing running water where there isn’t any will be quite a task—but the expansion of the city presents the opportunity to start from scratch. In many areas that are as yet uninhabited, plans are well underway to produce large, orderly, modern neighborhoods with big houses that will be fully served by paved roads and consistent facilities by the time they go on the market.
Some of these projects are very visible, like the big outline of a neighborhood in Gaculiro that can be seen looking north from pretty much anywhere in Kacyiru. I suspect there are many more, though, on the outlying hills like the one I visited here.
Lots of houses were still visibly under construction.
If they go unsold, it won’t be for a lack of people. Kigali’s population has rapidly grown in the last 20 years, from about 350,000 in 1996 to almost 1.2 million in 2012, and it is projected to reach 2 million by 2020.
The gamble, I suppose, is that economic growth will continue to produce residents who can afford to live on such properties. It’s not wholly unreasonable, though it is easy to forget that Kigali is still a city with a lot of poverty, where jobs are hard to come by and many people have trouble putting food on the table.
The last contradiction on that walk was our arrival at the bottom: at a decently nice house in a walled compound, yes, but nowhere near as nice as the ones we had passed. The house was small, and it shared an outhouse (no flush) with a few other houses in the same compound. I don’t think this family had been living there for a really long time, but the property they live on is certainly not a part of the recent construction boom, and I can imagine their uncertainty about what effect this lightning-paced gentrification will have on them.
An interesting side-effect of such rapid expansion, combined with a push to give names to all of Kigali’s streets! If I ever go back, I’ll tell them to just meet me the intersection of 836th and 854th; I’m sure they’ll know what I mean.
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