13 Nyákáanga 2013—Abacuraanzi

This past week’s Quiz Night featured a series of questions about KigaliUP, a Rwandan folk music festival to be held this weekend. I had not known what KigaliUP was beforehand, but I came away knowing lots about it! For example, it is modeled after a Canadian folk musical festival. And it would feature a performance by an African musician once called “possibly the most famous singer alive” (or something to that effect) by Rolling Stone, who is also his country’s minister of tourism and culture. (I guessed that this was Youssou N’Dour, but I am pretty sure he was not on the program at the festival, so I don’t know what was going on with that.)

In any case, I went with a friend from Harvard to the first of two nights of music. My hosts did not know that the festival was happening, which I suppose should have prepared me for arriving and seeing a crowd that was substantially (though not exclusively) composed of foreigners. This is to be expected, perhaps: the entry fee of 2,000 francs would be restrictive for many, and perhaps a little too much of the advertising was done online. (Or maybe my hosts just don’t listen to the radio!)

One thing struck me as soon as I got off of the moto. A kid approached me and offered me a wristband ticket. I might have been suspicious, but the price he gave was the right one (as I had read online), and for all I knew he was being paid to sell tickets. Once I tried to buy it, I was immediately surrounded by a whole crowd of kids. I am a little bit O.K. if this happens because they are curious about the foreigner, but here I had the distinct impression that they were looking to take advantage of me. As we worked out the change, I felt several hands successively reach into my pockets; I was ready for it, and they did not get anything, but I was nonetheless a bit put off. This had not happened before.

It’s really unfortunate that some children here feel like that is an O.K. thing to do. Even living on an unpaved road, it is easy to see the orderliness of this city and forget that there is real poverty too. I do not know any of these children’s specific circumstances, but they likely have very little money and non-desirable living situations, as well as very little ability to advance in society, so picking pockets appears to be the most promising way forward. I guess this is the source of many kinds of crime, and addressing it is really difficult regardless of the perspective I try to adopt: that of the disadvantaged, that of the law enforcement, that of the administration.

It was also possible to buy tickets at the gate, from the guy checking tickets at the gate. I have no way of knowing how much official permission my vendor had to be so vending, but I came away with an authentic ticket and the full contents of my pockets so I can’t complain too much.

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The music was good, I suppose. I was there less to see music performed, though, than to do something with a friend and experience a new environment. I would have liked to see the headliner of the night, Habib Koité, but he came on at 9:45 (by which point I had to be home). We saw a few Rwandan acts, which were enjoyable, though sometimes very loud. There was also an American, Joey Blake, who performed some nice jazz pieces before beginning to do joint performances with Rwandan musicians.

I noticed some things about the environment that I thought were interesting. For one, this was the first time I had seen substantial numbers of Rwandans smoking cigarettes. This is logical. The people here were probably reasonably well-off, and tobacco—even without American-style taxes—is probably more expensive than most can afford. It was also a live concert, where such things are just going to happen. Finally, the Rwandan government has been very responsible about restricting the ability of international tobacco corporations to advertise, so this country is developing as a place where such things just aren’t too much of an issue.

I also saw one pre-teen being escorted out of the concert pretty forcefully by a policeman. Perhaps he snuck in, or perhaps he was caught doing something else. I can’t really blame an officer for doing his job, but in light of what I had been thinking before I kind of hope he wasn’t too rough.

My other impression was kind of one of confusion: this event was held at Amahoro Stadium, the largest in the city. I had never been there before, so I was curious to see the inside… except that the concert was not held inside. There were two stages set up kind of in the yard on either side of the entryway to the stadium. I have certain associations I make with concerts that are held at sports venues, but I guess these organizers had something else in mind. To their credit, there were not really enough people there to fill a stadium, and to put one of the two stages inside would have created a vast and maybe unmerited hierarchy between the two.

Anyway, the music and company were good, and the food—supplied by various local restaurants—was very nice as well. I am really getting to like brochettes, at least as prepared here. I might find myself trying to seek out similar things more often at home.

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I headed out at about 9:00, to allow for the 30- or 40-minute ride home from Kimironko. The moto-ride gave me a chance to test another question I have been pondering, which relates to being taken advantage of by moto/taxi-drivers.

If we assume that I want to get a fair price out of a driver, not to high and also not too low, my question was whether I should speak to him in English or in Kinyarwanda. The argument for Kinyarwanda is simple: hopefully he will respect that I can speak, or at least try to speak, and not instinctively give me the muzuûngu rate. On the other hand, if I am talking to someone with an objective to accomplish, might it be better to address him using a language in which he is less comfortable, so that I can have the advantage in the negotiations?

The latter is certainly the more pessimistic view: it assumes, to some extent, that I will likely be overcharged regardless and that I should be the arbiter of what I pay at the exclusion of the driver. But it occurred to me nonetheless.

My memory is not perfect, but I believe I arranged the price with this driver in English. As it happened, he misinterpreted the location I gave. (There are two places in Kigali called Nyakabanda; I am actually surprised this has not happened more often.) I redirected him, no problem, but when he arrived he mentioned that the price should have been higher. He said it in a kind of resigned voice, sticking with the unwritten rule that the agreed-upon price must be honored. But immediately after, he started asking me about my Kinyarwanda. We had a pleasant, short conversation, and he did not mention the price again.

This is not conclusive. I do not know pricing standards well enough yet to judge. What I hope is that I was given the white rate for the first destination, which ended up being the standard rate for the second. I do hope I didn’t rip him off—he was a nice guy, and the only moto-driver I have ever really talked to.

(For reference, if memory serves, this was 1,200 francs that I paid to get from Kimironko to Nyakabanda, the one near Kimisagara. The ride took 30 or 40 minutes, and I thought this was a reasonable-sounding price, though I’ll grant the possibility that it should have been higher.)

12 Nyákáanga 2013—Memrise

Wow, I am behind on these. I did not do all too much on Friday. I had hoped to go pick up my research permit, but it wasn’t ready yet. So I went to an Internet café. I have been noticing more and more that I am able to fulfill all of my basic needs by just walking a few blocks over into Nyamirambo and going to small businesses—rather than walking a few blocks over into Nyamirambo, catching a taxi into Town and going to large businesses.

My previous default for Internet had been to go to Bourbon Coffee in U.T.C. (in Town), buying a scoop of ice cream for 1200 francs and enjoying the free Wi-Fi. However, I can also go to an Internet café in Nyamirambo and pay 100 francs for every twelve minutes. I still usually go to Simba Supermarket (in Town) for my candy and tissues and other food needs, but I could also go to one of the dozens of Alimentation shops much closer to home. And there is a place to be SIM card refills there too.

The other thing I am noticing is that I no longer have a whole lot of new places I want to see in Kigali. I don’t want to say I am bored of it, but unless I plan something specific I might find myself just cycling through my regular errands: using the Internet, buying candy, changing money. What that means, I think, is just that I am about ready to start doing research that takes me other places!

Anyway, one thing I found at the Internet café was that there is a mobile Memrise application available, which I had not known. This was exciting: Memrise is a very useful online tool that is built on algorithms designed to develop memories. It is especially useful for language-learning: it teaches words (or other items) by encouraging users to create mnemonics for them, and then tests on those words at increasing intervals until the memory is deemed to be secure. I created my own lesson plan with all of the words I have learned in Kinyarwanda in two years, and I have found it to be very effective.

The down-side is that it is web-based and fairly data-intensive. There is a little bit of irony in that I was solidly learning dozens of new Kinyarwanda vocabulary words every day before coming here, and upon arrival I slowed to maybe one or two because of the lack of Internet connection.

So I was happy to see a mobile app, and moreover one that could download courses to be used offline. I downloaded the app and my Kinyarwanda course (which took about 40 minutes on the African connection), and started back up. I had over 500 memories to “water” (according to the software’s terminology, which compares memories to plants) because I had been away for so long. I would gradually complete this task over the following days.

What I noticed, unfortunately, was that my course was flawed. I have done a lot of reading about Kinyarwanda since coming here, especially about its tones, and on returning to the course it became clear just how lacking I was in that area. Some words had the tones marked, but most did not, meaning that the memories I had been carefully planting and watering were missing very important pieces of information.

A definite reason for this is that there is no published reference that reliably gives the tones for words in Kinyarwanda. One can ask a native speaker, sure, but that becomes less plausible when trying to update a list of several hundred words. And I had not quite understood the important role that tones play in this language when I was compiling the list from my class notes; I included them where I could, but if a word did not have any marked I didn’t omit it. I figured it was better to know a word incompletely than not at all.

Now, however, I do have a good reference. It is an unpublished dictionary that I think I mentioned in a post awhile ago; I have it on loan, and it does mark the tones in the right way. So I have been spending much of my free time going through and updating the tones on the words in my list. It is a big job, with a list of over 1,000 words, but it is coming along.

I want to keep using Memrise: like I said, it is a very useful tool. I just have to think, now, about the best way to move forward. What I have tentatively decided is as follows: (a) stop “planting” new memories with the course I already have, as its tone information is incomplete; (b) make a new course for words whose definitions I do not know, and for those make sure the tones are correct so I learn them from the start; and (c) for words whose definitions I know but whose tones I do not know, make another course in which the sequence of tones is the only thing to be learned with each word.

That last one, especially, will take some thought, just because of the way Memrise is set up and the way it asks its questions. It’s doable, though—and, hopefully, I will have some long bus-rides ahead of me in which to think about it!

11 Nyákáanga 2013—Guteembera muri Nyamirambo

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.

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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.

10 Nyákáanga 2013—Úrwíibutso n’Ifilimi

It could be argued that there is really only one important thing to see in this city, and it had been bothering me for awhile that I had not seen it. I’m talking about the Kigali Genocide Memorial, opened in 2004 in Gisozi, on the site of a mass grave of 250,000 people.*

So I went to Gisozi this afternoon; it gave me the opportunity to familiarize myself with a new minibus line (for Kinamba and Université Libre de Kigali). I actually got off the minibus early because I thought I was at the right place, but ended up walking for about fifteen minutes instead. This was fine: the truth is, I could have walked the whole distance from town in a half-hour or so, and I do enjoy exploring on foot.

“Town” is on one hill, and Gisozi (which means “Hill”) on another, to its north. To get between the two, one descends into a valley and then reascends. There is a small river to cross, with a sizable basin filled with papyrus swamps on either side; this is interesting to see, given that beyond the marsh on both sides is city.

The memorial is not far up the hill in Gisozi. It is maintained by the Aegis Trust, a British N.G.O. that developed it, I believe, in conjunction with the Kigali City Council. It includes a series of exhibits, a gravesite, an archive and a café.

The exhibits are dedicated primarily to telling the story of the Genocide. Having read many different versions of this story, it is always interesting to see how another entity tells it. Very little can possibly be objective, and several pieces—ethnicity in precolonial Rwanda, the role of the Belgians and the final casualty count, among others—are especially sticky.

Perhaps I am prescribing more than I should, but what I read—a rendition that told of harmony prior to colonization, an ethnic hierarchy largely invented by colonists and a death-toll of over a million—seems consistent with a government that wants to emphasize the scale of the tragedy and promote unity among its people. I cannot say there is another version of the story that is better, or that I would rather have seen, but it is thought-provoking to see a story that so necessarily displays the interests of the storyteller.

It was well told, too: there were lots of images and several films. I have a lot of respect for the decision to put the English and French translations in small print below the main Kinyarwanda text. It is a little bit annoying for the foreigners who make up a substantial portion of the Memorial’s visitors, but it shows respect for the Rwandans for whom the center was built.

After the storytelling section, there were some other exhibits. There was a room with some bones and personal effects of victims. There was a room with hundreds of photographs of victims, put up by family members. There were some quotes in big plaques on the walls. There was a section with displays about other genocides.

I have to say that, having read so much about this already, I was not as upset as I thought I would be. I knew what was coming, so to speak, and my mind had prepared itself; the photographs were often not easy to look at, but somehow the bones did not hugely affect me.

One part was really hard, though. The second floor had a Children’s Room, which I thought going in would try to describe genocide in a way accessible to children. No. It was about young victims of the Genocide; there were big pictures on the wall of the kids, happy and alive, accompanied by plaques that gave parents’ descriptions of them, along with their cause of death. Reading about a toddler who liked pasta, ran around rambunctiously and played with her sister, and was smashed against a wall until dead, that was very powerful.

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In the evening, for a change of pace, I met friends in the city to see a movie. At the time my guidebook was printed, there were no movie theaters in Kigali—except a couple that would play whatever movie you brought, provided their speakers were working. In the past couple of months, though, one has opened in the Kigali City Tower, and it is functionally like an American theater (except smaller and cheaper).

We saw “Man of Steel”; the screen was smaller than most in theaters back home, but the tickets were Fr. 4,000 ($6) including 3-D glasses, so I couldn’t complain. I can complain about the film, though, so I will now digress a couple of paragraphs to share my thoughts:

I have to give the filmmakers a little bit of credit: What they are working with is a story of a superhero who cannot be harmed except by the remains of his former home planet. There are only so many times Lex Luthor can sabotage some Kryptonite and actually pose a threat to Superman, so we have to resort to ever more absurd plots.

The premise for this film was a military coup on Krypton, just before its demise, whose perpetrators were imprisoned in space but freed by the planet’s destruction. They then spent years gathering arms from Krypton’s former colonies before tracking down its only other living citizen: Clark Kent, living in America, in whose genes was encoded the blueprint for rebuilding Krypton—which former Emperor Zod** wanted to do on earth. And they had this thing called a world-engine that was going to alter earth to make it more like Krypton.

Huh?

As contrived as it was, the plot was remarkably free of substance! A solid majority of the film was taken up by sequence after bewildering sequence in which Superman fought against his Kryptonian pursuers, never accomplishing anything (of course, because none of them could be harmed) except collateral damage. The scale kept rising, and the scale of the carnage was outrageous. (Multiple office-buildings collapsed spectacularly; it actually seemed in poor taste for the film to show those events, which inevitably would have caused loss of life on a huge scale, while maintaining the feel of a fun action movie.) Additionally, the dialogue was often bad and there was not much room for character development between all of the explosions.

By the way, I remain confused about how the conscience of dead Jor-El was housed in multiple Kryptonian ships, how he was able to walk around like a person there and interact with people, how the plan he proposed to reimprison the invaders made any sense at all, and how Superman ultimately killed the final villain. I don’t feel much of a desire to know, either.

The film had its redeeming features. I liked the lead actors, and I thought the story of Superman’s childhood was told well—that is, with subtlety and emotion, two factors missing from the rest of it!

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* I am not quite clear on how those 250,000 people got to the location, or how precise the number is: that number far exceeds the number of Tutsis who could have been living in Kigali before 1994, and even by the most liberal casualty estimates represents a huge proportion of the total dead. Though I know there are many human remains there, I wonder whether it might also be a symbolic grave for the rest.

** Not to be confused with Emperor Zog, who actually ruled Albania in the early 20th century

9 Nyákáanga 2013—Guhiinduka

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!)

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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.

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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.

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!

7 Nyákânga 2013—Ameríkâ n’Abányáameríkâ

Sunday was not an especially exciting day. I went to town in the afternoon, and was struck by how few people were there. Luckily, I found a foreign exchange bureau that was open—the main reason I had gone in—but most businesses were closed and shuttered. I am used to seeing the Quartier Commerciale bustling with people, but in the late afternoon on a Sunday it was almost empty.

Part of the reason for this is that “Town” is a place where no one actually lives. I have looked around, and there are almost no places that look like they might be residential. Most buildings are only one story, and even those that aren’t have businesses and office-space on the upper levels. So everyone comes there to do something, usually doing business—there also are not any parks or public facilities where people might come to pass the time—which adds up to a lot of open space at certain times of week.

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I am a little behind in writing these posts, and I could end here and move onto Monday. I kind of want to talk about America, though. Here goes:

The United States

People in Rwanda seem to have only good impressions of America. It is a beautiful country, they say, and they want to go there. It is a little bit strange, actually: there are a lot of places in the world where one would find a lot of negative impressions about the United States’ actions in the world—not least within our own borders. Here, though, people’s concern seems to be primarily with the services and opportunities it can provide to its citizens. To an extent it makes me happy. I am proud to be an American, and I like hearing people say good things about it; it bothers me when people take an overly negative perspective and ignore all that is really great about America.

I think the opposite extreme is problematic, too, though. People tell me about how all Americans are rich; regardless of whether that is true, we do have a lot of inequality and more than our fair share of racial discrimination. People talk about how Las Vegas and the Bellagio Hotel (it’s a hotel, right?) are so beautiful, from the pictures they have seen; well, yes, but they are also icons of excess and their very existence is draining the Colorado River and creating problems for our future generations’ access to running water.

I do not expect people to know these things. I know them because I am American and I think it’s good to be critical every now and then, and it is knowledge that is not available to the average Rwandan. Still, the idea that these other places are magically perfect and problemless, to which many Rwandans seem to subscribe, can be harmful. It can lead to a lack of appreciation for the things that Rwanda has accomplished—indeed, I have heard Rwanda compared very often to Europe and the U.S., but almost never to the countries around it—and, related, a desire to leave. Also, it just encourages a lack of nuance in worldview. I should not draw too many parallels, but the most devastating acts in this country’s history were committed by people who oversimplified their views of social order and felt like they were subordinated because of it.

Americans

There are a lot of them. I heard someone say there are 5,000 American expatriates living in Kigali; in a city of about a million, this is a substantial number. I will not dwell on this too much, as I have talked about it before, but the not-totally-inaccurate expectation of an American here is that he will be white, English-speaking, rich and vaguely culturally aloof. This means that we are frequently asked for money, not just by homeless people (fine) but by children who are not homeless but who are conditioned to think we are wealthy (not O.K.). It also means that when we try to do business with someone, we are likely to be instinctively overcharged. And that people will speak English or French by default when we approach them. (This last bit is especially annoying for someone trying to learn Kinyarwanda.)

And if you happen to be a young child, Americans are the best people ever, except not much more than anyone else who happens to be white. (Teenagers sometimes get excited too, just they express it differently.)

American Culture

I have been surprised to find, here, people who are more up on American culture than I am. Granted, I am pretty out of it. Still, I live there. Rwandans, or at least those with some means, get a lot of their entertainment from the American film and music industries. I hear American hip-hop playing in minibuses; I see dubbed American movies on sale at shops; I have talked to people who ask me—as an American who must know these things—whether they’re making a new season of 24.

I wonder what impactions this has for people’s impressions of America: Americans, as portrayed in our film, are usually pretty well-off, which could contribute to the impressions above. Then again, if you are watching a lot of 24, you might not come away thinking the streets are paved with gold!

American English

Ikínyáameríkâ, as some call it, is apparently very difficult to understand, even for those who are quite proficient in English. Keep in mind that, when Rwandans learn English, they do not generally learn from Americans or even from Britons, but from other Rwandans (or, at least, East Africans). When English was first taught in this area, it was taught by the British in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The English that those students spoke, then, mixed the sounds of their British teachers with those of their native languages. Since, East African English has acquired substantial populations of native or near-native speakers in the above-listed countries, and it is their pronunciation—as natural as that of any other English-speaker—that is most often heard by Rwandans.

There are two major differences that come to mind between this kind of English and the kind I speak: First, we Americans tap our t’s between vowels—so the t in “writer” is different from the one in “time,” a distinction that does not exist in East African English. Second, we pronounce our r’s wherever we write them, a feature lost by standard British English long ago and therefore not passed on to very many Africans. My friends here think it is very funny to hear me say words like “word,” “world” and “part.”

This is convenient, because if I ever need people to not know what I am saying, I can just say it in English at a normal speed and be confident no one will understand it!