Admittedly, the idea’s been brewing for weeks. Having spent a good chunk of ’07 drifting around the country, and having seen a tentative stability set in in recent weeks, it seemed only right that I should drop in on some of my friends – Joost at the newly christened Milimani Backpackers in Nairobi, Basilio on the coast, David in the Mara – and see how the country’s doing after all the post-election chaos. I still haven’t made it out of the neighborhood, after all: my planned route through northern Tanzania would take me just a few hours’ drive from Nairobi. So rather than brave the tortuous roads of western Tanzania – in the rainy season, no less – I’ve sucked it up, shelled out two hundred forty US bucks, and booked myself a flight to Nairobi.
Even with the inauspicious news from the BBC, I’m giddy all morning. I gave five months of my life last year to Kenya – five months of ugali and matatus, five months of jambos and karibus – and this feels like something I wasn’t expecting anytime soon: a homecoming. Lifting into a curtain of rain over Kigali, bumping through the clouds across Lake Victoria, descending into a cool gray Nairobi afternoon, I picture a few weeks’ worth of coffees at Java House and wood-oven pizzas at Osteria del Chianti; afternoons rifling through the second-hand books in the Ya Ya Centre; curries with the whores at Annie Oakley’s. Yes, Nairobi, it’s good to be back, after all these months. I even indulge myself for long enough to imagine the old Backpackers staff greeting me at the gate: Julius beaming beneath his Yankees cap; Morgan sitting in dignified repose by the fire; long-suffering Mama trudging through the halls on her gnarled, old-woman’s feet, carrying a load of laundry into the yard.
But the old staff is long gone; Joost told me as much in an email last week. And it only takes a few minutes for me to come tumbling back down to earth. Traffic is bottlenecked on the airport road, a polluted, potholed stretch of buckled tarmac running past office parks and power plants and gray industrial zones. Men come rapping on the window, selling socket wrenches and screwdrivers, air fresheners, dishrags, peanuts and pillows and pirated DVDs. A young guy hawking a vegetable peeler shaves thin, wilting slices off a head of cabbage. Boys lead old blind men between the slow-moving lanes, clanking loose change in metal cups. Nairobi, with all its dirty, free-wheeling, energetic sprawl, seems less a destination than a frame of mind. And quickly, joltingly, reluctantly, I’m channeling my inner hustle, leaving leafy, well-kept Kigali far behind.
In the gray, dusky half-light, I pull into the Backpackers compound. It was almost ten months ago that I first arrived in Kenya, sitting in this same yard in the cool pre-dawn hours, listening to the birds rioting in the trees. Whatever the future held was, on that wet Nairobi morning, something of a mystery. The chaos and intrigues of Papa Ken’s World, the harrowing trip to Samburu country in the north, the sultry weeks on the coast, eating samosas and coconut rice and watching the waves break across the shore: it was all a story waiting to be told, and one that, looking back after all these months, I’m not so sure I would’ve believed at the time. But here, now, back again, listening to those same birds squawking their dismal squawks in the treetops, there’s something strangely fitting about coming back to where I started.
If these past few months have been an adventure for me, they’ve been a more harrowing trip for Kenya. With the chaos following December’s disputed elections – the rioters took to the streets on New Year’s Eve: an inauspicious start to 2008 – the world watched as one of Africa’s most stable democracies steadily, bloodily unraveled. Now, after the storm, sifting through the wreckage of what those troubled months had wrought, Kenyans are coming to terms with the long, slow process of rebuilding. More than 150,000 are still displaced, hunkered down in tattered IDP camps around the country. Tensions remain high, with many Kenyans – uprooted from their homes, fleeing to their traditional tribal homelands – wary of what awaits should they return. The government, after spending months at each other’s throats, has concocted a “grand coalition” that seems to be less concerned with reconciliation than doling out the spoils of leadership to friends, families, and party cronies.
And the economy has taken a brutal hit. Tourist visits dropped by more than 50% in the early months of the year, compared to the same period in 2007. On the coast, where dozens of resorts are shuttered, more than 25,000 Kenyans are out of work. Western tea plantations were ravaged by fire during post-election riots. Dairy and grain farms were crippled when transportation came to a stand-still. Across the country, where thousands were displaced by violence, farmers are anxious for the start of the rainy season. Most were late to plant their crops before the rain’s onset, and experts are predicting food shortages as the country copes with a small harvest.
At Backpackers, where a former manager, Patricia, has stepped in to fill Papa Ken’s safari boots, the air is funereal. Business has been slow since the hostel reopened two months ago; for my first few nights, just a pair of wispy, somber backpackers flit through the halls like shadows. With the last hectic days of Ken’s reign resembling the fall of Saigon, the place was gutted by creditors and disgruntled employees – most of whom went unpaid for nearly three months. The yard which Ken had lavishly decked out with wooden tables and cushiony sofas is outfitted with a few meager sets of lawn chairs. The dorms which slept eight a piece are sparsely furnished: just two double bunks in the boys’ dorm, two single beds in the mixed. A solitary bed frame sits in the middle of the girls’ dorm, looking slightly adrift. The cleaning woman’s strung a clothesline across the room. She uses it to hang the laundry when it’s raining outside.
With an angry snarl of litigation surrounding it, it’s a minor miracle that the place has even opened its doors. More surprising still is how much of the old Backpackers gang I bump into during my first days in Nairobi. Isaac and John and the rest of the mechanics have taken up at the auto body shop next door; they’d been working there full-time before the owner hired them out to Ken. Freddy is frying up stews and nyoma choma at a restaurant nearby. Even Julius – flagging me down with his long, limber arms from across the street one bright morning – has landed back on his feet. He’s enlisted his son, Mike, to help him start a new safari venture, following none too closely the script written by a certain Papa Ken. The company will combine a youth hostel and campsite with affordable safari tours across East Africa. They’ve chosen the name Wild Ways Adventures, a tip of the hat, perhaps, to Papa Ken’s Wild Rover. They’ve also chosen a site just steps from where Ken himself once drunkenly raged: the Salama Annex, a favorite haunt of the ex-pats and pensioners who would pick up prostitutes at Annie Oakley’s next door.
Julius shows me around the place one afternoon, eager to show off the fruits of his labors. The post-election violence in Kibera hit his family hard. One of his sons was attacked by thugs with machetes – reprisal, Julius suspects, for an earlier confrontation with a neighbor – and the rapist who assaulted his daughter last year was set free. He’d been slogging through the Kenyan justice system when the riots began; justice had better things on her mind and quickly lost interest. Julius shakes his head sadly, his eyes dropping to the parking lot gravel.
“They were very bad times in Kibera,” he says, “very, very bad.”
Inside he introduces me to the owner – “Mama Salama” – and shows me around the hotel. Julius has struck a deal with Mama Salama to use some of the Annex’s rooms for Wild Ways Adventures – a bit of reciprocation for all the business he brought her way when he was working for an overland tour company years ago. He opens a few doors, stepping to the side with a dramatic sweep of his arm. The rooms are gaudy – dark woods, plush armchairs, layers of cheap, sensual fabrics suggesting the mean intimacy of a thousand one-night stands. Thick-heeled, fat-thighed, love-meager women have used these rooms for casual embraces. Adulterous husbands have fussed with their belts, smoothed their pants, inspected their collars for incriminating signs. I tell Julius the place looks swell. And admittedly, once you get past the hand-job allure, the rooms – with full baths and TVs and queen-sized beds – are, at twenty bucks a night, as good a deal as you’ll find in Nairobi.
Outside Julius shows me the campsite – still cluttered with gravel and rusted sheet metal – and the concrete barracks that will soon house dorm rooms. Workers bustle about, clouds of dust hanging heavy in the air, and things seem to be speeding along. Julius adjusts his cap and claps me loudly on the shoulder. They’re expecting their first guests in just a few weeks. He’s happier than I’ve ever seen him before, and as we sit down for a few celebratory Tuskers inside, he begins to lay all his cards on the table.
The dorms and camp ground are just the first steps: with time, Julius hopes Wild Ways can be a full-service safari center for East Africa and beyond. Already they’re organizing packages for Kenyan tours: the Masai Mara, Lake Nakuru, Amboseli, the coast. Soon they’ll incorporate northern Tanzania – the Serengeti, Ngorongoro – as well as gorilla tracking in Uganda and Rwanda. Once the company has hit full stride, they’ll be able to venture further afield: Ethiopia, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique. Julius’ son, Mike, has spent the past five years working with overland tour groups in East and Southern Africa, and he flips through his passport so I can inspect the visas he’s amassed. Namibia and Botswana, Zimbabwe, Sudan. Julius beams as I show my appreciation. An overland veteran himself, he’s blazed many of the same trails over the course of his long career.
“I have spent these years training him to follow in my footsteps,” he says, giving Mike an affectionate pat on the arm.
With their overland connections, Julius and Mike are already lining up their first clients. Mike’s girlfriend in London has built them a website and is working on PR, and if there’s a strange new smell wafting through the halls of the Salama Annex, mingling with the stale beer and cheap perfume, it’s the smell of potential success. Both seem so fired up by their prospects, so eager to throw new ideas my way, that even I’m bitten by their hopeful bug. Why shouldn’t they be able to pull it off, after all the hard luck and empty promises that life has thrown at them? That Kenyans are still coping, hustling, struggling and striving seems like some sort of triumph, in the end. And with all the half-assed safari companies shuttling beat-up minibuses to the Masai Mara each week, Julius and Mike have as good a chance as any to find their own niche.
Somewhere – whether in a white-padded room, the arms of a hooker, or the streets of Sheffield – Papa Ken might even be smiling for him.
Earlier, a girl from my hotel told me it was an obligation to sit in on the weekly hearing. (She was on her way home for a nap; maybe she’d stop by later.) Shops are closed along the main street; more people arrive, climbing from the backs of pick-up trucks, hopping off of motos. A woman with a tall, gnarled walking stick comes dragging her clubfoot down the road: an apocalyptic image with vengeful eyes, come to see justice done, perhaps, or to exact some terrible revenge of her own.
In the aftermath of the genocide, the government took the remarkable step of using the gacaca – the traditional village court – to shoulder the country’s legal burden. It was the only way to sift through a ponderous backlog of cases, with more than 100,000 suspects awaiting trial for genocide crimes. As high-level officials and organizers – the architects of the genocide – waited to stand trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha, it was in the gacaca that the genocide’s foot soldiers would face the judgment of their peers.
“If we all rise up and support the gacaca process,” said President Kagame in June 2002, “we will have shown our love for our country and our fellow Rwandans.” Posters reading “The truth heals” were plastered in towns and villages across the country, introducing the process to a wary public. Kagame urged patience and understanding from his countrymen.
“Reconciliatory justice will be the basis for unity and the foundation of progress,” he said.
For skeptical Rwandans, it seemed the president was trying to have it both ways. “Reconciliatory justice,” after all, was something of an oxymoron: in the spirit of reconciliation, most low-level offenders would eventually be offered amnesty for their crimes. A man who confessed to the murder of his neighbor could, after six years behind bars, be released to perform community service. Whatever justice was promised by the gacaca courts would be an imperfect justice at best, and even defenders of the system had to admit it wasn’t without its flaws. Were the gacaca judges – respected community leaders, to be fair – qualified to preside over murder trials? Would villagers use false accusations to settle old grudges? And could a program of amnesty for convicted killers really be the best way for Rwanda to begin the difficult process of healing?
On a bright Wednesday morning, milling gregariously outside the court house, everyone is in high spirits. Father Sekamana – tall, broad-shouldered, his forehead showing muscular creases – talks breezily with a crowd of well-dressed men. He’s a spry old guy with thick-framed glasses and a zip-up cardigan the color of cloudless skies; from the laughter around him, he strikes me as something of a charmer. Stocky women and spindly old men approach and squeeze his elbow and offer their well-wishes. This morning, Father Sekamana will be tried for his complicity in murders committed near his parish during the genocide. Outside the auditorium he looks composed, guiltless. People come forward, clasp hands, share a few laughs. The mood is awfully convivial, so that I have to ask a few young guys if this is, in fact, the gacaca, and not a weekly bake sale for the Butare Rotary Club. Slowly we begin to file in, taking our seats on narrow benches and wooden chairs. A grave, self-important man – tri-colored sash draped across his chest – stoops over a megaphone at the front of the room, tugging on a cord. A guard in rumpled khakis slouches against the wall, assault rifle resting between his legs.
Before we’ve even launched into the preliminaries a young guy in a white Che Guevara t-shirt approaches. His sunglasses are dark and opaque, so that I can see my pale reflection in his eyes. The effect is menacing. He leans forward and speaks in low, forceful French. I pick up a few words that sound like “permission” and “papers,” and it’s not hard to see where this is heading. Still, I throw up an admirable bluff, shaking my head, appealing with vigorous hand gestures. He asks me to follow him outside, where we have a brief, comical debate in French (his) and English (mine), before he scurries inside for help from one of the judges.
Soon a wary, middle-aged man in layers of beige steps outside, squinting into the sunlight. He takes my hand cautiously and cocks his head. I plead my case. I explain that I’d been to the permit office in Kigali (lie) and spoken to a few men there (lie) and they assured me I didn’t need written permission to sit in on a gacaca (lie). He urges me on. I tell him I’m a writer (true) working on a book about Africa (true), and that I’m hear to study the question of justice in post-genocide Rwanda (so off the fucking wall, I’m surprised it doesn’t leave a mark on the back of his head). He nods thoughtfully, then asks to see ID. I jog back to my hotel and return with my passport, which I duly present to young Che inside. He brings it to the front of the courtroom, where the beige-clad judge – president of the gacaca, as I’ll later learn – flips through it with a rumpled brow. They hunch together and spend a few minutes studying the pages. I have no idea what they might be looking for, or, worse, what they might find. At the table beside them, the other judges are fussing with their paperwork and rifling through piles of pink folders. More spectators shuffle in from the bright daylight. Father Sekamana sits before the judges, a commanding presence at the front of the room, his dark, imperious eyes moving slowly across the room to take in the crowd that’s gathered. The judge hands my passport back to Che, who comes briskly down the aisle to hand it to me. He smiles a lean, unpleasant smile as he offers an apology. A judge taps on the microphone and clears his throat. The trial is about to begin.
The gacaca is, as I’ll quickly learn, no place for a Perry Mason. The trial is long and, as I’ll later learn, hinges on minor details and technicalities. There seems to be little hope of a serious resolution, never mind courtroom theatrics. Father Sekamana shakes his head, obfuscates, misremembers, contradicts; the judges push a certain line of questioning, give it up, corner the suspect, watch him wriggle free. Many of the spectators quickly lose interest. A couple of young guys behind me whisper, chuckle, bury their faces in their jackets. A squat woman two rows ahead kicks off her sandals and rests her feet on the chair in front of her. She spends some minutes punching SMS messages into her cell phone, sighing exhaustedly, letting her eyes roam around the room. When a woman asks to take the seat occupied by her feet, she seems to suggest with her frank, brutal eyes that it’s already taken. A man in a beaten leather jacket causes a small commotion as he struggles toward a seat in the middle of a row. An exasperated judge makes a few comical entreaties for him to find an aisle seat. A wave of laughter rolls across the room, a bit of comic relief before the first witness is called to the stand.
With no one to translate from Kinyarwanda, it’s here that Jado’s presence is most sorely missed. We’d made plans to meet in front of the courtroom at nine, but an hour later he still hasn’t turned up, and my calls haven’t gone through. I’ve quickly learned that Jado is, if not unreliable, certainly unpredictable – something he shares with most of the young African men I’ve met in the past year. Often it’s a question of finances: if money is tight, it’s better to send an SMS through a friend’s phone than add airtime to your own. (In Uganda, a volunteer friend who was frequently harassed by local men explained how hard it was to keep track of all the numbers used by certain persistent admirers. She saved them all to her phone, so that “Creep 1,” “Creep 2,” “Creep 3,” and so on, would show up on her caller ID.)
And then there are the attendant family dramas, so vast and varied, a catalog of the hardships that can quickly strike in lives that are so precariously balanced to begin with. A sudden illness befalls a cousin or aunt; there are trips to hospitals, to clinics, to burials. Earlier in the week, Jado had to call off our plans at the last minute: a cousin had rushed to the bedside of his sick, aging mother, and with no one to look after the cows, Jado had to spend the afternoon playing cow herd on the family farm.
In the courtroom, the witnesses are offering their sober testimonies, and for the first time all morning, the audience is rapt. A dowdy young woman tells her story in a just-audible whisper; another – a stout, broad-shouldered, church-going lady – speaks plainly, almost pleasantly, appealing to the judges one by one. Neither, I notice, manages to meet Father Sekamana’s imperious gaze. Then a tall, muscular young guy in a leather vest strides to the front of the room with purpose. He sits and leans forward and fixes the priest with his eyes; for the next few minutes, as he offers his testimony in forceful language, he doesn’t once turn from Father Sekamana’s stare. I have no idea what’s being said, but this is clearly a moment of the highest drama. Afterward he returns to his seat just a few rows in front of me, and I can see the smooth rounded knobs of his shoulders heaving with great emotion.
When Jado finally arrives, Father Sekamana is answering questions from the judges. The folds in his forehead rise and fall, the musculature of his great bald dome works expressively. The man is putting on a fine performance. After a brief greeting, Jado leans forward to follow the testimony. The strength of the case against Father Sekamana seems to rest on a body buried outside the compound of his parish near Gikongoro during the early weeks of the genocide. Earlier the witnesses had testified that they heard gunshots during the night; they were sheltering inside his church, huddled, fearful, while the death squads worked outside. In the morning, a beheaded body was found buried outside the compound. (Some claim it was buried inside the compound.) Because of Father Sekamana’s authority over the parish, they argue, the killing couldn’t have taken place without his knowledge – and, by extent, his complicity. The priest’s defense is a simple one: there was no gunshot in the night; he never heard any gunshots; and such gunshots could have only occurred after he, himself, had fled.
There is a long debate on these points, and when the judges chuckle and shake their heads bitterly, you can get a sense of their frustration. The evidence against Father Sekamana isn’t just slight – it’s based on scraps of memory dug up after nearly fourteen years. Even by the gacaca’s standards, there doesn’t seem like much to build a case on. Soon the debate shifts to guns found inside the church compound. Didn’t Father Sekamana know that some of his employees had stockpiled guns? Weren’t they being trained to use them by the militias? Again, a dead end. The priest knew nothing about the guns. He never saw the militias. The judges confer under their breaths. There’s restlessness in the audience.
The last accusation against the priest is the most damning. Isn’t it true, the judges ask, that Father Sekamana operated a roadblock during the genocide? This was a grave allegation. The militia roadblocks were notorious; it was at those checkpoints that the Interhamwe sorted the Tutsis from the Hutus and sent them each to their separate fates. To accuse someone of starting a roadblock is to accuse him of sending hundreds to their deaths. The room is silent. Father Sekamana shakes his head vigorously. Denying the accusations, he makes emphatic chops of the hand to drive home each point. The roadblock near his church, he explains, was used to confuse the militias. Rather than sending Tutsis to their deaths, he was using the roadblock to save them. There’s a restless murmur from the audience. The judges are incredulous. Father Sekamana insists that, given the brutality of the genocidaires, it was only through such acts of cunning that people could be saved.
“No one has taught me to do the evil,” he says. “I did my best to save people.”
Jado makes a short, indignant noise under his breath. Outside, under the pale, hazy sky, he ventures that Father Sekamana will get off easy. The charges brought against him would be impossible to prove; there were even some witnesses who rose to defend him. I remember one the next day, on my way back to Kigali. He was wrinkled, coarse, disheveled; he had a raspy voice, a sort of death-rattle, and threads of silver wound through his hair. The word that came to mind was disreputable, and I wondered if he wasn’t, in fact, like the village drunk who crashes the funeral, jostling the mourners, causing a scene. Often these men were hired to say the things about the deceased no one else had the courage to say. Maybe Father Sekamana had to be defended for the sake of all the others with blood on their hands.
