Kigali Blues

Kigali is all lovely and green, the grass is neatly trimmed and trees well manicured. It is ordered and super clean. The immigration officials are pleasant yet efficient, the taxi drivers gentle and honest, the people agreeable.

It is a green and pleasant land yet I feel queasy. I gotta lay it on the table, the Freedom House stats on Rwanda are not pretty, I also heard that the people are cowered and yet I still elected to come, was it a mistake. Okay, I am going to Bujumbura, I wonder what it’s like.

I try to have a conversation with the taxi driver and he is giving me monosyllabic responses. Bujumbura seems more appealing. It sounds interesting!

I arrive at my home and I am in a local neighbourhood. Phew, this is fine. I go out for dinner and it is fine, I go out for breakfast and it is fine. I gotta get out.

Thanks to a mishap with an Apple download I had to go to the phone shop. If anyone has ever watched Phone Shop don’t think for a minute the characters I met were the same. Emery tried to fix my phone with no success so I had to take it to a specialist iPhone doctor. Emery and his buddies were headed for that direction so were happy to take me. The doctor did not fare any better; I now have a toy phone for a mobile device but it does the job.

With my phone business taken care of, I sat with Emery and friends as they ate, I wanted to continue our conversation. First, let me tell you about these remarkable young men. All are at university and just about to graduate. All have jobs because they self-fund, all are super smart and eager to engage. They had chat, ideas, banter and plenty of concerns, they want to be successful. We talk about the trappings of success and the African big man syndrome. I suggest that a bicycle is better that a Chelsea tractor, they laugh with me (I think). I tell them all they need to attract a pretty girl is their charm and knowledge and they laugh at me (I am certain).

In Africa it’s all about image they say, to access the right anything you gotta have the right look, you even gotta smell nice. These guys are politically aware, they know that their past has shaped their present, they feel angry about the colonial legacy, they think Rwanda has no choice but to take China’s investment. Africa is behind so we gotta catch up, this is our reality.

We also talk about the leaders that have come before them and how they generally morph into ‘something else’. These guys are not afraid to go there, they feel able to talk, within limits of course. They see the positive change in Rwanda and are willing to go along with it until their time comes. I am absolutely certain that these are the future leaders. In a space of an hour (maybe more) we had a most inspired conversation, we spoke as openly as we could, laughed and reflected. Bujumbura seemed like a distant memory.

I had cracked Rwanda and I was ready for her to reveal herself to me!