Burundi, Bujumbura, in 2012. One evening, a neighbor, B.H., visited me in my home to hand me an invitation to an end-of-mourning ceremony. It was the first time that she crossed the entrance gate of my home and knocked at my door. We did not know each other and we had never exchanged anything but tame civilities, those of neighbors whose paths cross each other every day. So for this first, it was well worth sharing a drink. With this invitation, we had at least one topic of conversation. After our first sip, B.H. still did not say a word. To break the ice, I opened her invitation card, in search of inspiration. It was only when she saw me reading her invitation card and when she sensed a slight discomfort on my face that my visitor broke her silence.
Fourty years earlier, in 1972, death knocked at the door of B.H.’s family house. It had the sound of a rumbling "m'en fous m'en fous" Mercedes military truck (1). A few soldiers got out of it, shouted at her father, dragged him out, and hoisted him abruptly onto the platform of their four-wheeled cattle-trailer. This was the last time she ever saw her dad. Yet her mother never accepted the death of her husband. For a long time, she was convinced that he would come back. "My husband is alive." It was perhaps not an inner conviction, but she only needed hope to cling to, to revive the strength to earn a living, to feed her children, to send them to school and keep them motivated to succeed. When my husband returns, she often said, I want him to be proud of me, of what the children have become, of the marvel our household morphed into without him. With the benefit of hindsight, B.H. understood and learned not to thwart the stubbornness, obstinacy of her mother and her hope hanging on by a thread that was the thread of her children's path to school and life. Fourty years after her father's death, after B.H., her brothers and sisters had all completed their studies, embraced a career and founded their own families, they gathered around their mother and formally ended the mourning of a man who had to disappear, not die, to make this “stubborn” widow the kingpin of her family.
The story of B.H.'s devoted mother reminds us, Burundians, of what faith and hope can buy and build up from tragedy to breathe life. Never did this widow allow herself to be blighted and tormented by despair, or obsessed by "the unavoidable comeback of the evil enemy". Hope and faith were her best allies. Soon her granddaughter will take the Hippocratic Oath and become a doctor, like her father. She will soon heal the sick, save lives, regardless of ethnicity. Neither the soon-to-be doctor nor her mother will ever forget what happened to their respective grandfather and father. And that is how it should be. Deep in their heart, surely they stand compassionately by the side of Marie-Claudette Kwizera, regardless of her ethnicity. On December 10, 2015, without anyone knowing why, Marie-Claudette, the accountant of the Burundian Human Rights League "Iteka" was abducted by unknown individuals aboard a Police vehicle with tinted windows. She was subsequently held incommunicado without any reason. Even the $2,000 ransom demanded and paid by her family could not set her free. Perhaps she was abducted and extrajudicially executed by someone himself born of a father kidnapped and executed, like hundreds of thousands were, back in 1972. Delusional figment of imagination ? Drama used as compost for melodrama: isn’t this the vicious circle that has gripped us for more than half a century?
What kind of Burundi are the two daughters of Marie-Claudette, aged 11 and 6, growing up in? What is this country teaching them to believe in: our resemblances or our differences? Trust or mistrust? The force of law or the law of force? Our unsolved past deepen our prejudices. Our prejudices dig our graves. Fourteen months and nine days after the abduction, the "Iteka" league was officially banned by the government of Burundi from operating in the country and Marie-Claudette’s husband and children still do not know whether she is still alive or not. Hope and faith may never bring her back to her children. But surely they will build more than they will destroy her daughters and Burundi. Hope is life. A well-known Burundian journalist told me how one day he received a fresh letter from Uganda “to be hand delivered to him". Of this letter, each line that he read brought back to his memory, one by one, all the years – twenty – he spent believing the shipper to be dead: his father was alive !
**************************************************************
(1) In 1972, a Hutu armed group stormed Rumonge, a small city in South-West Burundi, targeted and slaughtered over a thousand of Tutsis, including women and children. The intervention of Burundi armed forces had the hordes of killers neutralized within days. In retaliation, for the next four months, all over the country, more than two hundred thousands of Hutus, mostly adult men, were indiscriminately abducted and summarily executed by the Tutsi-dominated army and Tutsi militias. The infamous “M’en fous M’en fous” (“I don’t care, I don’t care”) Mercedes military trucks transported the abducted who were often killed on their way to a mass grave.
No comments:
Post a Comment