African Lives: The dark side

Being a nice person was not a requirement for being included in my new anthology African Lives.

In his book Machete Season, the French reporter Jean Hatzfeld presented a perspective on the Rwandan genocide that is very rarely encountered. The book is largely an oral history of the killing from the point of view of the killers. Hatzfeld quotes from ten men who took part in the massacre of Tutsis in and around the district of Nyamata, south of Kigali. Many of the victims fled into the nearby papyrus swamps and were killed there. Jean-Baptiste Murangira, one of the killers whose words appear in Machete Season, was thirty-eight at the time, a civil servant married to a Tutsi woman who was spared during the genocide.

For African Lives, I collected the words of Murangira from different places in Machete Season to focus on one killer’s experience of the genocide.

We were on a path coming back from the marshes. Some youths searched the house of a gentleman named Ababanganyingabo. They frowned on him because this Hutu from Gisenyi was known to consort with Tutsis and might well lend them a hand. They discovered he had helped some Tutsis getaway their cows — behind his house, in a pen, I think. They surrounded the man and pinned him down helpless. Then I heard my name.

They called me out because they knew I was married to a Tutsi. The news about Ababanganyingabo’s fix was spreading, people were waiting, all fired up because they had been killing. Someone said to the audience: “Jean-Baptiste, if you want to save the life of your wife Spéciose Mukandahunga, you have to cut this man right now. He is a cheater! Show us that you’re not that kind.” This person turned and ordered, “Bring me a blade.” Me, I had chosen my wife for love of her beauty; she was tall and very considerate, she was fond of me, and I felt great pain to think of losing her.

The crowd had grown. I seized the machete, I struck a first blow. When I saw the blood bubble up, I jumped back a step. Someone blocked me from behind and shoved me forward by both elbows. I closed my eyes in the brouhaha and I delivered a second blow like the first. It was done, people approved, they were satisfied and moved away. I drew back. I went off to sit on the bench of a small cabaret, I picked up a drink, I never looked back in that unhappy direction. Afterward I learned that the man had kept moving for two long hours before finishing.

Later on we got used to killing without so much dodging around.

African Lives: Ruth First

The daughter of Latvian Jewish immigrants, Ruth First was born in Johannesburg in 1925 and studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, where fellow students included Nelson Mandela and Eduardo Mondlane. As a social researcher and journalist, she was active in the South African Community Party, which her parents helped found, and the African National Congress. In 1949 she married Joe Slovo, who became the head of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC.

First was one of the 157 defendants in the Treason Trial of 1956 to 1961. Following the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 she was placed under banning orders, and in 1963 she was the first white woman to be detained under the apartheid government’s 90-day detention law. Her memoir 117 Days describes that experience. In 1964 First left the country for England, and in 1978 she moved to Mozambique, where she was the director of the research training program at Eduardo Mondlane University. In 1982 she was killed by a letter bomb addressed to her.

The passage below appears in my new anthology African Lives. (Exam copies are available for professors and teachers.)

I slept only to wake again. My ears knocked with the noise of a police station in operation. The cell was abandoned in isolation, yet suspended in a cacophony of noise. I lay in the midst of clamour but could see nothing. Accelerators raced, exhaust pipes roared, car doors banged, there were clipped shouted commands of authority. And the silence only of prisoners in intimidated subservience. It was Friday night, police-raid night. Pick-up vans and kwela-kwelas, policemen in uniform, detectives in plain clothes were combing locations and hostels, backyards and shebeens to clean the city of “crime,” and the doors of Marshall Square stood wide open to receive the haul of the dragnet.

Suddenly the noise came from the other side of the bed. Doors leading to other doors were opened, then one only feet away from mine, and I had for a neighbour, across the corridor, an unseen, disembodied creature who swore like a crow with delirium tremens.

“Water, water. Ek wil water kry. For the love of God, give me water.”

A violent retching, more shrieks for water, water. I caught the alcoholic parch and longed for water.

Twice again I was jerked awake by the rattle of doors to find the wardress standing in my doorway. She was on inspection, doing a routine count of the prisoners. “Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked.

Suddenly the door rattled open and a new wardress stared in. A tin dish appeared, on it a hard-boiled egg, two doorsteps of bread, and coffee in a jam-tin mug. Minutes later the crow was retreating down the passage. The wardress led me out of my cell, past a second solitary one, into the large dormitory cell which was divided by a half-wall from a cold water basin and a lavatory without a seat. I washed in cold-water and half a bucket of hot, put on my pyjamas and dressing-gown, was led out again into my little cell, and climbed back into bed. My first day in the police station had begun.

On the radio

Look! There! On the stack of books on the right! That’s my book!

African Lives was one of the nonfiction books discussed on a recent episode of Mindy Todd’s program The Point on WCAI. Thanks to my long-time friend Jill Erickson for making this possible. 

African Lives: Kenneth Kaunda

Happy birthday, Kenneth Kaunda!

Kenneth Kaunda was born in 1924, the youngest of eight children of a Church of Scotland minister. He became a teacher and headmaster before involving himself in nationalist politics. In 1955 he was jailed for two months with his colleague Harry Nkumbula, the president of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress. Kaunda eventually broke from the ANC and formed his own Zambian African National Congress in October 1958. The new party was banned the following March, and Kaunda and others were detained. In 1964 Kaunda became the first president of an independent Zambia, a position he held until 1991. Since his retirement he has served as a roving ambassador for the Zambia and has been active in the fight against AIDS.

The passage below, describing Kaunda’s detention in the northwest Zambian town of Kabompo, appears in my new anthology African Lives. (Exam copies are available for professors and teachers.)

Life was not all rosy at Kabompo. I almost lost my life at one time. I had a serious attack of dysentery followed by a sharp attack of malaria and then I suffered from a series of colds and coughing attacks. In so far as my health was concerned I did much better when I was re-arrested and sentenced to prison. There are other sad memories of Kabompo. One day I went to see the District Commissioner about the insufficiency of our allowances. I arrived at the offices at 8.30 A.M. At 9.30 A.M. the Hon. William Nkanza, member of the Legislative Council for North West arrived. He waited for forty-five minutes but the D.C. could not see him. We were just told to wait. Mr. Nkanza went back but I still continued to wait. At 12 noon I went past the messenger posted near the D.C.’s door to stop anyone from going in. My patience was completely exhausted. I knocked at the door very angrily and entered without his asking me in. He shouted at me to get out but I refused and instead demanded to be told why he had kept me waiting for three and a half hours. He replied that he was drafting something for me to sign. I shouted back saying surely it would have been good manners to let me know and then I would not have wasted my time. How would he have liked it if someone else had treated him as he had treated me?

At this juncture, he lost his temper and called me names. Silently I went straight for him. He left his chair and we went round and round his table as he called for his head messenger. The head messenger came in and stood between us as we looked at each other like fighting cocks. Our newly found peace-maker was an old man for whom I had great respect and, when he pleaded with me not to do anything, I looked at my friend and saying, “I respect the head messenger more than I do you,” I left. An hour later, the D.C. came to my open-air office to make us sign certain documents. They were the orders — already referred to above — banning all three of us from addressing any meetings for three months. 

African Lives: James R. Mancham

Born in the Seychelles archipelago in 1939, James R. Mancham studied law in England, returned to found the Democratic Party, and promoted tourism as Chief Minister of the colony. In 1976, when the Seychelles won its independence, he was elected president, but was deposed less than a year later while he was attending a Commonwealth conference in London. These events are described in his memoir Paradise Raped, which was published in 1983.

Spring seems like the perfect time to feature this selection, in which the future president gets some unexpected lessons.

My teachers took their work seriously, yet ironically it was two of them who unwittingly furthered my less formal education. The first turned up one evening with her young man in a quiet spot frequented by lovers and proceeded to enjoy themselves, unaware that a friend and I were watching from behind a tree. To us, the sound and the sight of love-making was absurd and hilarious. We could not contain our laughter and when we ran away we were recognised. Next morning our teacher had reported us to the headmaster, the Rev. Brother Norbert, saying that we had been shouting names at her. The punishment was ten cuts of the heavy wooden ruler and as I stretched out my hands, I closed my eyes and saw again in my imagination my teacher’s wonderful legs thrashing around in the moonlight.

Not long afterwards, another teacher took us on a nature ramble to the Botanical Gardens. When we arrived, we were met by a young agricultural officer who lived in a timber cottage among the tropical flowers.

“Children,” said our teacher, “I want you to collect butterflies this afternoon. Catch as many as you can. At the end of the day, the gentleman here …” (pointing to the young man) “will give each one of you a mango. Now, all of you disappear and let me see who will bring back the most butterflies.”

We all ran off. Looking back I saw the teacher and the agricultural officer sneak into his cottage. Wise now to the ways of the world, I decided to forget about butterflies and crept back to the cottage where I saw my teacher in all kinds of positions. It was the most instructive hour of nature study I ever had.