Bujumbura

After 38 hours of flying and visiting airports in the USA, Europe, and Africa, I arrived in Burundi on Tuesday. Locating Burundi on a map is not easy. Even the least geographically challenged will find themselves squinting at the maze of borders and lakes. There are lakes in Africa that could swallow Burundi whole. Yet this tiny country, much like it twin to the north, Rwanda, manages to have a magnitude of problems disproportionate to its size.

War, for starters. Since 1993 300,000 people have died because of the conflict that’s been haunting this country off and on since the 1960s. It’s usually painted as an ethnic conflict, one marked by fear, mistrust, repression, killings and reprisals, but of course the reasons move well beyond the simplicity of “ancient tribal hatreds.” The majority Hutu have been dominated by successive Tutsi governments since independence, governments always afraid of losing their power to the majority Hutu population. In 1972 a failed coup attempt by Hutus crystallized the atmosphere of mutual mistrust. 200,000 Burundians – many of them education Hutus – were massacred. Since then there have been a few more coups and attempted ones, with opposition to the increasingly consolidated Tutsi government power becoming outright violent in 1993. Atrocities have been committed on all sides, with no actions escaping retalitations. Fast-forward to the present, after more than a decade of attempts by the international community to mediate peace between rebels and the government, and you’ll find a country that is putting conflict behind it only to face a mire of other problems inherently tied with its violent past – extreme poverty.

Still, better to be poor and at peace than poor and at war. Because in this neck of the woods, war is against civilians. I don’t think it should even be called “war,” which calls to mind armies facing off. It’s groups exercising their frustration, their greed, and their disregard for human life and dignity by turning against innocent people. Stealing from them, oppressing them, raping them, and killing them.

Burundi is currently the poorest country is the world. If you look at average income, or lack thereof, this is it. Of course, it’s hard to trust statistics. As far as I’m concerned any country within the poorest ten, if not twenty or thirty, are pretty much interchangeable in terms of poverty. A man in rural Chad isn’t jumping for joy that his country beat Burundi in terms of absolute poverty. He’s very very poor, a Burundian’s very very poor, and the likelihood of either of them accessing basic healthcare or paying their child’s school fees is minimal.

And yet these thoughts are in the way back of my mind as I sit in Bujumbura. War, hopelessness, the mess that is Africa - I never feel this. Alright, except for the mess part. But I mean that in an endearing way. Most of the time. Or at least some of the time.

I was very ambivalent about coming back to Central Africa, indeed within spitting distance of Congo, my former home-away-from-home. Maybe I was too stressed to think about it – I’d just flown to London on a day’s notice to interview for a job there, and within five days of returning booked a flight and left for Burundi. Such hurried logistics do not exactly lend themselves to introspection. Driving through Bujumbura from the airport, even my jetlag could not dim the friendly familiarity of the bustling streets and certainly not the beauty of the rolling hillsides framing the capital. Africa, I missed you.