A Pianist in Rwanda

Walrus Online Exclusive: Click here for additional photos for “A Pianist in Rwanda.”If you stand still long enough anywhere on the red soil of Kigali, you may be able to sense a slight shift in the ground, rumbling under your feet. Deep in the mantle of the planet, upwelling magma shoots to the surface and rips open the skin of the earth. A 6,400-kilometre fissure, the Great Rift Valley, stretching from Jordan to Mozambique, carved up the continent of Africa and spawned the Great Lakes. Every year, 500 million birds use it as their flight path, and 100,000 years ago it was one of the first highways of human migration. Patched into a quilt of Central African countries, Rwanda bottoms out onto one of the rift’s offspring—the great Lake Kivu.

From the air the country looks like a series of landscapes by Paul Klee—mountains, lakes, and valleys in geometric patterns of irregular squares, dusted terracotta red. The green has a tropical juiciness to it and the red soil a deceptively fertile glow. Kigali, the capital, is in almost the dead centre of the country. Wrapped into a mountain at its highest point of 1,600 metres, it is built into the natural fabric of the land. Scores of dwellings pop out like blisters from the belly of the wide central valley and creep onto the sides of the hill. People spend their days navigating the big up and down of unmapped, wormy neighbourhoods, carrying water jugs on their heads, produce in their hands, and children on their backs. From the safety of some of the ridges that sweep across the city, you can stand and watch the exhausting, pornographic industry of poverty.

Driving in from the airport, I am immediately struck by the number of people walking by the sides of the highway. Some are dressed for the office, some in traditional outfits, but most are in bare feet. They walk in the fog of a thick sun and the constant clicking dialogue of jackdaw ravens. My eye catches episodes of ordinary flowers—poinsettias, geraniums—suddenly stunning in their original home. The few sidewalks are less than a year old. Thanks to a recent partnership with the Chinese, who have also been supplying the country with bicycles, some of the roads are now paved. But most of them are still raw and ungraded, flanked by the natural tears from their construction. Long, haphazard roots spill out onto the shoulder like delinquent strands of hair.

As we drive by groups of schoolgirls in shock-blue uniforms and regulation shaven heads, I wonder whether it is the heat or their legacy that has stolen a few rounds from their mulberry bush or taken some of the singsong out of their skip. And as the car careens into the deep sway-back of the city, I also wonder if there is a quarter of a mile of straight road anywhere in the country.

Still, there are paragraphs of comfort in Kigali, and I am about to step into one of them. The Hôtel des Mille Collines (a thousand hills), famous now because of the film Hotel Rwanda, is one of the oldest luxury hotels in the city. It is hosting my stay as I track the activities of Canadian concert pianist and University of British Columbia professor Rena Sharon on her return visit to Kigali. Inspired by a passionate plea from Roméo Dallaire, who called not for soldiers but an army of artists, teachers, and caregivers to flood the country, and driven by a strong social conscience, a year earlier Sharon dipped into her savings, flew to Kigali for a week, and offered her considerable gifts as performer and teacher to the Rwandan public. She was moved by her experience of playing for an audience who responded to the music as though from the composer’s source, laughing out loud when the music took an unexpected turn. The experience was so different from the foot-tapping restlessness of her usual audiences that it changed the nature of her performance. And she was profoundly altered by the moral ambiguity of her northern privilege. When the invitation to return to Kigali from the Canadian consul arrived, she scraped together the funds and bought another ticket. She plans to set up a foundation for teaching internships and a cross-cultural music festival. Sharon is in such demand during her two weeks here that her visit had to be organized into a daily schedule of teaching, interviews, and concerts.

i came to rwanda to follow sharon’s project, which includes playing for orphanages, hospitals, and the university, and found myself in a country where the culture has been locked in a deep-freeze for twelve years. Since the war, the soul of the nation has been choked in silence, many of its artists literally and figuratively no longer able to speak. This is not only a psychological and emotional expression of trauma; it is also because the population of artists has been significantly reduced. In the 1920s, after a history of intermarriage between the two dominant tribes of Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the Belgian colonial rulers racialized the country, classifying people according to the number of cows they had—those with more than ten were Tutsi, less than ten, Hutu. By the 1990s, three decades after independence, the thriving, integrated community of artists had lost respect for those arbitrary designations. When the war broke out, they were targeted as sympathizers and many were killed immediately. Others fled the country.

In the last five years, the population of Kigali has increased to close to a million, and some of that migration includes the return of the surviving artistic community. It is not an easy homecoming. Corneille Nyungura, for example, who is a megastar in the francophone world and has an international reputation, moved to Montreal after a harrowing escape from the genocide. He still cannot go back. For the rest, the steps home are hesitant but there is a new openness to the outside world and a growing appetite for Western culture and expertise. Sharon’s project is part of a thaw in the voice of the people.

Albert Byron, a guitarist, was one of the first artists to return after the war. He has been trying to resuscitate the local culture, but while I was in Kigali I couldn’t find a single club with live music or a pocket of alternative artists. Most of the music heard today is imported from the Democratic Republic of the Congo or South Africa. I also couldn’t find a McDonald’s, which is more significant than it sounds, because I discovered that the absence of images from corporate America has a dramatic affect on the psyche. Under the spell of the Rwandan sun, a sun that climbs a horizon of unimaginable expanse, I felt, for the first time in a long while, a stretch along my own borders and as uninvented as the landscape.

The Hôtel des Mille Collines, in the heart of the most affluent district in Kigali, has an easy andante to it, a Sunday-drive feel. I am greeted by a gracious, disproportionately large staff in a lobby that holds the footprints of Bill Clinton and the king of Belgium but also the hundreds and hundreds of desperates who in 1994 crammed into the cane-backed cushions of the sofas and stuffed the balconied rooms of the five-storey hotel. This address was UN-protected during the genocide, a safe haven, and is one of the only buildings in Kigali that remained intact. But the taste of aftermath is oddly absent here, and like so much else in the city except for the reminders from the limbless, the surface stains of recent history have been wiped over.

Just around the corner from the president’s quarters and very near the new Intercontinental, the only hotel that has the really familiar swell of luxury, there is a pause in the studied elegance of the Boulevard de la Révolution. The Central University Hospital of Kigali, a facility that serves the general population and has an aids unit, is designed like a military compound. Next to the dressy architectural splash of the street, it’s an old, torn pocket. Inside the grounds of the hospital, on a lawn that fronts a series of concrete buildings for the “surgeree” or “famille” clinics, dozens of patients in vivid stages of illness roam around, waiting. A mephitic odour, escaped from the wards, infuses the outside air.