March 11, 2022
Taking in the evening ride on the gently-rising dual carriageway from the Akagera Bridge on your way from any part of Bugesera to Nyanza-Kicukiro is an experience of immense pleasure. The visual of an apparent pair of open arms of light rushing towards you for a hug and sailing past to give way for another prompt pair makes you feel that it’d be an insult to narrate it.
It’s there for you to only savour. The ride literally beseeches you to pause and ponder it.
What exactly is captivating about that section of the road? There are a number of other similarly beautiful and similarly lit dual carriageways we see every evening, in Kigali City.
So, is this particular road like this only when a few vehicles are on it, pounding it? Or is it that it’s not flanked by tall structures or, in parts, any buildings at all?
Or again, is it that, when you think back, you see the gruesome road from hell?
Indeed, thinking back, you’ll remember the pogroms of 1959, harbingers of horrendous 1994. If, for example, you were in the northern part of Rwanda that borders Uganda, like yours antiquely, you’ll remember how as a tot you heard about harrowing stories of those who were not lucky enough to skip over the border.
On that November 1, 1959, violent evictions broke out in the whole of that region. Some in the targeted section of Rwandans were mercilessly butchered as their homes were torched. From those billowing flames, frightened survivors were herded to Ruhengeri town where they were left in the open, stripped of all belongings and exposed to the mean elements of the area.
During that violent chaos, colonialist helicopters had been flying dangerously low (some even said upside down and chopping off heads) egging on the assailants and scattering written instructions for the gangs to do a quick job of it.
Before the victims could gather their wits to look for anything to drink or eat around the area, they were sardine-packed into lorries and driven to the northern side of the banks of Nyabarongo River, today renamed Akagera River.
Akagera River which, while at it, should perhaps also be pondered over its so-to-say cleansing. Before the change of name, from where Nyabarongo and Akanyaru Rivers converge, the river continued to carry the name Nyabarongo. Whose later-acquired bridge would act as the launch pad from which murderers desecrated the innocent river-waters by feeding them with dying and dead innocents.
That, however, is a story for another day.
We were talking about internally harassed and displaced Rwandans offloaded like rubbish and left at one side of the banks of River Nyabarongo. At the time there existed no bridge but a ferry operated by a colonial handler. Children, old women, men and all were left to die off in an uninhabited hostile savannah area with only muddy and bacteria-infested water to survive on.
To rub in the suffering, the ferry handler made sure he delayed in coming for them so as to find a famished, diseased and lessened number. When he finally came, it was only to ferry these miserable innocents across and abandon them in what was known as ‘Tsetse-land’ (itself a story for another day), Bugesera. And, indeed, the tsetse fly received and ravaged them to its lethal, sleeping-sickness satisfaction.
In which endeavour, the tsetse fly was given a wickedly willing hand by government civilian gangs and soldiers who periodically mowed them down. Every time Rwandans in exile in Burundi, neighbouring Bugesera, so much as expressed nostalgia for their home, government troops were dispatched for massacre operations. Still, miraculously, there were survivors.
But, as President Kagame has said on many an occasion, the resilience of survivors is unequalled. So, those who survived had turned Bugesera into the breadbasket of Rwanda by the time 1994 came to now deal them the last genocidal blow.
Unbelievable as it may be, there have been survivors and, joined by other Rwandans, together they are rising out of those ashes like the Sphinx to show those who denigrated them that they belong to the global high table. From desolate and deathly Tsetse-land, Bugesera is thus happening.
Of course, we ‘ain’t seen nothing’ yet’, in Reagan-esque parlance. Because think of the model villages sprouting everywhere, of Rwandans who are leaving Kigali City to pitch tent in the quiet of the place, without forgetting investors who are seeing rosy prospects and trooping there.
The mothers of all happenings: the world-standard airport that’s in busy-bee making, plus the dual carriageway that’ll shoot from it to connect with the above-mentioned section when complete.
“When complete” meaning the dual carriageway will remodel the whole way from the airport to Sonatube, in Kicukiru, Kigali City. That, however, will have been after navigating a graceful flyover roundabout in what’s known as Kicukiro Centre that’ll have wowed travellers some.
Bugesera airport and its dual carriageway. Fitting monuments to celebrate the courage of our brethren/‘sistren’ who suffered that indefinable inhumanity and the resilience of its survivors.
