7. Burundi and Rwanda

Mary Soderstrom

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7. Burundi and Rwanda

Mary Soderstrom
Mary Soderstrom

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This chapter is in the book Frenemy Nations

7BURUNDI AND RWANDAEarly in the morning, from my hotel room in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, I watched women like those I’d seen in Haiti carrying loads on their heads on their way to market. My windows faced east and looked onto the hills that rise steeply from the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the sec-ond-deepest lake in the world. It lies in a trench 673 kilometres long, which is part of the great rent in the earth’s surface where Africa is splitting apart. The geographic setting sometimes appeared to me to be a metaphor for what was happening seven years after the horrific genocide in Rwanda, Burundi’s twin, as Hutus and Tutsis slowly inched toward a power-sharing arrangement in Burundi itself.1Collecting wood for charcoal and brush to feed livestock was the cause for the desolate state of the hills before me, just as in Haiti. The Great Lakes region in the heart of Africa is even more densely populated than Haiti or the Dominican Republic, and the pressure on the land—once extremely fertile from regular infusions of volcanic ash—is immense. Indeed, overpopulation is frequently given as a major reason for the “interethnic” conflict between the

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7BURUNDI AND RWANDAEarly in the morning, from my hotel room in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, I watched women like those I’d seen in Haiti carrying loads on their heads on their way to market. My windows faced east and looked onto the hills that rise steeply from the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the sec-ond-deepest lake in the world. It lies in a trench 673 kilometres long, which is part of the great rent in the earth’s surface where Africa is splitting apart. The geographic setting sometimes appeared to me to be a metaphor for what was happening seven years after the horrific genocide in Rwanda, Burundi’s twin, as Hutus and Tutsis slowly inched toward a power-sharing arrangement in Burundi itself.1Collecting wood for charcoal and brush to feed livestock was the cause for the desolate state of the hills before me, just as in Haiti. The Great Lakes region in the heart of Africa is even more densely populated than Haiti or the Dominican Republic, and the pressure on the land—once extremely fertile from regular infusions of volcanic ash—is immense. Indeed, overpopulation is frequently given as a major reason for the “interethnic” conflict between the

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