First tourist in Rwanda

Sandy beach on Lake Kivu (Source: here)

In early 1995, two colleagues and I were among the very first tourists to visit Rwanda after the 1994 genocide in which a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered by the Interahamwe, an extremist Hutu militia.

The three of us lived in Kampala, where we worked as economic advisors in the Ugandan Ministry of Finance & Economic Development. We were young, open-minded, curious. Africa-philes. We had all lived and worked in several African countries before coming to Uganda.

Above all, we were keen safari enthusiasts.

A year after the genocide, we turned our attention to Rwanda. The situation appeared from the outside to have mellowed sufficiently to warrant a visit. Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni was a close ally of Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who had assumed power after driving out the Interahamwe. We would be driving an official Ugandan government Land Cruiser with the ministry of finance logo on the side, so we figured we would be seen as friends and allies.

On the day of the start of our adventure, we left Kampala early in the morning to beat the rush hour traffic: destination Kabale, a small Ugandan town set in rich hilly terrain close to the Rwandan border, some 400 kilometres south-west of Kampala.

The first leg our trip from Kampala to Kabale

The journey through southern Uganda was pleasant, if uneventful. Outside Masaka, a town of some 285,000 people, we passed abandoned and burned-out tanks from a decisive battle in February 1979 between Tanzanian forces and Idi Amin’s soldiers. At Mbarara, a smaller town, we stopped at one of the many roadside restaurants for roast chicken lunch with chips and Coca Cola. By evening, we arrved in Kabale and checked into the lovely White Horse Inn.

The Rwandan border was now tantalisingly close, just 25 kilometres to the south. And Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, was a mere 80 kilometres further south.

After a good night’s sleep, we crossed into Rwanda at the Gatuna border post early next morning. Other than a few heavily laden trucks with nondescript boxes beneath dusty tarpaulins, there was barely any traffic at the border. The officials waved us through without fanfare.

As soon as we were inside Rwanda, we noticed a sharp drop in human activity compared to Uganda. It was eerily quiet and we hardly saw a soul. We drove through village after village with empty houses, the doors swinging on hinges in the light morning breeze. Stray dogs briefly lifted their heads when we passed, then returned to foraging for food.

Everyone in this part of Rwanda had either been killed in the genocide or had fled into neighbouring Tanzania or Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

We reached Kigali by early afternoon and checked into Hôtel des Mille Collines. The hotel would later become famous, when a movie – Hotel Rwanda – was made about its owner, Paul Rusesabagina, who saved more than a thousand people from certain death during the height of the genocide. The hotel was in very bad condition when we were there, but we did not have high expectations. We were grateful just to have a place to sleep and something to eat.

Our plan was to stay three nights in Kigali, which would give us two whole days to explore the country. On the first day, we would visit the Akagera National Park on the border with Tanzania and on the second day we would head north to Lake Kivu near the DRC border. On the third day, we would drive all the whole way back to Kampala in one stretch.

The day trip to Akagera National Park

As planned, the next morning we set out early in an easterly direction along the main road to Akagera National Park. After some 110 kilometres on mostly empty roads, we reached the village of Kabarondo, where the tarmac road gave way to a dirt track that led all the way to the entrance of the park itself.

We reached the park gate by mid-morning, but found it unmanned. We got out of the car, walked around a bit, looked through the windows, called out to announce our presence, but no one came so we lifted the boom and drove into the park.

We saw no game. During war and civil strife, national parks become a target for poachers. Almost all wildlife in Uganda’s national parks was wiped out during the war years from 1979 to 1986. The same had happened in Rwanda.

Still, we pushed on, following an old paper map from the mid-1980s. Our objective was to have lunch at the game lodge near the park headquarters. We also hoped we might catch a glimpse of Tanzania across the border.

The bush in the central part of Akagera was so thick that it reduced our visibility significantly, especially when turning corners. We therefore had no way of seeing what happened next until it was upon us. Barely two kilometres from the lodge, as we were turning a corner, a few meters in front of us, stood, in the middle of the road, a tall soldier. He wore brand-new green army fatigues. His boots were shiny. In his hands, he carried a heavy machine gun, which he pointed directly at us. We slammed on the brakes and the Land Cruiser came to a stop. We lifted our hands to show the soldier we were unarmed.

He did not move. We did not move. Silence.

Then the impasse was broken by gentle tapping on the car window. Outside stood an even taller soldier, very handsome. He must have come up from behind. He smiled and indicated that we roll down the windows. In almost perfect English, he asked us who we were and what we were doing there. We began to explain, but he caught on very quickly, nodded, and then asked us to get out of the car.

Once outside, we found ourselves completely surrounded by soldiers, all of them very tall and extremely well equipped. Then the tall soldier with the smile began to walk up the road and beckoned for us to follow him, which we did. Two other soldiers followed a few yards behind. After a short walk, the tall soldier stopped and turned to us, pointing to a section in the road, which bore marks of having recently been dug up.

“Do you see those marks?”, he asked.

“Those are land mines. If I had not stumbled upon you in this place at this time on this morning, you would have driven over those mines and been killed. You are very lucky. You better turn around and head back to Kigali”.

Before we left, we asked him what he and his unit were doing in Akagera National Park. Tossing his head in an easterly direction, he said,

“Just over there, beyond the bush, is the border with Tanzania. Not far beyond the border are the refugee camps at Karagwe. More than 150,000 Hutus, who fled Rwanda live there. They are mostly women and children, but among them you also find large numbers of Interahamwe. The Interahamwe stage raids into Rwanda every single day. Our job is to keep them out.”

The soldier explained that he was platoon leader and his outfit was a special forces unit in Kagame’s new Rwandan army. He said he had lived most of his life in Uganda, which is why his English was so good. He had trained to be an officer. He had also received military training at Sandhurst in England.

We drove back to Kigali as he had been asked to do.

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The trip to Gisenyi at Lake Kivu

The next morning we set out on the road that heads south-west from Kigali with a plan to turn north at the town of Muhanga and reach Gisenyi via Mukamira in time for lunch.

We had not counted on what we would see along the road out of Kigali.

When Kagame’s Tutsis invaded Rwanda to stop the genocide, the Interahamwe and hundreds of thousands of civilian Hutus fearful of reprisals fled Kigali to seek refuge in DRC. Some went north and ended up in the enormous refugee camp at Goma. Even larger numbers fled in a south-westerly direction along the main road to the DRC border town of Bukavu.

It did not take advance units of Kagame’s forces long to catch up with the slow-moving rear-guard of the fleeing Hutus. First contact happened some fifty kilometres south of Kigali and the clashes continued uninterrupted for the next 200 kilometers until the border at Bukavu. The Tutsis attacked the fleeing Hutus relentlessly. Everywhere along the road there was debris of war; burnt out cars and trucks, smashed armoured vehicles, broken bicycles, countless shoes and rags, houses with only the clay walls left standing. I have no idea how many people died on the road to Bukavu. We saw no bodies, but I kept thinking about Napoleon’s flight from Moscow in October 1812 and the Highway of Death when Iraqi forces fled Kuwait City during the first gulf war.

It must have been sheer hell.

Once we reached Muhange and turned north the roadside wreckage stopped, which allowed us to appreciate the stunning beauty of this small nation. Rwanda is a green and lush country with red soil and endless rounded hills. The soil is fertile and the climate is pleasant.

As you approach Gisenyi, the hills gradually level out until they become the flat sandy beaches, which line the shores of northern Lake Kivu. Gisenyi is a spectacular place, where luxury hotels line the beachfront. From the hotel rooms, you look towards the mountains in DRC, which rise like a blue wall from the lake, dark and forbidding like mountain ranges in old black-and-white Tarzan movies. Beyond the mountains, lies the enormity of the Congo Basin.

Yet, despite its beauty, Gisenyi felt very odd.

For one, a strange and unpleasant smell hung over the town. At first, we were not sure where the smell came from, but when we went up to the DRC border at the northern end of the town it suddenly dawned on us that the smell came from the Goma refugee camp.

Goma in 1995 was a true nightmare. The previous year, nearly a million Hutus had fled across the border and into the camp. There was no sanitation and thousands were dying of cholera. Antibiotic-resistant infections had taken hold, but the Interahamwe was diverting aid supplies intended for the sick and dying. What we could smell, but not see, was human misery and death on an almost unfathomable scale.

The other strange thing about Gisenyi was the near-complete absence of people. So much beauty, yet no tourists. Not a single one. Gisenyi felt post-apocalyptic and I suppose it was. We entered one of the posh hotels on the lake shore and called out for the staff. No one came. After a while an old man with limp appeared. He did not speak English, but we managed to signal to him that we wanted to eat. He nodded and pointed towards the restaurant upstairs. As he shuffled off, we found a table by the window with a spectacular view over the lake.

A few minutes later we heard a bird shriek. The old man was evidently butchering a chicken. We figured we had some time, so we took a stroll in the hotel grounds, where we stumbled upon a UN military outpost near the lake shore. The soldiers wore blue peacekeeper helmets. They told us they never left their post, because their mandate did not allow them to engage.

An hour later we ate the toughest chicken we had ever eaten. Then we paid the old man and set off for Kigali along the southern Rutsiro route, which hugs the lake shore until Mabanza and then turns east towards Kigali.

We had barely left Gisenyi when we ran into the first of many roadblocks. Unlike our encounter with the crack troops in Akagera the previous day, these roadblocks were manned by children. Very young boys, some half our height, barefoot, drugged up, with bloodshot eyes, pangas, and AK47s. Rags instead of uniforms. Every few hundred meters we would reach a new roadblock. Each time, we were motioned to stop, ordered out of the car, lined up against the vehicle, frisked, and then sent on our way. There were no greetings, no smiles.

I hesitate to think what would have happened to us had we not been driving a Ugandan vehicle. We later learned that while we had been eating tough chicken in Gisenyi the Interahamwe had staged a raid across the lake in rubber dinghies. Many people had been killed, some abducted. The soldiers were frightened and tense and probably felt as unsafe as we did.

We made it back to Kigali. The next morning we packed our gear, refuelled the Land Cruiser and set off for home. By evening, we were back in Kampala.

The End