EASTERN PROVINCE

Ngoma — Abundant food, cool atmosphere, a well designed roundabout, green and clean environment welcome you to Ngoma.

Formerly Kibungo, Ngoma district is one of the thirty districts of Rwanda, one of the seven districts that make the eastern province, 100 km off the country’s capital city Kigali.

About fifteen kilometres off Kayonza district as you head to Rusumo, you come across a small signpost that reads, ‘Murakazaneza muri Ngoma’ (welcome to Ngoma). Half a kilometre before Ngoma, you come across another small signpost with words ‘welcome to Kibungo.’

To some people therefore, they still think that Kibungo is the name of the district as it used to be before (2005). Wrong!

Kibungo is just one of the fourteen sectors that make up Ngoma district, the headquarters of the district. A trek through the hills of the district offers stirring views in all directions.

Don’t get scared when you get to this small town and you see people running towards you.

If you had committed an offence, you would think your days are over. But they are just "taxi brokers" who run after people looking for potential passengers. You will hear them ask "Kigali or Rusumo?" Should I give you a ticket? It is departing at 11:30am, me at 10:40) depending on their schedule.

Some start pointing at you from a distance, and then you realize that the touts are asking you whether you would board.

Just two kilometres off Rusumo road past district [Ngoma] headquarters, you find another small town but slightly bigger than the first one. You will then be told that that’s the ‘big city’ in the district.

You will never miss to hear some words like yarahumuye mwana- is tough you can’t joke with him/her-mwana is for young but can be applied to all age groups.

It’s common to hear a four -year old conversing with an older person saying…mwana.

For residents, Wednesday or Saturday, are their busiest days because they are market days. First timers who visit the place on other days of the week and return on a market day may not believe their eyes; because the number of town dwellers is countable during normal days.

People from across the district flock the market.

With little money, you can get something to eat; you can’t starve, a bunch of banana may go for Frw500, while a 50kg sack of rice ranges between Frw17, 500-18,500.

Frw500 you can go home with some good kilograms of potatoes while a kilogram of Irish potatoes cost only Frw50.

If you are lucky while moving about in the late evening, as the market winds up, you may land on some unsold bunches of banana abandoned there as the owners can not return them to wait for another market day.

Secondly, they [sellers] travel long distances of about twenty kilometres to bring mostly bananas, to the market, and if they don’t sell them, they find it double burden carrying again. This district chose bananas as one of the specialised crops alongside coffee, rice and pineapple.

Currently every home you visit there is a banana plantation. The leaders say they are committed to achieve their performance goals within the shortest time possible.

Witchcraft: you would think witchcraft is no more in the present generation but that is not so. Talk of sorcery and witchcraft is still rife in Kibungo.

My first time to tell a friend of mine Brian (not real name) that I have been appointed The New Times Bureau Chief Kibungo; he told me "nshuti, wowe barakuroze birarangiye!" (It is finished you are bewitched my friend).

I asked him, what he meant. Man, people of Kibungo are good at that activity, he replied. I asked him again, what he meant. You see, people of Kibungo are good at witchcraft, he replied. I said, "in the name of God, I’ll escape them if so."

I took up my job. "Man, you seem to be a nice guy," Twahirwa (not real name) a friend of mine I met in Ngoma told me. "That is a disease in our family if not the whole clan. I replied.

Oh! That’s nice to hear, he replied. I told him lots of nice things about our family. And he told me there were a lot of bad things one needed to know in this district.

What? I asked. You mess up once you are gone, he replied. I asked him what he meant. He told me that in Kibungo witchcraft is the order of the day. "Man, some few years back even people used to fly by baskets at night," Twahirwa said.

You get into this place for the first time you will hear a lot of talk about witchcraft to the extent that you can get scared of staying.

But don’t get scared, one friend of mine who is a pastor assured me how they (witches) have been defeated. "Look, we spend days and nights praying and very soon witchcraft will be history in our district," he told me.

Sources say in 1950s, Ngoma and Bugesera districts were predominantly for Tutsis; after being displaced and their property confiscated, from other parts of the country!

Ends