Beyond gorillas, Rwandan culture is raking tourist dollars

Roughly a five-minute walk from Musanze bus station, below a steep escarpment with dense vegetative cover, sits the modest offices of a local tour company, Amahoro Tours. So dense is the tree canopy and green cover around the company’s extensive acreage, that, it appears like virgin forest when seen from the bus park. Yet at main entrance of Amahoro, the feeling one gets is that of an art and craft dealership, or a cultural artifact center: there are countless paintings on canvass, wood carvings, tribal masks and cultural paraphernalia neatly displayed at every nook and cranny, every wall, tree trunk and stump. Actually, this place has become a melting pot for local artisans either plying their wares to tourists who check into the facility, while others do come here for free apprenticeship. Greg Bakunzi, founder and managing director of Amahoro Tours recalls that he found the property in this virgin state in 1999, when he first acquired it. “When I first came here, there was some subsistence farming going on, mostly growing of sweet potatoes. Otherwise it was just a forest and nobody lived here.” Prior to this move, Bakunzi had been doing some cultural tourism projects with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, a mountain gorilla conservation project. “While there, I discovered that my real interest was in community-based tourism, so I decided to quit and start something,” Bakunzi said. He settled for this particular site because of its easy accessibility, the natural setting, and quiet atmosphere. “There is a saying that Charity begins at home, so as someone who had just discovered my niche in cultural tourism, my office had to reflect this concept.” With the frugal savings from his previous job, Bakunzi managed to erect a small residential structure on the site, in 1999. Today, this house is not only his home, it also doubles as the main office and base for Amahoro Tours. “I realised that the best strategy was that of combining my home and office in one place. In business you have to find all possible ways of minimising costs, so it was good that I was not paying rent. Another advantage of working from home is that it is the best place to develop my original ideas.” Being a tour operator, Bakunzi employs a small team of booking agents to handle inquiries and bookings, a splattering of field and tour guides, and a few artisans responsible for some of the unique and priceless art gems on the site. “I wanted to preserve our local culture, which is why I went in for this particular look, because that is what responsible tourism is all about. When I first thought of setting up Amahoro Tours, the main mission was to offer cultural tourism, and I could not have kept its office in a different way,” he explained. Tourism demysfied Seven kilometers out of Musanze town, in Nyakinama village sits the Red Rocks Campsite and Cultural Exchange Center, Bakunzi’s second major project after Amahoro Tours. “Here,” said Bakunzi, “cultural tourism leads to community development.” Essentially a camping facility for backpackers and tourists to and from the gorilla trail, Red Rocks also serves as some kind of demonstration facility for Bakunzi’s “community, conservation and tourism” pet project. Away from the camping facility, tourists get to have a feel of the local culture, by interacting directly with local artisan communities. The locals come to Red Rocks in their individual capacities –painters, weavers, sculptors –and set up camp at Red Rocks whenever there is a big touring group, ready to tap the tourist dollar. Bakunzi’s auxiliary, home-grown tour itinerary seeks to supplement the core packages of gorilla tracking and mountain hiking for which the Musanze tour destination is synonymous. He calls it “cultural tourism”. “What we do is basically to integrate three things; the community, tourism, and conservation together.” “Our model emphasizes real human contact between tourists and local communities as a form of intercultural exchange, with conservation of nature in mind.” In a nutshell, what Bakunzi does is to sell real life cultural experiences to tourists, as opposed to tour destinations. He offers a taste of local culture and life experiences to tourists at a fee. This cultural package includes a host of activities in which one can choose to take part; village and community walks, basket weaving sessions, banana beer production, farm harvests, traditional music and dance, family visitations …you name it. Think of any aspect of Rwandan life that a tourist would want to experience and tell the story when they return home. Most importantly, the emphasis here is on the tourist getting a hands-on experience as opposed to just watching the action from the sidelines or relying on explanations from tour guides. In other words, if a tourist got fascinated by a piece of handcraft and wanted to know how it is made, they will be taken to a community of basket weavers, given a theoretical explanation, and later offered a hands-on session to weave their own basket. Kim Harms, a tourist from Minnesotta, USA was pleasantly surprised to see a group of children pounding sorghum while on a cultural visit to the community around Kabagorozi village. While confessing to have seen a few sorghum fields back home in Minnesotta, she had never gotten so close to the crop. More shock awaited her as she begun to notice men, women and children eating raw sorghum grain, while a few children chewed at the stalks, like sugar cane. She was duly informed that there is a particular variety of sorghum that is palatable when eaten raw. While she duly turned down a fistful of sorghum grain extended to her by one woman, Kim could not resist the urge to participate in some of the post-harvest activities like pounding and grinding the grain. Kneeling down carefully, she wobbled to a start, but soon found her steady rhythm at the grinding stone, turning brown grain into white flour. “This is just my observation as an outsider. As I see it, the Twa are a beautiful indigenous people just starting to trust the outside world enough to consider entering it,” she remarked. Later, a motley crew consisting of women, children and men converged into one big choir in the middle of the settlement, ready to entertain their guests. A number of the women had their toddlers strapped on their backs as they took to a vigorous dance and singing session. And so vigorous were their dance moves, one of the tourists was forced to ask what food they eat, to which they quickly pointed to the freshly cut sorghum grain drying in the sun. But the most emotional moment was when Kim pulled out a large plaque of her late son and showed it to the women, telling them it was her son’s death that had inspired the trip to Rwanda. “When we lost our son, I and my husband took about three years traumatised and living in denial. Then one day, I thought about Rwanda’s tragic history, and tried to imagine what it must feel like to lose loved ones on such a massive scale,” she explained to the women through a translator. She later exchanged a few more gifts with her new found friends, and bought a couple of music CDs with their traditional folk songs. Banana wine Another highly cherished cultural experience is the local banana beer production. Only the very unadventurous among tourists are content with just tasting the final product. Otherwise, the majority are always waiting for the first opportunity to join in the fun that characterises the process. Usually, these tourists looking for some kind of trophy to carry back home, the reason they will go out of their way to touch base with authentic local country life. For this, they are only too glad to put away their gorilla permits and five-star Kigali comforts, if only temporarily.