Reflections on sunday : What do descendants of colonialists know?

Quite a load of mail is piling up, accusing me of exercising a haughty writing style that is hardly comprehensible. My humblest apologies to those who took offence, but I must confess that I am a victim of my random thinking. My fault is therefore that my reflections flow directly from my snafu head to this harmless page. But also, on last Sunday’s reflections I am accused of trading lies. That is unfair, because what I said about colonial Rwanda is the gospel truth. No one can deny, for instance, that a prison is known as ‘umunyururu’ because prisoners used to be chained together. Equally, no one can deny that a prisoner is also known as ‘umunyururu’ in Kinyarwanda. It is true, then, that to a Munyarwanda a prison was a chain. The confusion arose out of the fact that both the prison and the prisoner were the same thing – a chain! Of course, before colonialism prisons and chains did not exist, least of all for punishment. For punishment of grave offences, there was a strong rope that was used to tie hands of the offenders behind their backs. This rope was called ‘ingoyi’, but there was a stronger one for yet graver offences, known as ‘rugaragura’. Punishment with ‘ingoyi’ was meted out for murder or rape. However, when it came to the murder of a child, or the rape of an under-age girl, the stronger ‘rugaragura’ was used. In both cases, the offender was taken to the region’s chief where he was tied for the whole day. At nightfall, the culprit was freed for the night and requested to report the following morning. Since word of mouth used to travel faster than anybody, the lawbreaker would be sure to report or be denounced by everybody.In fact, running away was dangerous for any evildoer as they risked being lynched. After conviction by ‘gacaca’, the malefactor had no alternative but to serve his sentence, which usually lasted a week. Being tied meant that ‘prison service’ did not involve the hard labour that marked colonial prisons that replaced ‘traditional prisons’. And, apart from murder and rape, there was no other serious crime that called for stiff punishment. There were petty crimes of cattle rustling, land ownership disputes, domestic disputes and such other cases that called for re-imbursement, payment of a fine or reconciliation sessions for the parties in dispute. To digress a little, you may recall Ingabire Victoire making reference to ‘ingoyi’ in her rapid-tongued campaigns on arrival in Rwanda. This was a calculated re-awakening of the days of ‘ingoyi’ and ‘umunyururu’ as preached by the colonialists. In 1955, when the king of Belgium visited a prison in Rwanda, he could not believe that humans could be chained together in the name of punishment. He immediately abolished ‘umunyururu’, but the colonialists made it seem as if the magnanimity was theirs and added it to their tools of division. The colonialist convinced some Rwandans that the chain, ‘umunyururu’, was introduced by the king of Rwanda as ‘ingoyi’. He sold the lie that the chain replaced the rope, introduced by a Mututsi king. By abolishing the chain, the colonialist showed himself as being the liberator of Bahutu from Batutsi rulers. Naïve that he was, however, the colonialist did not remember that Rwandans could look across their border, in the Belgian Congo (today’s D.R. Congo), where conditions for prisoners were more appalling. There, prisoners were connected by chains that ran through their legs. Yes, “through their legs”, you heard right! Every prisoner had a hole drilled in his leg, between the tendon and the fore-shin, near the ankles. The wound was allowed to heal, after which a chain was passed through and connected to the next prisoner. The colonial ruler knew he was responsible for these abuses but laid the blame on Batutsi. Yet, how could they be blamed as if they were the rulers? And for what was taking place on the Congolese soil? The Belgian didn’t bother to think about an answer to that one, of course, comfortable in the knowledge that no one would dare ask. Back to prisoners of Rwanda, it is true also that prisoners those days did not wear the clean pink uniforms of today. Their uniform consisted of dirty black shorts and dirtier, striped shirts of black and white. That is why they were called ‘zebras’, in addition to ‘abanyururu’— those stripes made them look like those graceful animals. It is a wonder, though, that anybody could tell that those stripes had originally been white! You see, the uniforms were never washed. So, you can imagine such a uniform that was worn by a succession of prisoners. By the time it reached the eighth prisoner, depending on the lengths of the sentences its wearers had served, it was such a dirty brown that you could hardly tell if it had had any colour at all. So, when the sons and grandsons of these colonialists give us the lip about human rights, we should refer them to the ghosts of their ancestors! ingina2@yahoo.co.uk