Reflections:The blood brotherhood of yore…..

“By this blood, I swear that I will defend you against the fiercest enemy, you will never go hungry when I still have energy, all that I own will be at your disposal, I am you and you are me!” Those words were uttered by the selfsame me, Ingina y’ Ingina, to a newly acquired brother who equally solemnly pledged the same!It was 1960 and we had just settled in Bufumbira, southwestern Uganda, as refugees after the 1959 ‘work’ in Rwanda. The ‘work’ meant some Rwandans, led by Belgian colonialists, violently evicting their fellow Rwandans from their homes and their country, and sending them into exile by burning their houses, torturing, maiming or even killing those who tried to put up any resistance. We’d left Rwanda on a Monday morning. We young ones had been playing in the compound outside the house, once in a while throwing a glance at our school clothes (there were no school uniforms then!) as they dried in the sun, since it was All Saints Day (November 1st), which was a holiday those days.As we were playing, someone exclaimed: “Cyaraboze iraje!” Indeed, when we checked there it was, my old man’s tired and rattling jalopy that we called “the rotten one”, panting its way up towards us at an unusually high speed. When it ‘groaned’ to a stop, my old man jumped out and told everyone to carry whatever they could and quickly walk across the border into Bufumbira, Uganda, which was a hundred or so metres away. Luckily, we had many relatives and friends across in Uganda and so were quickly found dwellings to settle in. From the safety of exile, we watched as the grass-thatched huts were torched and stone houses razed to the ground, inside Rwanda.For food, our former neighbours, who’d refused to join the killers, kept us well fed, harvesting crops from our agricultural fields and carrying them to us in Uganda, at night. Their leaders had failed to convince them to ‘work’ and had resorted to ferrying peasants from distant ridges in the colonial government lorries, after promising them some token rewards. As to what was going on deep inside Rwanda, our former neighbours, as well as the survivors of the pogroms, kept us informed about everything. In fact, after the invading peasants had left after a day’s ‘work’, even we could freely go back to our homes to pick our own crops, then retire back into exile! Among our neighbours, only the priests were hostile.Meanwhile, in exile we were getting reports that there was fierce fighting in some areas of Rwanda. We were told attackers were using pistols and even big guns to kill those who still resisted eviction. It was at about this time that my late uncle joined us in exile and gave us the details of what was happening first-hand. He had been in the thick of it and survived narrowly.He recounted to us how helicopters were being used by Belgian officers to bolster the efforts of natives who were using traditional weapons. After losing almost all of his comrades, my uncle had decided that he was outnumbered and out-armed. Said he: “It is not every time that a man falls that he breaks his b......s, but a man must know when he is defeated. Our persecutor is strong, and we are going to be away for a long, long time.” Convinced that we all had to safeguard our lives and our little property where we were, he advised my late father to create extensive kinship in exile. That is how I found myself in the house of one Mitwe, a notorious cattle rustler of the region. We had a modest herd of cattle that we had managed to cross with and the best way to ensure the animals’ safety was to befriend the man. Mitwe was the king of all cattle thieves and all the other thieves worked for him. He lived in the border area of Rwanda-Uganda but was known in the whole region: Murera in Rwanda, Bufumbira in Uganda and Bwisha (Jomba and Rutchuru) in D.R. Congo. He was known by everybody as a notorious cattle rustler but seemed to be above the law and all the other petty rustlers were under his patronage. It was to the son of this great cattle rustler that my father took me so that I could seal a blood-brotherhood bond, ‘kunywana’. After the appropriate ritualistic recitations by my father and the cattle rustler, a man came with a razorblade and proceeded to make a small incision on my stomach and drew some blood which he gave to the other boy, known as Ntegeye, to lick and swallow. The man did the same to Ntegeye’s stomach and also gave me the blood to lick and swallow and then the small gathering stood up to clap and cheer. After that we were given straws and drank from the same pot to celebrate the union of two families into one.Even today, nothing could be better than blood-kinship as a tool for unity and reconciliation.