A year in Kigali

Over a year in Kigali…hard to believe. It seems to have gone as quickly as the city itself is changing. 

The skyline on the hill across the valley from my house has changed. The giant cranes are still there, but the frame of a new conference centre has been steadily rising and is now several stories above the hoardings and showing as a long rectangular block on the hilltop. It is an ambitious monument to a vision of a clean (plastic-bag less) modern city, a city in which internationalists can feel utterly at home, because it is just like where they have come from. Pictures of a city plan show high-rise apartments along a created lake on reclaimed marshland. The planner’s model looks just like planner’s models everywhere.

the new conference centre growing

The ‘boat’ building in city centre is having a grand opening sometime soon. The highest building in Kigali, it will have a big Bourbon coffee shop (a chain patronized largely by the expatriate community and only a five-minute walk from the Bourbon already in city centre). There will be another Nakumatt (a Kenyan department store chain) in addition to the one already beside the first Bourbon.

A law to get hawkers off the street is slowly being implemented. The hawkers are disappearing (in city centre they sell strange maps of the human body with names of the parts in English); the mayabobo, the street children are no longer haunting the local intersection in the numbers of a year ago, and everywhere poor people’s housing is coming down. At the same time, overly large houses are going up, sometimes identical suburban type monstrosities on treeless hillsides.

one side of a street we often walk down

the other side of the street

On the same street, beans are growing amidst the foundations of small houses. Everywhere that can be planted, is planted.

At the same time, Rwanda takes seriously the need to be less oil dependent and more conservation focused. But that’s not stopping the developers from scraping the hillsides around the city and building look-alike houses with look-alike brick walls and look-alike landscaping (not a tree left visible anywhere). Look-alike garages, too, because there’s nowhere to buy anything in these developments.

I’m told that there are plans coming, laws coming, to halt this type of development. But will they come fast enough?

Everywhere the trees are coming down. I still can’t figure this, given the massive tree-planting campaigns mounted by the government. Is this unregulated development or part of a master plan to replace all the spreading acacias with look-alike palms along look-alike colonial style avenues? A neighbour hacks his acacia branch by branch. The servants at the house next-door start early with the machetes one Saturday morning, whacking at the tree outside their gate.

Our own back yard has gone wild in a year. We have refused to keep the oleander pruned in a perfect globe and it is slowly transforming into a tree. We don’t clip the colonial hedge along the bamboo fence so it too is changing shape and looking freer. (Not clipping the hedge on the street side of the gate is not an option. It is an instruction to do so and there are penalties for allowing wildness to the landscape.) There’s a two-foot avocado emerging from a retired compost pile and other assorted unnamed plants growing whichever way they like. Erneste, our guard, demonstrates vigorously how this will all get whacked back when we leave. He’s come to like our free yard, says it’s good for small animals.

In Kinamba, where I get off the bus to walk to the memorial centre, there is now a sidewalk of linked bricks, and a temporary barbed wire strung between posts to protect the newly hoed earth and the planted grass. This is a tough grass that is plucked from lawns, separated into single blades, and painstakingly planted by hand by women and men in blue coats. Grass here is not for walking on, and so the amount of pedestrian space by this busy bus stop has been cut in half. I liked it better the way it was although this is ‘nicer’ and for sure better in the relentless dust of the dry season.

Kinamba also has a zebra crosswalk and over the past months, an increasing number of vehicles stop. Maybe a quarter, but this is still a great  improvement. Crossing this road is tricky, and in the pouring rain the other day I was escorted across by two young men in military uniforms and who were carrying serious weapons.

The red dirt roads are disappearing everywhere as pavement is rolled out. A guy from UK tells me that five years ago there were almost no private cars. A colleague at the memorial site says all the places where killing happened during the genocide, roadblocks, are paved over and nothing is left to tell the story. A Rwandan tells me that five years ago city centre shut down for two hours in the middle of every day for siesta. Someone else tells me that five years ago foreigners were rare but now there are whole neighbourhoods of restaurants that cater to foreigners who can mostly afford to pay more.

But much remains the same. The small taxi-buses are still falling apart and barely make it up the endless hills. The enormous square hole in the sidewalk in the local shopping area is still trapping the unwary. Kimoronko market is still alive with people and produce and on free Saturday mornings we often wander down that way, grabbing a good latte at the coffee shop across from the Kigali Institute of Education.

Kimironko Market

Our cobble-stoned street still has no working streetlights and at night I stumble in the glare of headlights the same way lights blind one when walking down a dark rural Canadian road. The lizard still lives in the hole in the brick wall in the back garden and the geckos still run hastily along the ceilings and walls of the house.

The sun sets within half an hour of the same time all year round and the robin chats vigorously and noisily welcome the dawn. The valley by the swimming pool is still growing crops of maize and beans amongst the trees.

Familiarity and change is all around. I’m changing too, because I am returning to Canada soon. I hope to be back in a few months, but now there’s an aching in me, my internal season is becoming autumnal.