A changing city

It’s almost three years since we first arrived in Kigali. The city has changed. When we came women’s skirts were almost always below the knee but hemlines have risen dramatically. There are fewer women dressed in traditional brightly patterned wraps and blouses with matching fancy headgear. There is less cloth in the market; more second hand clothing. The ladies carrying baskets of mangoes or passion fruit or avocado on their heads are not so visible and street side selling, a few onions or carrots or tomatoes spread out on the sidewalk, is disappearing.  Harassed off the street by food inspectors, people sell bread and samosas from the back of cars, ready to slam the trunk and peel off at a moment’s notice.  Even the bicycle taxi guys seem threatened. They peddle their passengers along a flat dirt road to the big market (that was slated apparently for demolition but has gotten a reprieve), a lovely cheap and peaceful form of transport but when they sense police presence the passengers must hastily dismount and the bicycles scatter. Are they the latest casualties to some notion of looking smart and western?

More roads are paved and although this creates runoff problems from the big storms, people are grateful for the reduction in dust during dry times. The desire to cut down trees has not abated since I last wrote about this; the most recent one to go is on our corner, a beautiful mature acacia spreading over the compound wall yesterday became a mass of hacked branches waiting for pickup or burning. It’s the same at home, I guess, private property owners can denude their property of anything resembling nature, but that doesn’t make it less sad. And in an equatorial country on the front lines of climate change this degradation is troubling. And contradictory. Rwanda has won awards for reforestation and planting trees and yet at the same time there seems to be no compunction on both private and city land to one by one fell the slow growing acacias or the thick leaved mango trees or whatever is providing a wee bit of shade from the hot midday sun. Although many streets are still graced with greenery, it seems that anything that reminds people too much of nature has to go. Clipped hedges are fine.

This clean and increasingly sterilized city filled with SUVs is something Rwandans are proud of, at least middle class Rwandans who benefit from it. But drop down a street or two to where poorer people live and the city suddenly comes to life. Here there are people moving about, talking, relating, sitting out front of small shops and stalls filled with produce. You feel part of the flow of life here. Not that life is easy, far from it, but it is not lonely.

‘Town’ is now called the Kigali central district, or the Kigali business district, something like that. A place of destruction and construction and new office towers with high rents. I find little reason to visit there, unless on a hunt for the cardboard tasting gluten free rice crackers at the big Kenyan owned supermarket. People used to come to the funky out of town bus terminals, all narrow alleys, hot ticket offices and vendors selling second hand magazines and men’s pants and cold sugar drinks. That’s all gone, moved to a giant field at the edge of the city.

But one good thing about Rwanda’s government seems to be an ability to change direction and this morning on the radio I heard that one ‘heritage’ street in city centre is to be spared the regulations to renovate upwards. I’m hoping this is the street that holds the store/restaurant we go to for the good home made potato chips and that has been in the hands of Rwandans of Indian descent for a couple of generations. Also the big prison just by city centre, built in the 1930’s (by the Belgians, I guess) has received heritage status. The prisoners are being moved to elsewhere, and the prison is slated to become a luxury hotel. That’s something to contemplate. Still, the notion of heritage can only be helpful; perhaps there will one day be protected heritage trees. And then I won’t wake in the night choked by the climate destroying smoke of burning trees.

But two years ago a British company gained the right to log 12,000 hectares of pine, cypress, acacia and eucalyptus in the buffer zone of Nyungwe Forest and this week parliamentarians are in an uproar because the Natural Resources Minister introduced a bill that would regulate the cutting of trees on small holdings. They are criticizing the minister for ‘not being in touch with the spirit of easing the business environment.”

What saddens me is the familiarity of all this,  how it mirrors home, how far we are from creating a world that honors the earth and all its inhabitants, how notions of progress with which we have been indoctrinated are taking us to an uncertain future.