Reading this book disrupted his entire life and the lives of his family, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, of whom the most beautiful and most intelligent would be baptized Gentille.
He learned that the Hutus had inhabited the region of the Great Lakes since time immemorial and that they were probably descended from the Bantus, who were savage warriors from Lake Chad and had founded great kingdoms, like those of the Monomotapa and the Kongo, as well as the great Zulu chiefdoms in South Africa. It was they who, long before the birth of jesus, introduced metallurgy to the region as well as a pottery technique still being practised today.
The Tutsis, who had reigned over Ruanda-Urundi for centuries, had come from the North, from Egypt or Ethiopia. A Hamitic people, they were not true negroes but probably Whites darkened by centuries of sun. Their tall stature, the paleness of their skin and the fineness of their features attested to this noble ancestry and their distant relationship with the civilized peoples.
“The Hutu, a poor farmer, is short and squat and has the nose characteristic of the negroid races. He is good-natured but naive, coarse and unintelligent. The Hutu is deceitful and lazy, and quick to take offence. He is a typical negro.
“The Tutsi, a nomadic cattle grazier, is tall and slender. His skin is light brown on account of his northern origins. He is intelligent and skilful at trade. He has a sparkling wit and a pleasant disposition. Colonial administrators in Ruanda-Urundi would do well to obtain the assistance of Tutsis for tasks which in their judgment they may entrust without danger to natives.”
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When Célestin read these words to his father , Kawa uttered a fearful cry. All was crumbling around him: his pride as a Hutu patriarch and the ambitions he had been harbouring for Célestin. He himself no longer existed and his son was worth no more than a leper. On the hill, he was already being looked on with suspicion. Yes, now he realized why. For Kawa was very tall and his nose was neither large nor flat like the noses of his six brothers and forty-nine cousins. His skin was darker than the skin of Tutsis he knew, but when you saw him from behind or far away, or in a dark place, you could not tell the difference. He did raise cows like the Tutsis, but only chance and a crazy bet his father had made a long, long time ago had put him on that course. He was neither lazy nor stupid. People complimented him on his humour and admired his instinct for trade, and certain Tutsis of rank readily took him into their confidence.
If the doctor who had written this book was right— and who could doubt it?—Kawa and his parents and grandparents and children were neither Hutu nor Tutsi. Unless some ancestor had been mistaken and, throughout all these seasons past, they had been Tutsis without knowing it. If they really were Hutus, on the other hand, they were deformed, bastards of some kind, and their future held only obstacles and disappointments. Kawa asked Célestin to pray to his new god, and for good measure invoked his own, Imana. One can never be too careful. Neither seemed to have a solution for his dilemma. He would have to consult the ancestors, even though the practice,
kuragura
, had been forbidden by the bishops and burgomasters.
Kawa did not sleep a wink all night. Ten times at least he rose and went to walk in the banana grove, hoping for a sign from the sky or a sudden inspiration that would spare him from having to go and consult his distant cousin, one of the most venerated umumpfumu
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of the Kibeho district. In vain. The stars were deaf that night, the sky blind and silent.
His cousin’s name was Nyamaravago, in honour of the queen mother who at her baptism later had taken the name Radegonde. She had been practising divination since the death of her husband, he too a diviner, who had transmitted to her all the secrets of interpreting saliva, and pats of butter dissolving in boiling water. The too easy and unreliable sacrifice of chickens they left to lesser diviners.
He set out long before the first ray of sunshine lit up the eucalyptus trees. He had brought his finest cow as a gift for his cousin to make sure she would be favourably disposed. When he arrived at her house the sun was already announcing the end of the day. A dozen or more worried, ill or wounded people were patiently waiting, sitting in the shade of the rugo hedge surrounding the big round hut decorated with abstract motifs. The urgency of his case, or perhaps the ties of blood, or even more the cow which uttered a piercing moo of fatigue on arrival, ensured that Kawa waited only a few minutes.
Without speaking, but his eyes brimming with questions, he took his place on the mat woven with a black arrowhead design. Nyamaravago, seated facing him, had not even raised her head when he entered. She was humming almost inaudibly, her eyes closed, breathing slowly. A serving girl presented him with a large bowl of water. He washed his hands and face. He was offered banana beer, which he drank slowly, and then rinsed his mouth with water. He closed his eyes and prepared himself to listen.
His cousin spoke of the rains which had fallen very heavily, and of the buzzards which were more and more numerous, meaning that people were throwing away a lot of food, then of her husband who had visited her three nights before. She enquired after Kawa’s stomach, which had been ill and which she had treated several months before. Yes, the cramps had disappeared as soon as he had returned home to his hill. An oil lamp, a gift from a rich patient, was lit. The cousins talked for at least an hour. Five minutes of words followed by meditative silences. At last, she who communed with the spirits invited him to state the reason for his visit, the more important, it would seem, for the fineness and fatness of the cow. Kawa had not come for himself but for his children and the children of his children. He feared that great misfortunes would fall upon them and that all his descendants were cursed. And if he was in such despair, it was because a big book written by a White diviner confirmed his anxieties.
“It seems we are not what we are, nor what we appear to be,” he concluded, “and the future of my children will be bearable only if they become what they are not.” Even with the gods and ancestors, caution and discretion are permissible. A man who tells all is a naked man. A naked man is weak.
He spat into a small calabash. His cousin soaked a strip of wood in his saliva and added a little goat’s grease. She heated the strip over the flame of the oil lamp. She examined the forms created by the heat and closed her eyes. The serving girl brought a big bowl filled with boiling water. Nyamaravago put two little dabs of butter into it. Once the butter was melted, she closed her eyes once more and said, “Your children and the children of your children, as long as they live in the land of the hills, must change their skins like snakes and their colour like chameleons. They must always fly in the direction of the wind and swim with the river. They will be what they are not, otherwise they will suffer from being what they are.” Silence fell. Kawa trembled. Ants could be heard walking on the mat. The cousin slowly raised her right hand. Kawa, without his cow, took the path back to his hill.
Here is where the story of Gentille, who is yet to be born, begins a second time.
When he reached home, Kawa said not a word of his journey and even less of his worries or the painful decision he had taken in order to save his progeny and their yet unborn descendants.
In the land of hills, the father’s origin determines the ethnic group of the children. A Hutu father has Hutu children, a Tutsi father has Tutsi children, regardless of the origin of the mother. Kawa’s daughters would need only to marry Tutsis for their children to be part of the race chosen by the gods and admired by Whites. This ought to be easy to bring about. Kawa was rich and knew many less well-endowed Tutsi families who would gladly agree to improve their lot by a few cows in exchange for a son. But for the males of the family, fate condemned them to remain Hutus in Tutsi bodies. And their origin and that of their children would forever be written on their identity papers. What a nightmare. What a tragic fate. Schools forbidden, scorn from Whites, careers and ambitions blocked. Kawa would not allow his sons and the sons of his sons to be officially inferior beings forever, negroes among negroes.
Father Athanase confirmed his darkest fears when he reminded him that God loves all his children equally, that the true greatness of man is within and that the first shall be the last, implying, Kawa understood, that the Batwas
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would enter heaven first, followed by the Hutus, then the Tutsis. He did not dare ask the holy man why the children of God did not love the Hutus and Tutsis equally, why true greatness in this country was physical and why, here on earth, the first are always first. The man of the hills, who does not like to lose face, takes care to save face for the person he is talking to. Which is why he never revealed his transaction with the burgomaster.
To the burgomaster he offered several cows, several goats and his most beautiful daughter, who had just turned fourteen. The White refused to issue new identity papers transforming Kawa’s Hutus into Tutsis. However, he would take the girl in exchange for the silence he would keep forever regarding Kawa’s improper and shameful proposal. This is how Clémentine (whose buttocks and breasts nourished fantasies in the men of the hill, whatever their ethnic group) became the property of a very ugly, pimply-faced Belgian who came and abused her from behind every time he was in the neighbourhood. She died at seventeen from a blood disease that came, it was whispered, from the cocks of unwashed men.
Kawa’s other five daughters married Tutsis, thus saving their descendants from shame and infamy. Kawa still had enough cows to find Tutsi wives for his four sons. He chose his daughters-in-law for their stature and paleness of skin. He wanted them slimmer and taller than average, as long and sinuous as snakes, hoping that the Tutsi blood would kill the Hutu blood. Now there was only Célestin left in the house. Célestin was looking after his father, who was wasting away with illness and melancholy since the death of his wife several weeks after Clémentine had died. All the children had left the hill, fleeing the disapproving looks of uncles, aunts and nephews who felt betrayed by this family that had decided not to be what it was. By now Kawa possessed almost nothing. Not even goats. To arrange the last marriage he had had to give up the banana grove. All he had left was the big house and a small field of beans. He and Célestin had been eating beans for a year.
Célestin was not married. He was going to the seminary at Astrida, walking ten kilometres every day there and back, even though he had been offered room and board. He could not leave his father alone on the hill. As an exceptionally gifted student, he had been allowed to continue his studies in spite of his origin. Of the three hundred seminarists, thirty were Hutus, which was how it was in all the country’s schools. Célestin was hesitating between the priesthood and teaching. But the bishop decreed that the country was not yet ready to accept a priest of the inferior ethnic group; he could be a brother or a teacher. Kawa’s decision was final. Célestin would become a teacher in the city, which would allow him to have profitable associations. And Kawa set out to find him a wife. Célestin was his heart of hearts, the repository of his hopes. Of all his children, he was the tallest and palest. The Belgian doctor who wrote the big book, learned as he was, would never guess that Célestin was a Hutu, if not perhaps for his nose which was a little wide. Kawa finally found the nose he needed on the neighbouring hill. A nose so fine one would have thought it had been cut with a razor. A nose with skin so pale that her family thought Ernestine was sick. A nose so straight on a body so long and thin that the wind had nowhere to catch. If the superior blood did its job, the children of Célestin and Ernestine would be more Tutsi than the Tutsis. And with Célestin’s massive, solid body, they would be as strong and handsome as gods. Before making his request, he returned to his old cousin. Without either cow or goat, he was entitled only to the saliva, but even that cost him the little bean field. Nyamaravago said, “You have travelled too far and the little strength left to you is waning. You think you have found the key to all your dreams. Open the door and die happy with your hopes.”
The marriage cost the house. Ernestine and Célestin made their home in Astrida, and Kawa settled under the fig tree that shaded what had been his house. Ernestine’s father allowed him to live there. He was brought a handful of beans every day. He died a few weeks after the marriage, saying to a distant cousin who happened by, “The children of my children will be white, but will they recognize me?”
This was the story told by Célestin, Kawa’s grandson, to Gentille, who told it piecemeal to Valcourt. As Valcourt listened, he sat in the only armchair in the little red-mud house she shared with a girlfriend in the Muslim quarter of Nyamirambo, several kilometres from the hotel. A single room, the floor partly covered by two mats. A rickety armchair he had fled to so as not to be standing too close to Gentille. A table and two chairs. Two cardboard suitcases containing all the girls’ possessions. On the wall, three colour lithos: the Virgin, the Pope and the president. What was he doing here, still trembling and sweating from every one of his pores, billions of inexhaustible little fountains?
He had just spent another worthless Sunday at the pool. When all the ravens and then the buzzards were perched and the sun had disappeared suddenly behind the wall of eucalyptus trees, when there was no one left but him—as happened every Sunday—and he was growing despondent at the thought of starting another worthless week, Gentille approached his table.
“Monsieur, I beg you, Monsieur,” she whispered rather than said, “the governor must be told that I’m not a Tutsi. I don’t want to lose my job. I’m a real Hutu. I’ve got papers to prove it. I’m afraid of being taken for an inkotanyi.”
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