In and out of the flow

How different are Bukavu and Cambridge, really? Teenagers wear skinny jeans and flat-billed hats. Professors talk too much.  Kids play with balls. In the stores you’re offered a plastic bag with your purchase. Just when you think that life here is the same as life there, you walk into a difference.

One of my favorite things to do anywhere is to walk where there are no cars. So I really enjoy the shortcut close to our house that connects our street, Ave Nyofu, with a street about 100m above it, Ave Lumumba. The ascent begins with a small wooden bridge over a trickle of water and waste. Usually there’s a man just beyond selling charcoal and wearing a golf cap. “Bonjour! C’est comme en Europe!” he says to us without fail. After passing him, one enters a narrow corridor with just enough space for one stream of humans to climb while another descends. As one climbs, there’s a brick wall 4m high to the left and to the right there are three wooden shacks with their entrances facing the corridor. In front of each shack there’s a grill and a young man tending to sizzling meat. Then, climbing still, there are stone steps in the red dirt that lead into a covered passage, the narrowest, final part of the short-cut. One passes under a tailor’s shop and out into the street.

It was there in the final covered passage, one day last week, when I noticed something had happened. First of all, the stream of humans had stopped, something that never happens normally, and blocked my entrance into the passage. I said “Excusez-moi” and started to gently push through the crowd. There was a man breathing heavily and rapidly to my left, but I didn’t see him well because I was watching several people in front of me who were pointing at the wall and speaking animatedly in Swahili. They were pointing at a divot or small hole. I noticed also that there was a large crowd at the end of the short cut.  

The short cut ends on one side of a very busy road with a large market on the other side. The sound of horns is constant. Motorcycles weave through taxi-vans, white NGO SUVs, and SUVs of color that belong to the rich. On the sidewalk yet more motorcycles wait for customers, crowds of people walk for their daily errands, and street vendors sit at their wooden tables under advertising-laden umbrellas. Some of these vendors sell Congolese francs for American dollars. The American dollars have to be pristine – no tears, no writing. The exchange rate has been 900 francs to the dollar for the last four years. These franc vendors sit with piles of 500 franc notes on their tables waiting for customers. Since arriving here I’d marveled at their confidence being in the open air with so much money.

On the day of interest, at the end of the short cut, pushing through the crowd in the covered passaged, I came upon the large crowd previously mentioned. The crowd was gathered around a one of the franc vendor’s wooden tables. There was no umbrella, no money, and no vendor, just a table with a bright red smear of blood across the surface.

I’m not used to seeing blood, and crowds in poor countries make me nervous, so I walked away a few meters. I asked someone what happened. “They killed him.”

That seemed to be enough information for now, so I took a taxi to l’Universite’ Catholique de Bukavu as planned. There, I asked our Congolese colleague Janvier if he’d heard what had happened. “Of course! Last night even.”

“Yes? So what happened?”
“The vendor was shot last night at 20h.”
“Did they catch the guy?”
“No. And they even killed his friend a few months ago.”

Over the next couple days a crowd remained around the table, no doubt sharing stories about what had happened. On the second day someone taped a photocopy of a picture of the victim on the concrete storefront behind his blood-smeared table. “Jean Katabisimwe. 1989-2014.” By the third day the picture and the crowd were gone and the steams of humans flowed through the short-cut just like they had before.