Jungle Adventure Part II
Dian Fossey left me in Kigali, and I spent the night in a good hotel. Next day I took a bus to Gisenyi on Lake Kivu.
Rwanda must be the loveliest place on earth!
A few days earlier I was having a drink in Kampala with some students and when one of them, I’ll call him Pierre, heard that I was projecting to go through Gisenyi, he told me that he was from there. Would I take a letter for him to his “brother”. I knew that “brother” meant perhaps a cousin, or even someone from the same village. Somehow I had this letter with me when I arrived in my destination. I found lodgings in someone’s garage. “The car was a write-off, so we make a little money by using the space as a guest room.”
Pierre had told me that his “brother” could be found via a certain shebeen. I’ll call it the Green Parrot. I make my way there and enquired. The barman eyed me suspiciously and when I said I had this letter for, let me call him Baudouin. If you give it to me, I’ll make sure he gets it, he says. Pierre told me to give it to Baudouin in person, I said. He shrugged and asked me where I was staying.
Early next morning, there was a knock on my garage door, and I opened it to a man in uniform. Sécurité Rwandaise, he said authoritatively. I had had a brush with Mobutu’s Sécurité not long ago, and that was not an enjoyable experience. In Zaire, “enemies of the state” disappeared. A few years later, the backyard of Governor Ndebo was found with a few dozen skeletons buried. He asked to come in, and sat on my bed to interview me. Why was I, a foreigner in these parts, meddling with local politics and consorting with enemies of the state? Pierre an enemy of the state? I wondered aloud. I explained the innocuous manner in which I had agreed to deliver the letter. He ordered me to hand it over to him. In a matter of seconds, with my ordeal with Mobutu’s man fresh in my mind, I decided that I had no choice. Perhaps I am not of the stuff heroes are made of. Dear Reader, I did.
I still believed that Rwanda is the prettiest place on earth.
