Finding Peace in Bujumbura

The central part of Bujumbura was laid out during colonial days, and features a classic City Beautiful rond-point, around which vehicle
traffic is channeled. The Chaussée Prince Louis Rwagazore and the Chausée Peuple Murundi come together here.

Bujumbura is the capital of Burundi, Rwanda’s non-identical twin in the Great Lake Region of Central Africa. Like Rwanda, Burundi’s population is divided between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups, with Hutus forming the vast majority, about 80 percent. (Both countries also include a small proportion—less than three percent—of Twa, a people related to the pygmies.) Inter-ethnic violence has been endemic for more than 40 years, and although Burundi has not seen bloodshed on a scale of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, a civil war that began in 1993 has claimed thousands upon thousands of victims. Whereas in Rwanda, Tutsi were the target of Hutu violence, the situation is reversed in Burundi.

A long, slow process toward peace and reconciliation was just beginning when I visited Bujumbura to research a novel, The Violets of Usambara. That was in October 2001, a most interesting time to travel in Africa, I can assure you. Both the US and Canadian governments had travel warnings in effect, and before I left I was told not to venture outside the city alone. What I found in Bujumbura was a city which still showed its colonial roots in the design of the central section. Wide, City Beautiful-inspired boulevards took off from a rond-point or climbed toward the hills. Both the airport and the cathedral boasted classic modernist design from the 1950s and early 1960s. But the city was surrounded by acres of informally-built housing. These neighborhoods are said to have grown as people have come to take refuge in the city from violence in the hills.

Cattle are extremely important still to Tutsis who are the traditional herders in both Rwanda and Burundi. When I was there the peace process between the two ethnics groups was underway, but tensions were still acute. Several well-off herders had brought their cattle down from the hills for safe keeping in corrals in the city right at the edge of Lake Tanganyika.

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Streetcorners in Alexandria

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Morning Coffee #7: Cafés in Old Cairo

El Fishawy is the best known café in Cairo
and a favourite of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz

Mention Cairo, and the first things that come to mind are the pyramids. Why do I consider this unfortunate? Because the pyramids are a remnant of a dead civilization, and Cairo today is a living city of 16 million people. Let me suggest a better symbol: the cafés of Khan-el-Khalili, a living microcosm of Egypt’s metropolis.

Cairo’s cafés are many things at once. Sometimes, they have the social buzz of a nightclub or pub. You can often count on the Egyptian smoking a shisha next to you to strike up a conversation. I even saw some French tourists at a nearby table who seemed to be flirting with two Egyptian women in conservative Muslim headgear. Somewhere beyond the shisha haze was a family in party hats celebrating their kid’s birthday surrounded by golden trays crammed with large frothy milkshakes. A café isn’t a café without, well, introspective café types: reading, quietly sipping their dark mint tea, or scribbling away.

Cafés are habitually doorless and windowless. The interiors spill out onto the streets and the suq spills into the cafés. Cairo’s most famous café, the Fishawy, is a series of mirrors and ornate doorframes crammed into a through street. The street is used by shopkeepers, trinket vendors, and pedestrians, who brush against the tables. Sometimes the people-watching seems a little too intimate but this is Cairo: dense, chaotic, and wonderful.

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