7 Billion (9 page)

The forestry agency's sector manager of the area, Patrick Kaketo, contemplates the environmental devastation with a despairing smile. “They're cutting all of this down,” Kaketo says. “And we can't touch them. For us, it's a kind of psycho-professional torture.”

 

How did Africa's land of plenty
descend into a perilous free-for-all? For over a thousand years, migrant farmers, pastoralists, and mineral-seekers have gravitated to the Albertine Rift Valley with high hopes that were invariably met. The first wave of Bantu immigrants some 2,500 years ago, “were running away from the Sahara desert and malaria in present-day Cameroon and Nigeria,” says Pierre Ruzirabwoba, director of Rwanda's Institute of Research & Dialogue for Peace. “Then, several hundred years later, came a group of people from present-day Somalia and Ethiopia who were running away from conflict and overcrowded cattle pastures. When conflicts would arise over land, the Mwami's deputies—one in charge of grassland, the other in charge of farmland—would make sure everyone had what was sufficient.”

Trouble arrived when the Europeans did, at the end of the 19th century. While permitting the Mwamis to continue their local governance, the colonizers were struck by the physical differences between the darker-skinned Bantu, or Hutu, majority and the taller, lighter-skinned Ethiopian descendants, or Tutsis. Imposing their own racial stereotypes on a region that had previously never distinguished by color, the German, Belgian, and French administrators deduced that the Tutsis were intellectually superior to the Hutus. The former were therefore given plum government jobs, while the latter became soldiers and farmhands.

In 1932, Rwanda's Belgian occupiers officially codified a racial caste system—and, inevitably, racial hostilities that spilled over the borders into Burundi and the Congo—by handing out ID cards that designated about 15 percent of its subjects as Tutsis, 85 percent as Hutus, and a tiny fraction as Twa pygmies. By the time the colonizers departed as the countries gained independence in the early 1960s, recriminations had already led to ethnically-based killings of Tutsis, followed by retaliatory murders of Hutus. Today, tensions between those two groups continue to play out in the Congo.

But the genocide that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 was the result of more than Hutu-Tutsi ethnic hatred, fueled by politicians hungry for power. The latter years of the 20th century brought a sobering recognition that there was in fact NOT enough for everyone in the Albertine Rift Valley—and with that, catastrophe. An alarming rise in birth rates coincided with the collapse of the coffee and tea markets during the 1980's, leading to great deprivation; poverty led to even higher fertility rates, and thus to an even greater strain on the land. While it's true that many industrialized countries have population densities as high as Rwanda did at this time, they also have mechanized, high-yield agriculture that allows a few farmers to grow enough food for the whole country. In Rwanda's subsistence agricultural society, the only way to grow more food was to clear forests with slash-and-burn agriculture.

By the mid-1980s, every acre of land outside the parks was already being farmed. Sons were inheriting increasingly smaller plots of land. Soils were depleted. Tensions were high. Belgian economists Catherine Andre and Jeanne-Philippe Platteau conducted a study of land disputes in one region in Rwanda both before and after the genocide and found that an increasing percentage of households were struggling to feed themselves on so little land. Interviewing residents after the genocide, it was not uncommon to hear Rwandans argue that “war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources.” Thomas Malthus, the famed British economist who posited that population growth would outstrip the planet's ability to sustain it, couldn't have put it more succinctly.

Platteau and Andre are not suggesting the genocide was an inevitable outcome of population pressures. The killings were clearly influenced by political decisions made by power-hungry politicians. But several scholars, including French historian Gerard Prunier are convinced that a scarcity of land set the stage for the mass killing. In short, the genocide gave landless Hutus the cover they needed to initiate class warfare. “At least part of the reason why it was carried out so thoroughly by the ordinary rank-and-file peasants was feeling that there were too many people on too little land,” Prunier observed in The Rwanda Crisis, “and that with a reduction in their numbers, there would be more for the survivors.”

 

The Eastern Congo Village
of Shasha—roughly equidistant to Goma to the north, Bukavu to the south, Masisi to the west and Lake Kivu to the east—has become a grim crossroads for roving rebels seeking land, minerals, and revenge. Nearby mines holding eastern Congo's abundant tin, coltan, and gold are almost exclusively under the control of various armed groups—the Hutu and Tutsi paramilitaries, the Mai-Mai militias of the indigenous groups—each descending on Shasha village in a macabre rotation, one after another, month after month, in a wave of mayhem.

A woman named Faida weeps quietly as she recalls what happened to her a year ago. She is petite and ebony-skinned, with fatigued eyes and a voice just above a whisper. In her hands is a letter from her husband, announcing that he is divorcing her because he fears she might have contracted HIV from the men who raped her.

On that fateful day, Faida was on the same road she always took after working in the peanut fields some 40 miles southwest of Goma. She would walk an hour and a half to the market at Minova with the peanuts on her back; then return home with firewood on her back. Faida was 32 and of the Hunde tribe, married with six children, and for 16 years this had been her routine. She believed no one would attack a woman in broad daylight.

The three men were rebel Hutu. She tried to run, but the load on her back was heavy. The men instructed her to lay down her bag. They told her to choose between life and death. Then they dragged her into a cattle field. She lost consciousness.

Today she lives with neighbors and cannot work. Her ex-husband quickly remarried. The damage done to her reproductive organs is extensive. “I'm really suffering,” she says. “Please help me get medication, I beg you.”

Shasha's population is about ten thousand, twice what it was in 1994, and its story is, writ small, that of the eastern Congo. A Hunde stronghold since antiquity, Shasha began to receive Hutus in the 1930s, when the Belgian occupiers brought them in to work their coffee and tea plantations. Later, in the wake of the 1994 genocide, came thousands of Tutsi refugees. Land disputes became overheated and were frequently resolved at the point of the gun. The area's vast mineral wealth only made things worse. Scarcity and abundance both exist here side by side, fueling grievances as well as greed, spiraling into inexplicable violence against innocents.

Goma women's advocate Marie Gorette estimates that over eight hundred women in the village have been raped. They range in age, she says, from six months to eighty. Gorette offers to introduce me to the women of Shasha. And so one afternoon we sit in a village hut while the ladies enter one by one to tell their stories.

Odette is strong-shouldered and wears a blue print dress. It happened to her just ten days ago. Her 12-year old son found her unconscious in the cassava fields where she had been working.

Chantel is forty-two. Tutsi rebels barged into her house four years ago, took all the family's money and declared it was not enough. Her husband was forced to watch at gunpoint. Justine looks much younger than twenty-eight, with lively eyes. The Congolese Tutsi warlord Laurent Nkunda (now-imprisoned) brought his CNDP army into Shasha in 2008. Justine was far from the only one—many of her relatives and neighbors were raped as well.

In 2005, the UN estimated that some 45,000 women had been raped in the eastern province of South Kivu alone. And despite international attention following a 2009 visit to the region by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the abuse continues. Just as the “Hutu Power” Rwandans in 1994 sought to eradicate the Tutsis by deliberately massacring women and children, Shasha's invaders are human heat-seeking missiles aimed at the village's women. “Because it's the corridor, Shasha is the worst place in the region when it comes to mass rapes,” says Gorette. “They use rape as a weapon to destroy a generation.”

 

I am somewhere in Rwanda
when my car breaks down. A man pulls over to where I'm hovering over the smoking engine and offers to drive me the remaining 70 or so miles to Kigali. “If this were the Congo, you would be in big trouble,” he laughs.

The 41-year old man's name is Samuel, and though he is from the farming community of Romagana, his vocation is carpentry. By the region's standards, Samuel's family is small—“only four children,” he says. “I think that's the ideal size.” Schools cost Samuel about four thousand dollars per child each term. “But I think education is the solution. Otherwise people have no work. They just resort to having lots of children and stealing to survive.” The broad-faced man smiles and says, “I'm very optimistic about our country. The future is indeed bright.”

It is no small miracle that the country where the Albertine Rift Valley's anxieties and resentments metastasized into genocide would, less than two decades later, emerge as the region's beacon of hope. Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, drove out the Hutu leaders of the massacre and set up a minority Tutsi regime that has been in power ever since. Recently Kagame's luster has been tarnished as he's come under criticism for civil rights abuses against dissidents—and for using paramilitary groups to divert mineral riches from the eastern Congo. Though Rwanda has largely stopped the direct plunder of resources that occurred during Congo's last civil war, Kagame's plans to build up his country definitely depend on continuing to covertly exploit its neighbor's mineral wealth.

Still, in this neighborhood, there's no denying the long list of successes Kagame has piled up in an incredibly impoverished place. Rwanda is now one of the safest, most stable, and least corrupt countries in Africa. The roads are paved, the landscape is tidy, and cutting down so much as a single tree has been illegal since 2005. Government programs offer poachers alternative livelihoods such as beekeeping. An event known as Kwita Izina has raised awareness of wildlife conservation with an annual ceremony to name every newborn mountain gorilla in Rwanda. A law passed this past January provides compensation for livestock killed by wildlife. An environmentally sensible regazzetting of Rwanda's Akagera National Park in 1997 gave hundreds of acres back to its citizens, while hundreds of additional acres owned by wealthy landowners in the country's eastern province were redistributed in 2007—though Kagame himself, and other influential cronies, continue to own sprawling estates.

Unlike in Uganda, where President Musevini has declared its high birth rate a tool in building a productive workforce, Rwanda is tackling its high fertility rate with an aggressive family planning campaign. “When I look at the problem of Rwanda's population, it starts with the high fertility rate among our poor women. And this impacts everything—the environment, the relationship between our people, and the country's development as a whole,” says tktkt, the deputy speaker of Parliament. “For all the visible progress Rwanda is making, if we don't address this matter, then it will create a bottleneck, and our development will be unsustainable.”

Yet even if Rwanda's fertility rate falls below replacement level, as it's projected to in 2050, its population will still double beyond what it was during the 1994 genocide. Forty-five per cent of Rwandans are under the age of fifteen; the same percentage are illiterate. Nearly 85 percent live in rural areas. To feed its burgeoning population, and protect the wildlife still left in its parks, Rwanda will need to figure out how to produce much more food on much less land—a tall order in this part of the world. Even Kagame's strongman government can only do so much so fast.

“The average family of six has little more than half an acre here,” says Pierre Ruzirabwoba. “And of course, those children will have children. Where will they grow crops? That small piece of land has been overworked and is no longer fertile. I'm afraid another war could be around the corner.”

Another full-scale war in the heart of the Albertine Rift Valley? It's an awful thing to contemplate. Ruzirabwoba fretfully ponders the way out. High-yield farming techniques, of course. Better job opportunities in the city. And “a good relationship with our neighboring countries.”

Then he shrugs and says, “Perhaps some of our people can migrate to the Congo.”

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