Holding Back the Shame
Tracy Chevalier reports from Burundi
"I am told that, unlike in other African countries, people in Burundi don’t show emotion. That may be one reason why rape flourishes here: it is easy to hide it when everything else is hidden too"
Just down the road from the city market and the bus station in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, is an anonymous brown metal gate. At the sound of our car, a guard opens a slit at eye level, looks at us, then slowly opens up. We drive into a large garden where a pale yellow, one-storey house sits. The grounds are enclosed by a high wall, and consist mostly of scrubby grass and high weeds that a man is cutting with a scythe; clumps of bougainvillea, lemon, orange and banana trees provide needed shade.
A group of women and children are clustered on the steps of the house. As we come close they stare at us, and I try not to stare back. We step inside. It is cool and calm here in the waiting room. More women and children are sitting along the sofas and chairs. Women have been arriving since 6 am, some of them walking in or taking busses from the countryside. Some are accompanied by family or friends. Others – a local schoolgirl in her blue-and-white uniform, or a 60-year-old grandmother of 16 from the north – chose to come alone.
More are appearing all of the time; by the end of the morning the room will be overflowing. It is Monday morning. It has been a busy weekend for some. Most of these women and girls have been raped. I came expecting to see tears and grimaces, to hear shrieks and cries, but the women are impassive. They speak quietly to their companions, or to strangers they meet in the room, but mostly they sit silently, waiting. Children wander in and out. A five-year-old girl raped four months ago sits on the floor in the sunlight playing with wooden dolls. Partly the subdued atmosphere may be shock – some women, like the schoolgirl, were raped just hours ago.
Partly it may be a desire to quell emotions in front of strangers. But the lack of drama may also have something to do with the Burundian character itself. Again and again I am told that, unlike other African countries, people here don’t show much emotion; everything is hidden. It’s true that while I am in Burundi I don’t see people laughing or shouting quite so much as in other places I’ve been. Perhaps that is one reason why rape flourishes here: it is easy to hide it when everything else is hidden too. Bujumbura sits on long, narrow Lake Tanganyika. Across the lake hangs a wall of forbidding mountains like something out of Lord of the Rings; the vast Democratic Republic of Congo lies beyond. The Congo is by all accounts a mess: rumours proliferate about savage killings, systematic rape, even cannibalism.
By comparison, tiny Burundi (a little larger than Wales) seems sedate. Bujumbura itself is a straightforward African city, with decently paved roads, constant electricity, a huge market, banks, shops, schools, even a public swimming pool. For all its apparent orderliness, however, Bujumbura is rife with violence and lawlessness; its middle-class houses are walled off and guarded. There was a civil war in Burundi between 1993 and 2003, and although it didn’t succumb to the complete genocide its neighbour Rwanda has become infamous for, it shares similar manipulated ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis, as well as an erosion of the social fabric that normally reins in illegal activities and antisocial behaviour.
The post-war Burundian government is still an interim one, awaiting the elections that will turn it into a real democracy. The war tore it apart economically and socially – it was ranked 173rd out of 177 countries in the UN's 2004 Human Development Report. The foothills ringing Bujumbura hide guerrillas opposed to the government, and the city is under curfew at night. There is hope, however. As I write, the last guerrilla group has just signed a joint statement with the government agreeing to end hostilities. Burundi feels like a country on the verge of improving enormously. The Centre Seruka (which means “Come into the light” in the local language Kirundi) was opened in September 2003 by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an independent organisation that provides medical aid to areas in crisis.
The centre offers medical treatment and psychological counselling for victims of sexual violence. Such people had previously been treated at MSF’s long-established Centre for Civilian War Wounded in another neighbourhood. There, women and children coming in who had been raped would occasionally find themselves alongside their rapists who were being treated for gunshot wounds or fractures. It became clear that women needed a place where they could go and feel both protected and anonymous. Besides taking in rape victims, the Women’s Health Centre also offers family planning and treatment of sexually-transmitted diseases (STD), partly as a cover so that people won’t assume that everyone coming to the centre has been raped.
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Rape is its primary concern, however. It now receives an average of 120 rape cases a month, whereas only 5-10 per month come for advice on family planning. The centre is run by women, with only the guards, the drivers, and the gardeners men. The place has a calm, purposeful, practical energy about it. In fact, I notice that about women in general in Burundi: though they wield little economic or political power, they remain the dynamo behind the wheels of society. Women here never sit idly by the roadside the way men do. They are always doing something: carrying water, selling things in the market, tending children, working in the fields with baby strapped to back. Even their clothes are more vibrant – they wear colourful sarongs and head scarves, while the men favour western T-shirts and trousers.
The local staff at the centre are well-educated, well-trained, well-dressed, and manage that tricky balance between the sympathetic and the practical so needed in situations like this. I am not so deft. When I try to talk to women who have been raped I hesitate to ask for the details of what happened to them. I feel tripped up by the myriad emotions the idea of rape brings with it, wherever it occurs: horror, embarrassment, prudishness, voyeurism. At one point I sit out on the steps with an older woman and another schoolgirl, both of whom speak French as well as Kirundi, the local language. They were both raped several months ago and are here for six-month check-ups. I ask them lots of questions that skirt around the main topic but bottle out of mentioning rape directly. It feels too stark and disrespectful to say, “So, about your rape – tell me what happened.”