Ok, so it's a bit late to start this after 12 weeks and 24 new entries in my passport, but here it is - the first part of my little East African Adventure, the second time round (I really had to come back after spending all of summer 2009 just hanging out at Stilts in Diani Beach, Kenya). As a result, I'm going to split this first entry into a few separate pieces.
Anyway, here's the basic itinerary and plans I had before coming:
- 14th July, leave Edinburgh for Rwanda
- 15th to 31st July, hang out in Rwanda. Try to figure out some things about why the genocide happened, how the country has managed to progress so far to the stage it's at now, and go gorilla tracking and hiking in the Virungas.
- 31st July to 9th August, go to Kenya, base myself at Stilts and be the driver for a safari in Tsavo.
- 9th to 30th August, go to Ethiopia, see Erta Ale (lava lake), hike in the Simiens and check out the tourist industry to see if it'd be sensible to start another Condortrekkers-style non-profit trekking company there, and have a look at some of the ancient Ethiopian ruins and rock-hewn churches.
- 30th August to 22nd November, base myself at Stilts and do some trips from there. Maybe go to Jinja, Uganda for white-water rafting, maybe try to climb Mount Kenya (including rock climb to the true summit, not the walkers' summit), go to Zanzibar, Tanzania, maybe check out the flamingos at Lake Nakuru, and generally just try to meet people at Stilts with good ideas and join up with them.
All the plans kind of changed on about 6th August though. More on that in the next post. For now I'll start at the beginning.
When I arrived in Kigali, Rwanda, at about 2am on 15th July, it turned out that the hostel I was staying in does not in fact have the advertised 24h reception, and I had to sleep on the sofa in reception. They were really friendly and apologetic in the morning, gave me the free breakfast anyway, and the tour group that was organised from the hostel (Discover Rwanda) told me to come along and play football with them against some orphans. So I did.
I thought I'd hang out with the Discover Rwanda people for a bit longer when they said I could come with them to visit some of the important genocide museums and meet a student survivor group and just pay costs. Considering they also had a Rwandan volunteer guide who was 4 when it all kicked off, I thought this could give me a valuable insight with a pretty unique opportunity to ask questions. I won't go into details on genocide stuff, just check out the Wikipedia page if you want the nasty facts:
http:\\en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide
With the Discover Rwanda guys I also went on a quick safari in Akagera National Park, and for a quick trip to Kibuye to see Lake Kivu. I mainly just stuck around in Kigali with other backpackers in the hostel, went to the genocide memorial a couple of times (an externally curated museum that tries to be as unbiased as possible in Rwanda, which means it basically just doesn't mention the RPF who now rule the country...) and generally just tried to get myself a good picture of how and why the country has managed to become by far the most prosperous-feeling East African country.
Essay time, you're welcome to ignore the rest of this post - it's just been done for me to organise my thoughts.
In the end, about a week of my time was spent making the following conclusion - (His Excellence[!]) Paul Kagame is an all-powerful dictator who actually wants to do good for the country. I was struck when getting buses through the countryside that almost all the houses seemed to be at least weatherproof (very much not the case in Kenya), even though loads of NGO workers thought they were absolutely awful because they were still overcrowded. I read a paper and laughed out loud when I got to the opinions section and every single one explicitly applauded the government or Kagame himself. Reading more of it I realised the press freedom was poor, and I sent an email home saying the press freedom was what I expected in Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez is mental and shuts down TV stations that criticise him - turns out it's much worse than Venezuela, slap bang between Cuba and China, about 8th worst in the world. Political freedom is also awful, but economic freedom to invest is great, so people can pump money in easily and the country develops at a phenomenal rate.
Rwanda has had loads of cash and development work as aid since 1994, the intercity roads and main roads within cities are all excellent, and more importantly they are exceptionally well protected from erosion (useful in a hilly country, and to be expected of Kagame's long-term strategies - he doesn't even let NGO's in if they don't register and prove themselves to be actually beneficial [or try to help people he doesn't like, as I found out when reading James Orbinski's An Imperfect Offering). Interestingly, however, Rwanda is trying to be fully independent of aid money by 2020, and that was just one of the many ways they show themselves to be fiercely independence-minded; the government blames France, Belgium and the UN (as well as pretty much everyone else) for the genocide happening, and for it lasting so long and gaining so much momentum (to be fair, they do kind of have a point).
The main thing is though, loads of African countries have had tons of aid. And many of them are, frankly, crap. I mean that in the way that a large chunk of the populations would have no access to clean water, weatherproof shelter, or adequate food for long-term survival. The only way Rwanda does so well is because Kagame hates corruption, and he has been either president or puppet master for 17 years.
Having come to the conclusion that Kagame was probably/hopefully a benevolent dictator (which happened to be the exact words I read in an article in the Telegraph a day or two after deciding this - see http://tinyurl.com/KagameTelegraph), the next thing was to work out what happens if/when he stops running the show. From the sounds of it, he's planning on officially stepping down in 2015 or at the 2017 election, but I'm really not convinced he trusts anyone to actually do a good job, and I would be surprised if he doesn't try to do a Putin. Interestingly, through an Aussie girl called Marissa who spent much of her time trying to convince me to go to the Congo, I met a guy who works in the presidential office who gave the good news that from next year the political succession is going to be planned, and he was suggesting that political freedom will be opened up significantly. While Kagame's ideal Rwanda is based on Singapore, I think his main target was to get the economy and future development sorted so that normal freedoms could be introduced without ruining everything (presumably some people didn't like being displaced to put a business park in and stuff like that, and if they didn't move he would have just disappeared them while there are fewer basic freedoms, along with a bunch of beggars because he doesn't like them).
Still, the main conclusion from Rwanda is that it's an incredibly successful story of African development, and that that's entirely down to Kagame. He's also trying to make sure another genocide is impossible, for example by outlawing the use of Hutu and Tutsi as racial identifiers (which seemed to have been more like economic identifiers at one point anyway), although there does still seem to be a lot of simmering tension, as demonstrated by a grenade that was thrown at the memorial centre earlier this year.
Has to be said, Rwanda was a weird type of holiday!
Edit: While I started writing this on Sun 21st August, it was posted on Wed 5th October, which is when the 12 weeks and 24 passport entries bit was accurate.
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