Burundi Quotes

In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi - but neither is it exceptionally less violent.

I'm neither Hutu nor Tutsi ... Those are not my stories. You're my friends because I love you, not because you're from this or that ethnic group. I don't want anything to do with all that!

The 20th century merits the name "The Century of Murder." 1915 Turks slaughtered 2 million Armenians. 1933 to 1954 the Soviet government encompassed the death of 20 to 65 million citizens. 1933 to 1945 Nazi Germany murdered more than 25 million people. 1948 Hindus and Muslims engaged in racial and religious strife that claimed more lives than could be reported. 1970 3 million Bangladesh were killed. 1971 Uganda managed the death of 300,000 people. 1975 Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and murdered up to 3 million people. In recent times more than half a million of Rwanda's 6 million people have been murdered. At present times genocidal strife is underway in Bosnia, Somalia, Burundi and elsewhere. The people of the world have demonstrated themselves to be so capable of forgetting the murderous frenzies in which their fellows have participated that it is essential that one, at least, be remembered and the world be regularly reminded of it. _Consequences of the Holocaust

Kiswahili ni lugha rasmi ya nchi za Tanzania, Kenya na Uganda. Ni lugha isiyo rasmi ya nchi za Rwanda, Burundi, Msumbiji na Jamhuri ya Kidemokrasia ya Kongo. Lugha ya Kiswahili ni mali ya nchi za Afrika ya Mashariki, si mali ya nchi za Afrika Mashariki peke yake. Pia, Kiswahili ni lugha rasmi ya Umoja wa Afrika; pamoja na Kiarabu, Kiingereza, Kifaransa, Kireno na Kihispania. Kiswahili ni lugha inayozungumzwa zaidi nchini Tanzania kuliko nchi nyingine yoyote ile, duniani.

There is not one politician in Burundi who would not murder another for the sake of one hour of political power.

MOST NATIONS HAVE AT ONE TIME OR OTHER BOTH condoned and practiced slavery. Greece and Rome founded their societies on it. India and Japan handled this state of affairs by creating untouchable classes which continue to this day. Arabia clung to formal slavery longer than most, while black countries like Ethiopia and Burundi were notorious. In the New World each colonial power devised a system precisely suited to its peculiar needs and in conformance with its national customs. The

Death comes to us all, that is the only thing we can be certain of. It makes no difference whether it is a thief in a garbage dump or a policeman in the line of duty. When someone dies at the hands of another, the pain for the survivors is the same.

If we just had the time, he thought, and would often say, we could manage these kids as well. All they lacked was time and resources.

The culture of Death is everywhere.

The 20th century merits the name "The Century of Murder." 1915 Turks slaughtered 2 million Armenians. 1933 to 1954 the Soviet government encompassed the death of 20 to 65 million citizens. 1933 to 1945 Nazi Germany murdered more than 25 million people. 1948 Hindus and Muslims engaged in racial and religious strife that claimed more lives than could be reported. 1970 3 million Bangladesh were killed. 1971 Uganda managed the death of 300,000 people. 1975 Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and murdered up to 3 million people. In recent times more than half a million of Rwanda's 6 million people have been murdered. At present times genocidal strife is underway in Bosnia, Somalia, Burundi and elsewhere. The people of the world have demonstrated themselves to be so capable of forgetting the murderous frenzies in which their fellows have participated that it is essential that one, at least, be remembered and the world be regularly reminded of it. _Consequences of the Holocaust by Raul Hilberg

So here I am, my father’s daughter, as the light breaks through the forest, writing down the names of my children and my husband, my friends and even the world at large—like our brothers and sisters in Iraq or Haiti or Burundi—and beside these scrawled names, I am writing out the words of Scripture. Not like promises or talismans, not like magic spells, no. But to give language to what I yearn for, what I believe, and even what I hope. It’s my way of walking in the counsel of the Holy Spirit, may our hearts be fixed and established on Jesus. I

Even after closing the heavy gates, I could hear her voice behind me, still lavishing me with never-ending wisdom: take care in the cold, look after your secrets, may you be rich in all that you read, in your encounters, in your loves, and never forget where you come from...

Corruption has become a short-cut accusation, a term used by those who are angry at the system to express dissatisfaction and cast aspersions. It is a (rhetorical) weapon of the weak – all the more credible as there indeed is a lot of corruption in Burundi. This is related to what we ended the previous section with, where we said that Burundians desire ‘better people’ rather than ‘better structures.’ Corruption as described by Burundians is a ‘bad person’s’ fault – not a structural issue. Corruption, then, is in part to the masses what human rights are to the well educated. Both are ways to ‘stick it to the man,’ terms whose currency in protest and dissatisfaction is useful. Hence, more than simply accurate descriptions of a social fact, talking about these things is a political act – a way the jargon of the international community has become reappropriated in local political struggles. Given that in Burundi both corruption and human rights violations are indeed prevalent, this makes understanding these discourses very complicated.

Kiswahili ni lugha ya Kibantu na lugha kuu ya kimataifa ya biashara ya Afrika ya Mashariki ambayo; maneno yake mengi yamepokewa kutoka katika lugha za Kiarabu, Kireno, Kiingereza, Kihindi, Kijerumani na Kifaransa, kutoka kwa wakoloni waliyoitawala pwani ya Afrika ya Mashariki katika kipindi cha karne tano zilizopita. Lugha ya Kiswahili ilitokana na lugha za Kisabaki za Afrika Mashariki; ambazo nazo zilitokana na Lugha za Kibantu za Pwani ya Kaskazini Mashariki za Tanzania na Kenya, zilizotokana na lugha zaidi ya 500 za Kibantu za Afrika ya Kusini na Kati. Lugha za Kibantu zilitokana na lugha za Kibantoidi, ambazo ni lugha zenye asili ya Kibantu za kusini mwa eneo la Wabantu, zilizotokana na jamii ya lugha za Kikongo na Kibenue – tawi kubwa kuliko yote ya familia ya lugha za Kikongo na Kinijeri katika bara la Afrika. Familia ya lugha za Kikongo na Kibenue ilitokana na jamii ya lugha za Kiatlantiki na Kikongo; zilizotokana na familia ya lugha za Kikongo na Kinijeri, ambayo ni familia kubwa ya lugha kuliko zote duniani kwa maana ya lugha za kikabila. Familia ya lugha ya Kiswahili imekuwepo kwa karne nyingi. Tujifunze kuzipenda na kuzitetea lugha zetu kwa faida ya vizazi vijavyo.

One of the most striking observations emerging from our research in Burundi is the way people constantly maintain some form of relations across great chasms of violence, class, abuse, and absence. People have civil relations with the murderers of their families; husbands and wives, even after many years, can reconnect and share all again; refugees and IDPs return home, solving their own land conflicts in the process. And all of this happens against a background of stunning poverty. Burundi specialists decry the level of land conflicts, involving as many as 9 percent of all households in the province of Makamba, a center of return of refugees and IDPs: in many areas, as much as 80 percent of the current population consists of people who have just returned during the last few years. But this still means that an amazing 91 percent of the population is not party to any land conflict, and this in a country where every square foot of land is a matter of life and death.5 Let’s not forget: throughout the country, this means Hutu and Tutsi are living side by side again, for they were intermingled everywhere. How, then, do people manage to such an extent to reintegrate, after a decade of war, dislocation, and poverty?

The vast majority of Muslims still breathe in a universe in which the Name of God is associated above all with Compassion and Mercy, and they turn to Him in patience even in the midst of the worst tribulations. If it seems that more violence is associated with Islam than with other religions today, it is not due to the fact that there has been no violence elsewhere—think of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the atrocities committed by the Serbs, and the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. The reason is that Islam is still very strong in Islamic society. Because Islam so pervades the lives of Muslims, all actions, including violent ones, are carried out in the name of Islam, especially since other ideologies such as nationalism and socialism have become so bankrupt. Yet this identification is itself paradoxical because traditional Islam is as much on the side of peace and accord as are traditional Judaism and Christianity. Despite such phenomena, however, if one looks at the extensive panorama of the Islamic spectrum summarized below, it becomes evident that for the vast majority of Muslims, the traditional norms based on peace and openness to others, norms that have governed their lives over the centuries and are opposed to both secularist modernism and “fundamentalism,” are of central concern. And after the dust settles in this tumultuous period of both Islamic and global history, it will be the voice of traditional Islam that will have the final say in the Islamic world.

In 2012, for example, “reported federal campaign spending ... reached almost $6.3 billion,” or over twice as much as the total annual GDP of an African country like Burundi.

Who has the moral high ground? Fifteen blocks from the whitehouse on small corners in northwest, d.c. boys disguised as me rip each other’s hearts out with weapons made in china. they fight for territory. across the planet in a land where civilization was born the boys of d.c. know nothing about their distant relatives in Rwanda. they have never heard of the hutu or tutsi people. their eyes draw blanks at the mention of kigali, byumba or butare. all they know are the streets of d.c., and do not cry at funerals anymore. numbers and frequency have a way of making murder commonplace and not news unless it spreads outside of our house, block, territory. modern massacres are intraethnic. bosnia, sri lanka, burundi, nagorno-karabakh, iraq, laos, angola, liberia, and rwanda are small foreign names on a map made in europe. when bodies by the tens of thousands float down a river turning the water the color of blood, as a quarter of a million people flee barefoot into tanzania and zaire, somehow we notice. we do not smile, we have no more tears. we hold our thoughts. In deeply muted silence looking south and thinking that today nelson mandela seems much larger than he is.

that she suddenly understood how a sense of compassion for the victims of oppression can lead to a hatred of the oppressor—and there you have a recipe for reciprocal violence and internecine war like in Rwanda and Burundi.

Even if making precise predictions about which societies will prosper relative to others is difficult, we have seen throughout the book that our theory explains the broad differences in the prosperity and poverty of nations around the world fairly well. We will see in the rest of this chapter that it also provides some guidelines as to what types of societies are more likely to achieve economic growth over the next several decades. First, vicious and virtuous circles generate a lot of persistence and sluggishness. There should be little doubt that in fifty or even a hundred years, the United States and Western Europe, based on their inclusive economic and political institutions, will be richer, most likely considerably richer, than sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central America, or Southeast Asia. However, within these broad patterns there will be major institutional changes in the next century, with some countries breaking the mold and transitioning from poor to rich. Nations that have achieved almost no political centralization, such as Somalia and Afghanistan, or those that have undergone a collapse of the state, such as Haiti did over the last several decades - long before the massive earthquake there in 2010 led to the devastation of the country's infrastructure - are unlikely either to achieve growth under extractive political institutions or to make major changes toward inclusive institutions. Instead, nations likely to grow over the next several decades - albeit probably under extractive institutions - are those that have attained some degree of political centralization. In sub-Saharan Africa this includes Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, nations with long histories of centralized states, and Tanzania, which has managed to build such centralization, or at least put in place some of the prerequisites for centralization, since independence. In Latin America, it includes Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, which have not only achieved political centralization but also made significant strides toward nascent pluralism. Our theory suggests that sustained economic growth is very unlikely in Colombia. Our theory also suggests that growth under extractive political institutions, as in China, will not bring sustained growth, and is likely to run out of steam. Beyond these cases, there is much uncertainty. Cuba, for example, might transition toward inclusive institutions and experience a major economic transformation, or it may linger on under extractive political and economic institutions. The same is true of North Korea and Burma (Myanmar) in Asia. Thus, while our theory provides the tools for thinking about how institutions change and the consequences of such changes, the nature of this change - the role of small differences and contingency - makes more precise predictions difficult.

We want to stay in Ruanda-Urundi because in the lives of peoples and people there are interests other than purely economic interests. We want to stay there just because there is still much to do, because we have begun a great human work in that country that we want to bring to a successful conclusion; because we have accepted a mission of guardianship that we want to fulfil to the end. And when the objectives laid down in the [UN] Charter are achieved, thanks to us, thanks to our help, that people will be able to decide its future in full awareness and in full freedom.

I am a sixty-three-year-old war reporter. I have covered wars and madness in Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa, the Romanian revolution, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Albania, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I have seen babies with hacked limbs and an old man with his eyes blown in by an artillery shell and people with their lungs sucked inside out and a man with his brain sliced with a machete – and there is nothing worse than watching kids smile in war, watching the aristocracy of the human soul. It makes me cry – and cry I do.

Life was a mixture of coincidence and hopes that often ran out in the sand.

I’ve felt the same thing,” she said. “We all love our kids, but we want so much. The kids are everything to us, and yet they aren’t our life, so to speak. Some women love to putter around at home but I almost went crazy that first year. Sitting around the playground shooting the breeze with other moms was not my thing.

He didn’t blame anyone or anything anymore. Life was what it was.

Unlike basketball, baseball, or football, games that reset after each play, soccer unfolds fluidly and continuously. To understand how a goal was scored, you have to work back through the action - the sequences of passes and decisions, the movement of the players away from the action who reappear unexpectedly in empty space to create or waste opportunities - all the way back to the first touch. If that goal was scored by a young refugee from Liberia, off an assist from a boy from southern Sudan, who was set up by a player from Burundi or a Kurd from Iraq - on a field in Georgia, U.S.A., no less - understanding its origins would mean following the thread of causation back in time to events that long preceded the first whistle.

A person has to find a place where they fit in, that’s all.

What a way to go,” he said. “Everyone putting your life under the microscope. What if we paid that kind of attention to people while they were alive?

Berglund was certainly aware of the fact that there were two cities, two Uppsalas: Oskar’s and the skånkarna’s, with their academic degrees. You didn’t hear people talk about it much anymore, but you still felt the effects of this division.

It was about a class system, the fact that the underclass, Oskar and Albin, always slipped off the roofs of the rich folk.

It had also become harder to discuss this with his colleagues. All too often Sammy’s speeches about the importance of good neighborhoods and schools were met only with dismissive comments. It was self-evident, it was written on every wall, they seemed to say,

For at least a century, anthropologists have largely played the role of gadflies: whenever some ambitious European or American theorist appears to make some grandiose generalizations about how human beings go about organizing political, economic, or family life, it’s always the anthropologist who shows up to point out that there are people in Samoa or Tierra del Fuego or Burundi who do things exactly the other way around.

    My family – my wife and my six children – was killed. I know who did it. I sometimes meet them in the street: they greet me and I greet them. I have forgiven them: they can never bring back my family, so it is the best thing to do. It is best to forget and to get on with life. (Forty-two-year-old ex-combatant, CNDD, now chef de colline, Nyanza-Lac)

More and more Burundians have started redefining the enemy not as all people of the other ethnicity but as extremists on the other side, or even as politicians of all stripes. By

    We must pardon everyone because if not, it will be like we will have to punish all the population. We must pardon everyone because all ethnic groups did bad acts. (Thirty-eight-year-old female, Nyanza-Lac)

This book is based on the voices of people – primarily young people – throughout Burundi: people who have been refugees, internally displaced, dispersed, ex-combatants; in the city and the collines, Hutu and Tutsi.

Michael Quinn Patton describes four levels of interviews, from ‘informal conversation’ (where the subject often does not even know s/he is being interviewed) to ‘closed, fixed-response interviews’ (basically questionnaires) (2002: 349). Our approach squarely falls into his second category, ‘interview guide approach,’ in which ‘topics and issues to be covered are specified in advance, in outline form; the interviewer decides sequence and wording of questions in the course of the interview.’ The interview schedule itself consisted of only twenty-one questions. All these questions sought to probe into people’s perceptions, dreams, and analysis of development, governance, the future – their future. We encouraged people to ask questions if they had any. In the rural areas, people systematically asked the same thing: What are you going to do with this? In urban areas, the questions were often more direct, sometimes a tad aggressive: So, now that you’ve asked us all these questions, what’s in it for you?

First, I wanted to get an empirical sense of the ‘positive peace’ versus ‘negative peace’ debate. This discussion started in the late 1960s, against the backdrop of the cold war (the Vietnam War was waging then) and growing awareness of Third World poverty. Traditional peace research was under attack by a new generation of radical scholars. One of their prime complaints was that researchers focused solely on negative peace, i.e. the absence of war, uncritically elevating this to an absolute ideal. But, critics argued, peace is not simply when people or nations don’t fight each other, but when there is cooperation, trust, and respect between them. They

    Peace is about eating and sleeping, being able to enjoy the fruits of your work. When there is peace, you can work with a calm spirit. Even if the situation isn’t good today, you can have hope for tomorrow as long as you can invest in an activity. (Twenty-eight-year-old male farmer and mason, Nyanza-Lac)

Negative peace answers often included references to theft and criminality.

    There are different levels to peace. One is individual – that you are not sick and hungry. Another is mutual understanding, that there is no discrimination. My own life is at peace, but that is not the case for all of us: the individual dimension is often lacking. People are often hungry and sick, they have heavy debts and family conflicts, and that can disrupt peace. Or this twenty-five-year-old male migrant to Musaga, with no education: ‘Peace is when nobody is a victim of injustice. It is also when the entire neighborhood has enough to eat. If your neighbor doesn’t have what is needed you too become vulnerable.’ Or this twenty-nine-year-old mechanic in a better-off urban neighborhood: ‘People must have work and quit poverty: if they don’t, they start thinking badly of each other, because they feel bad themselves.’ For this minority, there is a causal link between poverty and peace.

Finally, I surmise that mobility is generally a symbol of well-being: when people talk about the good life or about dreams for the future, they frequently use images of mobility as well. A better life is one in which one can move around, can go to places – whether the city or abroad – and can avail oneself of opportunities that are available there. Not

In the previous chapter, we argued that while democratic governance is one of the central pillars of the international post-conflict/peace-building enterprise, Burundians rarely explicitly included governance in their definition of peace. But this is not the end of the story. Our conversations reveal that matters of governance and citizenship are important to ordinary Burundians in many ways.

The ‘listen/respect’ category came back everywhere, often in a passionate manner. A few quotes will give an impression of what I put under this heading:     I would be closer to the local people and listen to them more. I would encourage freedom of expression, so that people would talk. I would make sure that the administration would have close relationships with people, so that they would not get lies. (Eighteen-year-old former child soldier, now taxi-vélo driver, Busiga)     I would listen to everyone, rich and poor. This is rarely done in Burundi (Nineteen-year-old woman, Busiga) The first thing I would do is to let the little people express themselves, listen to everyone and apply justice without bias. (Thirty-year-old female farmer, Ruhororo, Banda colline)

We said earlier that what Westerners call corruption was to ordinary Burundians normal. True, but there are borders – lines that can be redrawn, but which denote real differences most everyone recognizes.5 Increasingly, the types of abuse of power that many politicians and administrators engaged in went beyond what could be justified or recognized by ordinary Burundians: ‘people perceive that forms of corruption no longer rooted in a moral economy of kinship are on the rise’ (Smith 2007). Showing great deference to people of authority is a traditional norm, indeed, and it is not difficult for a Burundian farmer to enact these behaviors – the shuffling, the downcast eyes, the left hand on top of the right arm – when asking for services she would legally deserve to access as a citizen, but when that same administrator abuses his power to capture lands of her family, he has gone beyond what is mutually legitimate, and they both know it. When teachers require sex with female students to let them pass, or when employers do the same to hire, this not only runs counter to the modesty Burundians pride themselves on; it is also perceived as a clear abuse of power.

Note that when people talk about climate change, they are referring to the frequent droughts that occurred during the last decade in Burundi. Many people talked about lack of land – logical in a country where 57 percent of households have less than one hectare to live off (ibid.: 42). All this demonstrates that even in countries at war, there is more going on than war. War may capture the attention, dominate the political discourse, and its resolution may be a sine qua non for meaningful change, but it is not the full story of life, and people know it.

Little do they know how hard it is for educated young people in the city, competing against thousands of others, to find a decent job, especially if they have no connections. Some of the unhappiest people I met were young men in Bujumbura, after all these years of sacrifice, desperately looking for a job, month after month after month. Some don’t even manage to find the money to print their final theses, and will thus never get their degrees. They worked so hard, got so close, and then they still find the door closed. It is my impression that these are not people who are inclined to violence and self-destruction: they are too serious for that, they have given too much, they want to belong to the system more than anything else. And so they doggedly keep on going, asking around, trying to ingratiate themselves with more powerful people (including any foreigners they can get to meet), waiting for the day they will get a job, any job, anywhere.

our interviews suggest that many rural men migrate to the city precisely to prepare for marriage. Married men who do not already work in the city rarely migrate there (it is different for those who live in towns surrounding cities).     After the death of my parents and oldest brother, I took care of the siblings. In 1997, I came to Bujumbura to do different jobs and then I managed to buy my own bike and I started doing taxi-vélo. I have done this job since 2002 and it allows me to have everything I need. I managed to build a house and I married because of my work. I also managed to buy three goats and five parcels of land to cultivate. I think that with God’s help I will manage the development I wished for when I came to the city. (Twenty-six-year-old migrant, Musaga)     I am saving some money to buy a couple of cows. After that, I will seek a wife. I am busy building a house with a tile roof in my colline to prepare my marriage. (Twenty-year-old male migrant, Musaga)

Prostitution’ similarly denotes a fall from grace, a failure to live up to expectations of productivity and chastity by women. All these, then, are images used mainly for young people, and their power lies in their association with failure.

We finish university studies, [but] we can’t be hired. In order to be hired you must be corrupt, the jobs are given according to who you know.” For these youth, Nkurunziza’s attempt to violate the democratic process set by the constitution and the peace accord that ended a 12-year-long civil war only adds to their frustration over their prospects and that of their country. On Monday, Burundi's constitutional court ruled that the president could run for a third term. The court's vice president, who has left the country, said Tuesday that the court had been strong-armed into making the ruling. He's among 40,000 Burundians who have fled

Helena's telling Sorcha that the media are OH! MY! GOD! totally ignoring what's going on in Rwanda, we're talking four years on from the genocide, with thousands of unarmed civilians being extrajudicially executed by government soldiers - 'It's like, HELLO?' - while almost 150,000 people detained in connection with the 1994 genocide are being held without, like, trial. She goes, 'I'm not even going to _stort_ on the thousands of refugees forcibly returned to Burundi. It's like, do NOT even go there.' Sorcha's saying that President Pasteur Bizimungu SO should be indicted for war crimes if half of what she's read on the Internet is true. She's there, 'It's like, OH! MY! GOD!' but I'm not really listening, roysh, I'm giving the old mince pies to Amanda, this total lasher who's, like, second year Orts.

At times, when we had spent some time in a particular location and word had spread about our presence, people approached us for interviews. Surprisingly, these were often very poor or vulnerable people, typically women and frequently widows, who wanted someone to listen to their story, just for once. These were some of the most amazing conversations we had.

Finally, for research like this, the quality of the translators is crucial. Kirundi is a language of allusion and proverbs: information is conveyed between the lines, hinted at, but rarely expressed directly. The challenge is also social: the translator is the front-line person who interacts with the interviewees, making the connection, maintaining the social aspects of the relation, putting people at ease.

Basic needs The second-most frequent definition of peace involved basic needs and poverty. Many people told us that there exists no peace without a minimum of material well-being. As a thirty-five-year-old woman in Ruhororo told us: ‘How can you have peace if your stomach is empty?’ Indeed, the image that dominates this category is overwhelmingly the empty stomach: no peace can exist on an empty stomach. It is not only women telling us that. Here is a quote from a twenty-nine-year-old male migrant peanut seller in Musaga: ‘Peace is foremost having bread. If my children and those of my neighbors don’t cry of hunger at night I have peace in my heart.’ Different assumptions seem to underlie this statement. First, people are clearly telling us that, for them, peace means nothing without improvements in the quality of life. This confirms scholarship: as Tony Addison (2003: 1) states so well: ‘The end of war saves lives – including those of the poor who are often its main victims – but it may not deliver much if any improvement in livelihoods.’ This is confirmed by the fact that this definition seems to occur most frequently in places where there has been major suffering from the war and where there is significant social discontent that nothing has changed since the end of the war (Ruhororo; Kamenge). Second,

Social peace The third-most frequent answer defined peace as ‘good social relations.’ This definition, too, is more holistic than simply about the absence of war. It privileges social relations, cohabitation, social harmony.     If we live in the same place and understand each other there will be peace. (Twenty-one-year-old woman, Busiga)     Peace is when people live together and share, they don’t kill each other but help each other. There is almost peace now, so there is hope. (Thirty-year-old male student from the interior, living

Mobility A surprisingly large number of answers related peace to mobility. For example:     Peace is being free to move around and visit friends and family. (Twenty-four-year-old female, remote colline in Busiga)     When you can visit others there is peace. (Eighteen-year-old man, Ruhororo IDP camp)     A place where you can come and go as you wish, that is peace. (Twenty-year-old male student, Bwiza)

A few times in Ruhororo, for example, we heard the same image that peace means ‘you can go for a long walk and sleep where you arrive: you can knock on the door, you can sleep there and you will continue your voyage the next morning.’ This image is powerful in people’s minds. All older people I asked tell me that when they were young, this really was how things happened in Burundi until the 1980s.5 From this perspective, the mobility definition is about the restoration of the former social capital order, a sign of the desire for continuity amid dramatic change.

Perseverance is so important to these young people. Most of these quotes are from the poorest of the poor. They know that life is hard, that failure is likely, but they also intend never to give up. In the literature on young men in Africa, it has become so common to describe them only as angry, frustrated, drifting into mindless violence – potential rapists and killers, all of them, it seems. In some theories, their very existence is taken as an indicator of violence, regardless of their personalities, beliefs, dreams. And yet, when you talk with them, how different they are from these simplistic images – how filled with perseverance and hope, ready to take on life and all that it may bring.

Farming is a prison to most Burundians.8 In the countryside, especially in the north and center, people desperately want to reduce their dependence on the land. The three big ways for young people to escape poverty are education, migration, and hard work. To Burundians, secondary education is crucial: the primary if not the sole image ordinary people have when thinking about an escape from poverty is that of the fonctionnaire – not a matter of public service but of individual gain. More generally, urban migration is the crucial way by which young people try to make a decent living for themselves and their families; it is a way to prepare the conditions for marriage as well.

Burundians think of survival and progress in profoundly individualistic and capitalist terms. It has become common to argue that ‘culture matters,’ and this is often taken to mean that people in developing countries lack the cultural values that favor individual advancement and innovation. Talking to ordinary people, one is struck by the constant repetition of the themes of hard work, perseverance, good planning and foresight, and, increasingly, innovation and dynamism. It is impossible to over-estimate the value of perseverance in poor people’s lives. Under all circumstances, dramatic setbacks occur for the poor; war makes this worse still. The capacity to fall and stand up again, to never give up, no matter how badly one is hurt, becomes essential for progress in life. Religion

How many hundreds of times have I heard that argument, expressed by high-earning intellectuals, local and foreign: ‘helping the poor is dangerous for they will become (or are already) dependent on aid’? Aid dependence, it seems, acts as an explanation for every negative social phenomenon. The rural road not maintained; the anti-erosion measure not adopted; the expression of hunger in a conversation – all due to aid dependence. Nonsense, and condescending nonsense at that.

Marriage One of the most significant mechanisms through which gender ideology is produced and reproduced is marriage (Silberschmidt 2001: 659). In Africa, marriage is a cornerstone in the attainment of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’; it gives one a social identity and is a crucial part of achieving adulthood (Kwesiga 2002: 58). Spinsters are generally not respected in African communities and they are an embarrassment to the family. Bachelors do not command the same social respect that married men do (Okeke 2001: 239; Kwesiga 2002: 139).

If she is not able to complete her studies, she will get married at the proper age, i.e. not too young.’ And educated men, both urban and rural, desire to marry women who have attained a certain level of education as well (although none of them wants to marry a woman with a higher education level than himself!).

Of course, many women have suffered as well, especially during these war years: they have been raped by combatants, beaten by their husbands, left behind by their boyfriends, kicked out of school when pregnant. Some are left with little choice but prostitution, or becoming a concubine, in order to survive. In a society where violence has become omnipresent, where the law does not function, and where frustration and anger are everywhere, it is actually amazing that all this does not occur even more frequently.

All Burundians we spoke to told us they have been materially hurt by the war. The litany of theft and destruction, of forced migration, of education years lost, and of family members and friends killed, is unending. Almost nobody, it seems, whether rural or urban, rich or poor, has not seen their meager assets depleted if not eradicated entirely by the war.

How many eventually regularize their marriage? One of my drivers did so after twenty-two years of living together and four children, so it is always possible. How many informal marriages dissolve? How many break up, but are renewed after some time? We came across many men for whom the dream of marrying persisted. This unemployed self-demobilized ex-combatant from Kamenge is typical: ‘if my situation improved I could go and live with my son and his mother: I would like that, if she is still available.’ This wish reflects a value deeply embedded in Burundian culture: fathers should do everything possible to support and raise their children, even those born outside marriage.

Widows are clearly one of the most disadvantaged groups in Burundian society. We heard sad stories of widows abused by family members, ostracized by their communities, losing access to land, and living in destitution. We also heard repeated references to unmarried and married men having covert relations with widows – a way to have sexual relations with a woman without having the financial responsibility of marriage. A group of young men from the Ruhororo IDP camp explained to us, ‘sometimes men see [a euphemism for having sexual relations with] a widow in her own house, but they would not build a second house for her. Widows often have relations with married men, because they need to financially.’ Windows, financially vulnerable, are less desirable for having already been married and are not given the same level of respect as unmarried young women.

How is it that a country that gave us Emily Pankhurst and Margaret Thatcher is currently number twenty-eight in the list of countries offering equal pay – behind Bulgaria and Burundi? For every £1 earned by a man, a woman earns 85p. We are all aware of the heart-warming story of the female Dagenham workers who fought for equal pay in the 1960s. It is still happening. Why does a man working in the warehouse at Asda today earn more than a woman at the checkout, whose skills require numeracy and customer relations? Why do women earn, on average, 21 per cent less than men at corporate, managerial level? Why are there so few women at this level? There are mandatory quotas in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany. Why is the UK so far behind? Institutionalized misogyny say the Fawcett Society, the campaigning group on equal pay. But, looking back at my own career and the regrets I have about family life, I ask whether women can and should try and compete.

The years between the end of the Second World War and 2010 or 2011, Pinker designates the long peace.19 It is a peace that encompassed the Chinese Communist revolution, the partition of India, the Great Leap Forward, the ignominious Cultural Revolution, the suppression of Tibet, the Korean War, the French and American wars of Indochinese succession, the Egypt-Yemen war, the Franco-Algerian war, the Israeli-Arab wars, the genocidal Pol Pot regime, the grotesque and sterile Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, ethnic cleansings in Rwanda, Burundi, and the former Yugoslavia, the farcical Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Iraq, and various massacres, sub-continental famines, squalid civil insurrections, blood-lettings, throat-slittings, death squads, theological infamies, and suicide bombings taking place from Latin America to East Timor. Alone, broken, incompetent, and unloved, the Soviet Union lumbered into oblivion in 1989. The twentieth century had come to an end.

Il y a quand même des objets du patrimoine qui parlent de l’histoire, qui parlent du passé. Et le passé permet de voir l’évolution du pays. Il donne aussi une perspective de l’avenir. Quand on a un monument aux morts, on doit prendre conscience que ce pays a connu des guerres. On a en ce monument des problèmes avec le Rwanda. Mais vous savez qu’avec ce monument, on allait se rappeler les victoires du Congo sur le Rwanda. Le Congo avait gagné la guerre, occupé le Rwanda, le Burundi et même Tabora qui était la capitale des Allemands

We gain nothing from Burundi, and nothing it could do would ever threaten us. It has no influence at all. It only matters if we care about people we haven’t met.

Jean ratelt aan een stuk door terwijl hij me met groot vertrouwen door de bergen van Burundi voert. Hij is een hutu uit het noorden en kent deze streek op z'n duimpje. "De groep is een probleem in Afrika," zegt hij peinzend. " Individueel hebben wij, Hutu's en Tutsi's, niets tegen elkasr. Maar in groepsverband laten we ons meeslepen, scheppen we een klimaat van angst voor elkaar. Dan denken we niet meer zelfstandig, nemen we geen individuele verantwoordelijkheid meer voor onze daden. Dan wordt alles vertaald in termen van "wij" en "zij" en "zij" dat is een andere soort, een ander ras, dat zijn geen levende wezens.

Jean ratelt aan een stuk door terwijl hij me met groot vertrouwen door de bergen van Burundi voert. Hij is een Hutu uit het noorden en kent deze streek op z'n duimpje. "De groep is een probleem in Afrika," zegt hij peinzend. " Individueel hebben wij, Hutu's en Tutsi's, niets tegen elkaar. Maar in groepsverband laten we ons meeslepen, scheppen we een klimaat van angst voor elkaar. Dan denken we niet meer zelfstandig, nemen we geen individuele verantwoordelijkheid meer voor onze daden. Dan wordt alles vertaald in termen van "wij" en "zij" en "zij" dat is een andere soort, een ander ras, dat zijn geen levende wezens.

At kvinnelaget fra Burundi ikke dukket opp til sjette runde, kom som en overraskelse på alle. Men etter å ha tenkt seg om, ble arrangøren og Tromsø-politiet enige om at det ikke er kriminelt å trekke seg fra en sjakkturnering.

Lindell had seen too many of these women who subordinated themselves, but could also feel the temptation of giving in to a more traditional woman’s role. It would be so easy to be like her mother. So seemingly secure.

E. Raymond Hall, professor of biology at the University of Kansas, wrote the authoritative work on American wildlife, Mammals of North America. He stated as a biological law that, “two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area.” Prof. Hall explains that human races are biological subspecies, and that the law applied to them, too: “To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other.” In recent decades we have seen what Prof. Hall was writing about in the Balkans, Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Eastern Congo. We call it “ethnic cleansing.” In Zimbabwe there is a systematic effort to rid the country of whites, and some observers do not rule out similar efforts in South Africa and Namibia. Is it utterly unrealistic to imagine ethnic cleansing in the United States? Prof. Hall’s forebodings do not appear outlandish in some of our schools, prisons, and neighborhoods. The demographic forces we have set in motion have created conditions that are inherently unstable and potentially violent. All other groups are growing in numbers and have a vivid racial identity. Only whites have no racial identity, are constantly on the defensive, and constantly in retreat. They have a choice: regain a sense of identity and the resolve to maintain their numbers, their traditions, and their way of life—or face oblivion.

By being made into colonials, black people lost the power which we previously had of governing our own affairs, and the aim of the white imperialist world is to see that we never regain this power. The Congo provides an example of this situation. There was a large and well-developed Congolese empire before the white man reached Africa. The large Congolese empire of the fifteenth century was torn apart by Portuguese slave traders, and what remained of the Congo came to be regarded as one of the darkest spots in dark Africa. After regaining political independence the Congolese people settled down to their lives, and murdered both Lumumba and the aspirations of the Congolese people. Since then, paid white mercenaries have harassed the Congo. Late last year, 130 of these hired white killers were chased out of the Congo and cornered in the neighbouring African state of Burundi. The white world intervened and they have all been set free. These are men who for months were murdering, raping, pillaging, disrupting economic production, and making a mockery of black life and black society. Yet white power said not a hair on their heads was to be touched. They did not even have to stand trial or reveal their names.

Burundi, on the other hand, is a small African nation of which most Americans have never heard. A 15 percent minority of Tutsi tribesmen dominates the other 85 percent, who are Hutu. Like blacks in South Africa, the Hutu have tried to throw off minority rule. The Tutsi do not take kindly to this. In 1972 the Tutsi army crushed a rebellion and then went on to massacre an astonishing one hundred thousand Hutu. In 1988 the army went on another rampage, after which it admitted having killed five thousand Hutu. Independent witnesses think they may have killed as many as fifty thousand. Most of the dead Hutu were unarmed peasants, killed with modern weapons such as helicopters and machine guns. In the Hutu town of Marangara, Tutsi stopped killing Hutu only when there were no more left to kill.1023 Did the media wring its hands over the horrors of tribal violence? Did America impose sanctions against the murderous minority regime of Burundi? Did the Congressional Black Caucus denounce the oppression of its “Hutu brothers”? Did Hollywood stars organize a sit-in at the Burundi embassy? No. Whites must be denounced when they behave like brutes, but there is nothing that can be done about it when blacks do.