Burundi Diary # 2: Civilisation - travelling around here

Bujumbura, Burundi
March 31, 2008

Burundi - one of the materially most poor countries in the world with an annual per capita income of about 140 US$. Here you’ll find all the problems that mal- and underdevelopment display plus the aftermath of a genocide-like war that took 300.000 lives.

But what do you see when you travel around here? Yes, of course, poverty. Malnutrition. Lack of infrastructure. Extremely bad roads. Children in dirty clothes – and too many of them; Burundi is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and scarcity a problem that can lead to warfare one day, again.

But here is what you see then. Extremely beautiful landscapes of millions of small hills – collines – soil red from iron. You see every square centimetre utilised for tea, coffee, bananas, rice, potatoes; you see people tilling their land and toiling hard with the simplest of tools. You see children herding goats and cows in the fields. But there is one thing I have seen again and again on my trips around the country: smiles, smiles, and smiles again – everyone, from the age of 3 to 99. Welcome Muzungu, white man! Hand-shakes, openness, hospitality – and please take a photo! Where are you from, white man?

The word decency comes to me again and again. Pride and hospitality too.

It is totally disarming. I think with shame how a black person, a refugee – not to speak of a Muslim – is now greeted in my own part of the world. It’s a long time ago I saw spontaneously smiling people in Sweden inviting strangers into their houses on the spot – if I ever did.

This basic humanity, this kindness and respect: How come that the people I meet in Burundi have preserved it with dignity and spontaneity while we in Europe have lost it so completely? How come “Europe” means “civilisation” and high levels of development when we have lost that humanity and openness to the other, to the stranger who comes by?

Some time ago one of these mechanical ranking surveys of the quality of life was published based, as usual, on some quantitative indicators. Surprise, surprise: Denmark came out on the top, Burundi close to the bottom.

What’s wrong with smiles as an indicator? Perhaps only that Westerners - who make these foolish surveys - don’t smile anymore and that those who make them lack both creativity, cultural inspiration and, I assume, are pretty bored themselves.

I interview the Governor of Gitega, the second largest city in the heartland of Burundi. Mr. Mossi – a Muslim himself - greets me warmly and remembers me from two years ago. He responds to my question that Christians and Muslims have no problems here, that they know they have the same God and that none of the sides attempt to use religion politically. And that said, Burundi’s President Nkurunziza is a newborn Christian who many of the Christian majority here think spends too much time with God and the people and football and too little with fellow politicians!

Since I worked in Somalia 1977-1981 I have increasingly come to question the Western self-proclaimed universalizing paradigm of development and civilisation. The West’s senseless and self-destructive wars, in its colonies and in Vietnam and Iraq in particular, solidified my scepticism.

Who are we to believe that they are the only ones to learn from us and, therefore, that we have nothing to learn from them?

Travelling around Burundi and working with so many and different individuals here makes me even more sure that there is something we Westerners have not understood, perhaps because we did not want to understand it. The one who thinks he is Number One by definition has nothing to learn from others, he only teaches and preaches. That is self-defeating in the long run. Not wanting to learn anything from others means decay.

It’s that simple. And that difficult for the Westerner to even begin to understand.

More about Burundi here


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