The House Is Burning

By Abel A. Nkunda

It’s the 1950s and mounting political unrest consumes Rwanda. With fading monarchy, intensifying colonial rule and whispers of rebellion, countless native families find age-old traditions under attack.

For Abel A. Nkunda’s family, the shifting climate grows increasingly hostile. As powers vie for control around them, they face a painful choice: take flight to save all they cherish or stay to watch it burn.

Venturing into remote wilds in search of refuge, grandparents lead young Abel towards an uncertain future. With each step into the unknown, doubts arise. Can a foreign haven truly preserve their sacred cattle herding heritage from extinction?

Follow the Nkundas’ quest across a changing landscape where long-held customs blink at the brink. Will new mountains shelter this household from escalating threats? Or will the life they knew go up in smoke? Immerse yourself in one family’s struggle to find safe harbour for endangered livelihoods and identity before the house left behind is reduced to ashes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035850358

Abel A. Nkunda

Abel A. Nkunda is currently General Counsel at the Rwanda Broadcasting Agency and lives in Kagarama, Kigali. He is happily married with four children. He is passionate about corporate governance, current affairs, sports and farming. The House Is Burning is his first non-fiction book.

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About the Author

Abel A. Nkunda is currently General Counsel at the Rwanda Broadcasting Agency and lives in Kagarama, Kigali. He is happily married with four children. He is passionate about corporate governance, current affairs, sports and farming. The House Is Burning is his first non-fiction book.

Dedication

To you, my readers, you make my story worthwhile. May you have the courage to tell your own stories.

To the selfless leaders who aspire for the well-being of humanity—those of us with a turbulent beginning shall remain indebted to you.

To my grandfather, your stories and counsel live on.

Copyright Information ©

Abel A. Nkunda 2024

c

The right of Abel A. Nkunda to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035850341 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035852963 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781035850358 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

To my parents, Charles and Joyce, for always believing in me. You have taught me many lessons in life, including resilience and humanity.

To my dear wife, Phoebe, for taking good care of our children while I was busy writing.

To my elder brother, Apollo, for your endless encouragement. To my little siblings, Annet, Bosco, Pius, Alice and Peace, your quest for our family history pushed me to document this story.

I am grateful to Arthur Asiimwe and Richard Balenzi for encouraging me to publish this book.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The revival of Christian Evangelism in Gahini, eastern Rwanda, around the 1940s may have been good for the soul but an obstacle to cattle herding. It was during this time of evangelical revival that the architects of missionary churches, hospitals and schools needed manpower and space to establish or upgrade the existing infrastructure. Church work may have been voluntary but the manpower for hospitals and schools supervised by the then administrators was largely mandatory and non-compliance came with severe penalties. In addition to these colonial penalties, the acquisition of previously farming land to erect public buildings and grounds meant that the inhabitant farmers could only be pushed further east in the wilderness that was later gazetted as Akagera National Park towards Tanzania or further north towards the present-day Republic of Uganda. The Akagera area was a habitat for tsetse flies and not favourable for cattle keepers. The remaining option for the herdsmen was to move further north towards Uganda. After all, most of these herdsmen had many relatives occupying the Mpororo area that is presently located in southwestern Uganda.

Despite forced labour and seizing of land in favour of public infrastructure, my grandfather, Nkundabatutsi first persisted and tried to live with these new developments until the political upheavals of the 1950s forced him to flee further to the north with his relatives. Like anybody who is forced to flee their home, there is always that tendency to sneak back to see if life might have returned to normal. Muhinde, a cousin to my grandfather used to work with a mining company in Rwinkwavu and was also an assistant to the missionaries at the time. He underestimated the political violence and got murdered at Rusumo within a few days after his return to Rwanda. His murderers accused him of having gone to Kenya and allegedly met King Kigeli V. He had been persuaded by the missionaries to return to his work but unfortunately, they could not protect him from the murderers.

The death of Muhinde in the early 1960s marked a point of no return and my family gave up on the idea of returning to Rukara and instead tried to fully establish themselves in Mukoni in Mpororo but it was too late and the area was already filled with locals and Rwandan immigrants. Nonetheless, he temporarily stayed in the same area for about two years. If my grandfather thought he had secured refugee in Mukoni, then he was terribly mistaken because what followed was a roller coaster of miserable events that didn’t end with him alone but further affected his entire family including me, his grandchild.

More refugees from Rwanda kept pouring into Mpororo and either mixed with their relatives who lived in this area or simply occupied any open spaces. By 1963, these refugees were accused of supporting an armed rebellion to force their way back to Rwanda in what came to be known as Inyenzi attacks. In order for the UNHCR to keep these refugees away from the Rwanda-Uganda border, they were moved to various refugee settlement camps in rural western Uganda such as Ibuga, Nakivale, Nshungerezi and Rwamwanja but refugee life and the passion for cattle keeping do not exactly match. This was witnessed by my grandfather together with his group that was sent to Ibuga refugee settlement camp.

Firstly, all the family cows were taken to Ibuga camp and the rest of the family members (women and children) were supposed to be taken to Rwamwanja refugee settlement camp about 100km apart at a time when Uganda hardly had any road. Grandfather did not like the idea of parting with his cows, let alone going to Rwamwanja camp and thus, he fled the camp with his family and cows a night before others were taken to Rwamwanja and he returned to Mpororo with his family and cows. It was actually illegal to flee a camp protected by UNHCR but he found his way out nonetheless. In Mpororo, it was no longer life as usual because after a few weeks, his cows started eating the neighbours’ crops and he either had to keep paying fines or move again. He had just escaped a camp hoping to have a peaceful stay in Mpororo but as it turned out, he had to take another adventure to find open grazing land for his family and cows in the wilderness. This was another exasperating task that Grandfather accomplished albeit after a long time.

Grandfather’s second and final adventure largely shaped the next course of life for his family and it forms the genesis of this book. This mission to secure grazing land was completed after almost two years of intelligence gathering, long journeys in the wilderness and sometimes having to bribe the local authorities either to accommodate him or to allow him to proceed with his mission until he found what he was convinced was a suitable settlement. He then embarked on the rigorous journey of bringing his family and cows to the sparsely inhabited village of Muzaire in the Kasagama sub-county present-day Lyantonde district in western Uganda.

Whether he had anticipated it or not, this new life in the bushes was more favourable to his cows than it was to his family. Indeed, the cows multiplied but both our young parents and we the grandchildren that were born in this harsh environment were going to start inventing almost all life’s basic necessities while standing up against nature’s life-threatening adversaries.

Chapter 2

On the Run to Nowhere

It was one evening in 1982 when what had been rather an ordinary day winded up into an agonisingly eventful night. I was about five years old and one of my exciting tasks at the time was to separate calves—Inyana zonka from their mothers at the well—Iriba and take them home so that their mothers could be milked the next morning. I pulled and chased the calves while whistling to the trending songs of the time or rather what were my grandfather’s favourite songs. Leave the calves to their mothers, young man, my grandfather ordered as he called me to go home with him. This meant we had to leave the calves behind together with their mothers and hence less milk the next morning. As we climbed the hill back home, I asked him many questions but hardly got any answer.

Clearly, he was not in his usual mood.

Usually, we would slowly move back home while conversing. Sometimes, we would stop for a while as he would be explaining a certain point or task to me. Mostly, the tasks involved how to pick and tie firewood—Gusenya Inkwi in order to make it comfortable to carry on the head (if at all there was any comfort in that), how to identify and pick a ripe fruit, how to identify and harvest a mature stick—Guca Inkoni to mention but a few. The events that were about to follow were so wild and haunting that most of them stuck in my mind right from first sight while others were recollected in my early childhood through recurring family conversations.

The evening came and the cows came home but my father did not close the gate—Kugarira Irembo like he usually did. Milking time followed and my father released all the young calves to their mothers—Kwinikiza except two that he chose to milk. Unlike every other evening, this time milking was very fast and I was excited to escape the darkness outside, get into the warm house, sit by my mother’s side and exchange riddles and stories—Ibisakuzo n’Imigani. It was never to be! As I embarked on separating the younger calves from their mothers back to the kraal—Gucyura Inyana mu kiraro, my father reiterated Grandfather’s statement, "Zirekere kuri za nyina sha," meaning,leave the calves to their mothers, young man, he said in a remorseful tone. I could not get it.

Shall we not milk the cows tomorrow morning? I curiously asked since it was the first time younger calves were going to be left to their mothers throughout the night.

He fired back. "Dore uyu nawe, bati inzu irahiye, uti ni munsasire ndyame?" loosely translated,"look at this one; when the house is burning, do you jump into the bed?"

Anyway, I left the calves to their mothers, we entered the house only to find my mother packing a few cloths and our wooden milk utensils—Ibyansi were already tied horizontally to a wooden stick—Umugamba. At this point, I realised the whole situation was already unusual. My mother gave me milk and asked me to quickly finish it up. Before I could finish drinking, two men accompanied by my cousin Bushaija were at our door and as soon as they entered the house, they immediately started strategising with my father on safe routes and how to move fast with the cows in that dark night.

The clock was ticking and before I knew it we were on our way…to nowhere. Chasing cows with their calves suckling them from behind is one heck of a challenge, but having to do it in the darkest nights of bushland Muzaire of the early 80s was a real struggle. Kasagama in general and Muzaire in particular were still bushlands with their low-lying hills largely covered with green vegetation. The area had very scattered homes leaving the rest of the bushes as grazing land for cows that occasionally mixed with wild animals. Sometimes cows would scare away smaller animals like rabbits and antelopes from their hideouts.

Nevertheless, we kept moving, I could barely see in front of me, cows bellowing for their calves and charging back at me, their calves getting left behind, rabbits and birds were running from one bush to another, owls hooting from nearby bushes, my bare feet now pierced with thorns and terribly hurting, I could hardly move. The little excitement of an unusual night’s adventure was quickly vanishing. Now moving at a slow pace with my grandfather, I realised we were lagging behind the cows and it didn’t take long before my father came and carried me on his shoulders. Under normal circumstances, it should have been fun getting carried on my father’s shoulders but this was far from a gesture of affection. It was an effort to keep pace with the group fleeing with the cows. Meanwhile, I could hear alarms and see huge flames of fire coming from the far hills of Ankole. It must have been horrifying for the