a U.S. dollar, a large sum. Deo’s parents said they couldn’t afford to buy him a pen, only one pencil, but
they were determined to send their children to school. And so were many other families in the region,
too many by the time Deo was six years old and eligible for first grade. Since there wasn’t room for all
the applicants, the authorities seem to have reasoned that some children either weren’t old enough or
weren’t ready for school. They had a peculiar way of weeding those kids out.
On the morning of enrollment day, Deo stood on the dirt field in front of the school in a line of about
seventy-five boys and girls, all jostling each other. “I was ahead of you!” “No, you weren’t!” Parents
hovered at the fringes, whispering commands to their children: “Be quiet!” “Stay in line!” Preoccupied
with keeping his place in the line, Deo didn’t notice the procedure being enacted up at the head of the
line. Before he knew it, he was standing there alone. From his vantage point, only a few feet above
ground level, everything looked enormous—not only the building but also the steps in front of him, and
especially the bearded white man, the muzungu, who was seated in a metal chair at the top of the steps
just outside the metal door to the first-grade classroom. This was the local Belgian priest, nicknamed We
Can’t Escape You, conducting interrogations in Kirundi.
“Touch your ear like this,” said the man to Deo. The white man quickly bent his right arm over his own
head and briefly touched his own left ear.
Deo stared at him, astonished.
“Out!” said the man.
Deo just stood there, staring.
The man was sitting with his legs crossed. He lifted a foot off his knee and brushed Deo aside with it.
“Out!”
Deo was led away by his mother. She was in tears. His father bent over him. “Are you stupid? Why
didn’t you stretch your skinny arm?”
Deo never did learn the provenance of the touch-your-ear-with-the-opposite-hand theory of human
development. His parents had him practice the procedure at home. He started school the next year, at
seven.
One pair of shorts and a T-shirt lasted a year. He or his mother would wash them at night. In the morning
when he took them down from the rope that hung over the cooking fire, his clothes were never quite dry
and he’d smell the smoke in them all day, but you went to school in washed clothes or else. He got his
copybook, gathered his lunch of beans wrapped in banana leaf, and headed out. On the way, he broke off
a twig of an especially fragrant variety of eucalyptus, mashing one end with his teeth, then brushing his
teeth with it as he walked along.
School lay three long descents and three steep climbs away. Down from the compound in Butanza—the
family hadn’t yet moved onto the mountain Runda—up along paths that cut through pastures and banana
groves and gardens of beans, and quickly through a dense wood where, he’d heard people say, bad
spirits lurked, then down again to a stream bottom, a small piece of open flat land, where sometimes he
and his classmates would meet up with kids from the Protestant school in Nanga and play soccer, or
fight, or both. (The Protestants usually won. Deo and his classmates would go away saying to each
other, “Oh well, what do they do, these stupid kids from Nanga? They spend all their time just fighting
and playing.”) He climbed through more woods, through a field of ferns with huge fronds, then crossed
a barren, stony hilltop whose trees, people said, had been cut down before he was born and turned into
charcoal. This spot marked the beginning of the last leg. If he had been punctual, he could relax when he
got here.
But things went wrong sometimes. When it was raining, it was easy to slip and fall in the mud, and then
he’d have to stop to wash off his legs in a stream and to reassemble his lunch. Sometimes he’d stub a
toe, and then have to walk slowly for a while—walking, as he pictured himself, like a chicken that had
lost its other leg. And there were so many distractions—the crowing of cocks, the crying of babies in
houses below in the valleys, a wildflower, birdsong, chimps—so much coming in at his eyes and ears
and nose and asking for examination, that he could forget momentarily the object lessons against
tardiness he’d witnessed at school the day before. So he didn’t always get to the top of the bald hilltop as
early as he meant to.
From that summit, he could see across the next valley to the schoolyard, and in the distance he could
make out the miniature figures of schoolmates on the bare ground in front of the building, the field that
served as their playground. From across the valley, he heard the ringing of the metal head of the hoe that
served as the school bell. He saw his classmates already forming into lines at the classroom doors. Then
he ran. Headlong down the hillside, legs brushing through knee-deep grass, across the muddy
bottomland, and gingerly across the slippery logs spanning the stream, trying to make his feet
prehensile, praying, “Please, God, don’t let me fall. Please, God, don’t let me be late.”
But once across, he knew there was no hope. Small eucalyptus trees bordered the path up the last hill.
He stopped and broke off a long thin branch and stripped away the leaves. He also broke off a twig and
put it in his pocket, and walked slowly on. A couple of other boys were crouching among the brush and
saplings beside the path. He wasn’t really tempted to join them. They’d have to hide there all day,
because going home before the end of school would bring approximately the same penalty from their
fathers as arriving at school late would bring from their teachers. Sometimes a student hoping to escape
a punishment would duck into the latrine off to one side of the campus, but the teachers knew that trick.
If they caught you hiding there, they’d sometimes make you stay in the reeking hut for the rest of the
day.
Entering his classroom, Deo offered the eucalyptus branch wordlessly to his teacher, who wordlessly
accepted it for use later that day.
In his memory, a couple of the teachers were French, one was Belgian, and the rest were Burundians. He
and most of his classmates tried to make good impressions on their teachers. He sensed before he
understood that the Burundian teachers tended to be cruelest because they were trying to impress the
white ones. Maybe beatings were less common than he remembered. And yet in retrospect, it seemed as
if a day never passed without someone being punished. No matter how hard he tried to be perfect, the
rule seemed to be that everyone must be beaten.
There were so many rules that you couldn’t help breaking one now and then. There was arriving late or
arriving without your homework done—and arriving in either condition without a eucalyptus switch, the
tool for your own punishment, got you a double whipping. The teachers would sneak around, trying to
catch kids speaking Kirundi instead of French, a punishable offense. Forgetting to bring your lunch was
bad, though not as grave as what one schoolmate did, in a hungry season when his family had run low
on food. A teacher discovered that the boy had filled his package of banana leaves with cow dung
instead of beans. “Eat it!” the teacher commanded. The child refused, he was suspended, and to get him
reinstated his mother had to come and watch him be beaten with the eucalyptus in front of the whole
school. From then on everyone called that boy Fumier, “Manure.” The name would have been the
hardest thing to take, Deo thought, though he laughed at his schoolmate, too.
Punishments were at least as varied as infractions. Whippings with the eucalyptus switch across your
bare legs and sometimes your back. Hard pinches on the arms and cheeks. Teachers would lift you by
the skin at your jawbones and give you a good shake or force you to kneel on the ground in front of the
school and hold a rock above your head for an hour. If a rooster shat on your copybook while you were
trying to do your homework by the light of your family’s cooking fire, you might end up the next day
with your hands on your desk, your teacher beating your knuckles with his ruler. Biting down on a twig
of eucalyptus helped you not to cry, but Deo hadn’t brought one the time this happened to him, and the
more he cried, the harder the ruler struck. By the end of that day, his fingers were so swollen he couldn’t
hold a pencil, let alone do his chores at home. He made the long walk toward Butanza, crying out
silently, “What am I going to say to my dad?” But he was saved. He kept his hands behind his back and
told his father he was sick, and was excused.
He knew he had it easier than some other kids. Some kids had cruel fathers, whereas his was merely
stern. And Deo’s father believed in education. His own schooling had ended after sixth grade, when he
was obliged to go to work tending Lonjino’s cows. But Deo’s father had insisted that his own younger
brother get educated. He’d fought with Lonjino and won; that younger brother, Deo’s favorite uncle, had
made it through the national university and become an economist. As for Deo’s mother, her education
had begun and ended with a year of catechism class. Sometimes Deo would come home from school,
thinking, “I’m learning things my parents don’t know.” Sometimes he’d hand a textbook to his mother
and ask her to read it, and she would hold it upside down. But she forgave him. She told him once, “If I
can send my children to school, then no one is ever going to tell me that I didn’t go to school. If my
child went, I am educated, because I have an educated child.”
On most days Deo’s father let him stay at school for an extra half hour, so he could do his homework
while there was still light. And Deo’s daily walk was manageable, whereas other kids had to come from
mountains twice as far away. Those were the ones most in danger of the eucalyptus switch, the kids he
was apt to see hiding on the way to school, caught between the fear of teachers and the fear of fathers.
Many students dropped out. In Deo’s memory, many also died. One day he would come to the room and
a classmate would be missing. For the next several days Deo would keep glancing at the empty seat. The
school was attached to a church. There was a graveyard filled with wooden crosses just a short distance
away. Through the grated windows of his classrooms he would hear the ululations from funeral
processions, high-pitched, two-note sounds of grief played on fluttering tongues. The sound went right
to his stomach, especially on windy days. People said the wind could carry the thing that had killed a
person. He pictured this thing floating like a leaf on the wind, up from the graveyard and through the
classroom’s open windows.
Some other students were differently affected, like the brother of the most popular girl in the school.
That boy sat in the classroom, studying, on the day of his sister’s funeral, as if he didn’t hear the cries of
mourning that Deo was hearing all too well. How could you lose your sister and go to school during her
funeral? That boy never cried when he got beaten, and there were some others like him. Their numbness
had seemed strange to Deo, because numbness hadn’t overtaken him. Looking back, he thought he
understood the condition and its consequences: “Some people wonder why so much anger in my
country, and really there is something that is rooted, from the way you grow up in the beaten
conditions.”
His best friend, Clovis, died on the evening of a completely normal Sunday. They had spent it minding
their families’ calves on a slope of the mountain Runda, their usual Sunday job, a good job for a pair of
fourth graders. They took turns retrieving the calves that strayed near the edges of ravines. They spent
the rest of the time playing cards and wrestling around on the ground. Near sunset, with no warning at
all, Clovis began shivering and sweating and weeping, moaning, “I don’t feel good.”
Deo wanted to run away. Maybe the thing on the wind had caught Clovis. Maybe it was going to catch
him, too. Oh, God, would he be next? He began weeping with Clovis and calling frantically for help. For
a long time, all he heard were his own echoing cries, and then at last his father’s voice called from an
adjacent slope. Several men came and carried Clovis away. After Deo and his father had put the cows
safely in their pens, they went to Clovis’s house. Deo stood in the doorway of the hut. Inside, torches
made of tightly wrapped dry grasses were set into the dirt floor. In the wavering light, Deo saw a
neighbor he recognized attending to his friend; people called this man a doctor, but Deo’s father had said
he was really just an herbalist. The man was forcing a green liquid into Clovis’s mouth. Clovis wasn’t
moving. Perhaps he was already dead.
Standing there in the doorway, watching the herbalist administer his potion, already suspecting that this
medicine was worthless, Deo thought, “God, what is killing him? What can I do, what can I do?” Deo
was an altar boy, in spite of his father’s banishment from the church. He asked God for a favor. “I wish I
could have some magic to get my friend back to life.”
For years afterward he would visit the graveyard by the school and remember the funeral—the women
wailing, everyone weeping—and he would think of Clovis and of the prayer he had said in the doorway.
The first time Deo came down with malaria—perhaps the cause of Clovis’s death, he’d later learn—he
felt as if a layer of his skin had been stripped off, as if the breeze blowing on him were a thornbush. He
was on his way to school when he collapsed. His fierce little grandmother found him and carried him
home piggyback. His father was away, but the people carrying loads through the mountains formed a
virtual telegraph service, which brought his father home in time to have Deo treated at the hospital in the
provincial capital. His father knew malaria, its treatment and its cause. His grandmother, however,
believed differently. She blamed a neighboring family. “That family, they hate my grandchildren,” Deo
would hear her say in a low voice for years afterward. “They gave him poison.”
Looking back, he saw this as a typical event in the annals of such allegations. His grandmother didn’t
approve of the way his mother was raising her children. Deo’s mother must have exposed him to
