members of that neighboring family, who must be jealous of Deo’s family’s cows and must therefore
have poisoned Deo. What was frightening and confusing to him then became dreadful in his memory.
How, out of love for her grandchildren, his grandmother was bound to start a small feud on their hill.
And surely the same sort of thing had been happening in other huts and houses in those mountains all
during his childhood.
Most of Deo’s classmates who didn’t die or drop out of the elementary school progressed from room to
room down the length of the building and after six years headed off into the mountains to eke out a
living raising crops or herding cows—if their families had some land or cows. Whether they finished
school or dropped out, many left Butanza for the towns or the capital, where the usual choice was a
menial job or, for Tutsis at least, service in the army.
During the years when Deo was growing up, a succession of military dictators ruled Burundi. All
belonged to a group called the Tutsi-Hima. Records from the era show that in all of Burundi there were
only a few dozen secondary schools and one university, and that Tutsis occupied the majority of places
in them. No doubt this favoritism gave Deo advantages that most schoolchildren didn’t share. It seems
strange to think of Deo enjoying anything that could be called privilege, but in a small, crucial way that
was the case.
His family didn’t belong to the ruling group of Tutsis; they had no political connections. For a boy like
him, the only ticket onward was good grades and a high mark on the nationwide exam administered to
sixth graders. Only Deo and one classmate scored well enough to make the cut.
He excelled in middle school, too, and was admitted to one of Burundi’s best high schools, situated two
days’ walk from home. Deo boarded there. School became genteel. One wasn’t beaten, and one wore
shoes. He ran barefoot, though, in races. He ran for fun as well, sometimes with friends and often alone
in the surrounding hills. He was no sprinter, but he could run for hours. He liked to boast that his feet
were so tough you couldn’t drive a nail into them. In a sense, he had been in endurance training ever
since his first hikes with cows in the mountains. That kind of training continued when the school year
ended and he and Antoine went back to carrying food and cowherding for the summer.
At high school his world expanded, partly under the influence of a bishop named Bernard Bududira, a
big figure in the region, the man in charge of all its Catholic schools. Deo felt he’d known Bududira for
most of his life, ever since third grade, when the bishop had visited the school in Sangaza and Deo had
been chosen to present him with a gift. At the high school, priests got to select their spiritual advisees.
Naturally, Bududira got the first picks. He chose Deo and one other boy. He spoke to them about God, of
course, but with an emphasis on what God asked human beings to do for themselves and what God
would have bright young students do about poverty and injustice in Burundi.
“There are many ways in which poverty finds its way into the bodies of the destitute.” This was a
favorite saying of Bududira’s. He traveled widely through his territory, visiting many hills, and he would
talk to Deo and the other boy about what he saw, especially about the almost universal need for clean
water and medicine. He told them he was distressed at the great numbers of impoverished children who
joined the army at twelve or thirteen, and told them about his campaign to build alternatives in the form
of technical schools.
At the end of eleventh grade—high school ended with thirteenth—Deo started his own project, an
attempt to build a clinic in Sangaza that would serve the surrounding hills. He dreamed of inspiring
other communities to do the same throughout Burundi—starting small but thinking big. He talked half a
dozen classmates into joining him, and even got his father to let him spend the first weeks of summer
vacation on the construction. He worked at trying to build the clinic for parts of three summers, right up
until graduation. He didn’t manage to get a building erected, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. He told
himself he would get back to a project like this one day.
Deo received a very high grade on the national post-secondary school test and was offered a scholarship
to a university in Belgium, to be trained there for the priesthood. No doubt Bududira had a hand in this,
but Deo wanted to go to Burundi’s medical school instead. Bududira heartily approved.
In 1988, during Deo’s senior year in high school, Bishop Bududira had written a bold public letter,
urging the government to abandon its “deliberate refusal to talk about ethnic antagonism.” The subject,
he wrote, had become “a taboo,” and meanwhile, Hutus were being systematically harassed. They were
suffering “deliberate injustices in the distribution of positions of responsibility in favor of Tutsi
elements.” (There was also blatant discrimination against Hutus in all aspects of education, even in the
grading of the national tests.) Ethnic antagonism, the bishop warned, had become “extremely acute.” His
pastoral letter was prophetic. That summer, a large Hutu rebellion erupted in the north. Tutsis were
slaughtered indiscriminately, and the army retaliated with even greater brutality, killing perhaps as many
as fifteen thousand Hutus.
Deo happened to be at home on Runda when the massacres in the north began. Neighbors who he had
long since learned were Hutus—whatever that actually meant—warned Deo’s family that the trouble
might spread. He and his family spent a few days and nights in the woods, all except for Lonjino, who as
usual kept a vigil over the compound. Nothing happened around Butanza, but in the aftermath Deo
began asking questions and for once received some answers. He also did some reading. Later, he called
this time “an awakening.”
In school, he had learned a basic version of Burundian history. Even at the time some of the lessons had
seemed weird, particularly when it came to colonization. The basic facts were clear: Germans had
claimed the kingdoms of Burundi and Rwanda at the very end of the nineteenth century, and were
replaced after World War I by the Belgians, who ran the countries from 1918 until the early 1960s. His
teachers said that the Belgians had “tortured” Burundi. Nonetheless, students were taught songs
extolling the greatness of Belgium, and the teachers would speak longingly of going to Iburaya. And
now those high school history lessons also seemed strikingly incomplete, all but devoid of explanations
for the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi,” and of facts that Deo gradually ferreted out. He learned that Hutus
made up about 85 percent of the country and Tutsis about 13 or 14 percent; that for decades Tutsi big
shots had controlled both the army and the government; that there had been many bloody Hutu
uprisings, followed by even bloodier army repressions. This pattern had turned into a bloodbath back in
1972, when Deo had been a baby. That was the year, Deo already knew, when his uncle the doctor had
been killed. Now he learned that Hutu militiamen had dismembered his uncle and left him to die in his
little car on the mountain Honga. His uncle had been just one victim of a gruesome Hutu rebellion,
which the army had put down with gruesome efficiency. They had killed all the Hutu politicians and
intellectuals they could, even schoolteachers and nurses, and many schoolchildren—at least 100,000
Hutus in all, and some said 200,000 or even 300,000; many other Hutus had fled to neighboring
countries such as Rwanda and Tanzania.
Why had he known almost nothing of this? Had he heard more than he’d allowed himself to remember?
It was a frightening subject for everyone: for Tutsis who were outnumbered by Hutu neighbors, for
Hutus who knew the army was never far away. And by the time Deo was born, the Tutsi-dominated
government had decided its own purposes were best served by silence on the issue of ethnicity. Among
other things, they had done away with the Belgian practice of putting “Hutu” or “Tutsi” on citizens’
identity cards.
It was a shock for Deo to realize the depth of the divisions in his country, a shock to think how virulently
people must have spat out the term “Tutsi” around cooking fires in some neighbors’ huts in Butanza
during the years of his childhood. And yet, for all the suffering the division had apparently caused, he
still felt puzzled as to what “Hutu” and “Tutsi” actually meant. Had the Hutus been the original, the true
Burundians, and the Tutsis more recent conquerors from the region of the Nile? It was said that Tutsis
kept cattle and Hutus farmed the land, but many people around Butanza, Hutu and Tutsi, did both. It was
said that Tutsis were tall and slender with thin noses, whereas Hutus were short and chunky and broad
nosed, with hairlines that ran straight across their foreheads. But in Deo’s experience the stereotypes
didn’t hold. He thought he knew of more exceptions than examples. He himself was close to being a
hybrid, at least according to the standards laid down by some Belgian colonials, who had weighed and
measured Burundians and Rwandans and come up with averages for features such as height—1.7586
meters for a Tutsi, 1.6780 for a Hutu. By those definitions, most of Deo’s brothers were too short to be
Tutsis, and he was just barely tall enough. He was thin, but not as thin as many people around Butanza
who were said to be Hutus, and his nose was neither narrow nor very broad.
Deo suffered another bout of malaria and put off medical school for almost a year, during which he
taught elementary school in a remote village. He had no idea which of his pupils were Hutu, which
Tutsi. And he didn’t care, nor did anyone else in the village, so far as he could tell. He didn’t think about
ubwoko, about “ethnicity.” To him, the pupils were simply poor, and already demoralized by poverty,
especially the girls and the ones with physical handicaps, whom he tried to help. He spent a fair amount
of his meager pay buying banana beer for their fathers so they would listen as he praised their children.
When Deo finally arrived at medical school in Bujumbura, he began to learn what a rube he was, a
country boy with mud between his toes. Some of his classmates also seemed to struggle financially, but
everyone had better clothes. He owned only one shirt with a collar. He would wash it at night in his
room and let it dry in his open window. He made one pair of pants last his entire first year, by sewing
patches on them. “So many patches,” he later said, “it was impossible to tell which was the original.”
He underwent the standard hazing from the older students. They ordered him to sit beneath a dining
table, to put his plate full of rice on top of his head, then to feed himself by hand, grasping handfuls of
rice from overhead. “So you think this is bad?” said one of the upperclassmen. “How often do you have
rice at home?”
This was a standard question. Deo got the answer wrong the first time it was asked. He said what was
true, that his family grew some rice and did sometimes eat it at home. For this, he was kicked. The next
time, he managed the exchange correctly.
“How often do you eat rice at home?”
“Only on Christmas Day.”
Rice was often served in the dining hall. He understood the implication. He was being inducted into a
superior group, which deserved special privileges.
He had always made friends easily and was making many now, among them Jean, who had a Burundian
mother but was a muzungu because his father was French. (Muzungu, which comes from Swahili,
originally meant a person who moves from place to place, but it had come to signify a white European.
And because, where Deo grew up at least, one assumed that anyone with white skin was rich, muzungu
was often used to signify any wealthy Burundian—it was like calling that person white.) Jean had his
own car and his own apartment near the campus. He was a good-looking, light-skinned young muzungu
with money and a car, in a city of beautiful young women. He was often out on the town. This was the
era of AIDS, and Deo felt more worried than disapproving, though he did disapprove. He didn’t
remonstrate with his friend, though. He was a country boy who knew how to grow beans. Who was he to
lecture a civilized boy?
The medical school itself was a paradise to Deo. The principal building was practically brand-new. It
had a well-stocked library, and a room full of microscopes and other gear for studying bacteriology. The
buildings of the university hospital that surrounded the school weren’t as elegant, but a large staff kept
them clean, and there were only two patients per room on the wards. Each class had about a hundred
students, about as many of them young women as men. About a hundred and fifty professors worked
full-time or part-time teaching them. Many of the professors were French, and they were like gods, not
to be crossed. Just as in high school, if you asked a question, you got an answer. One never heard a
professor say, “I don’t know.” Often the answer would be, in effect, “Shut up.” Early on, one of Deo’s
classmates asked a question, and the professor wrinkled his nose and said, “First of all, learn to speak
French properly.” Deo spoke impeccable French, but after that he didn’t often feel like raising his hand.
He lived in a dorm and spent most of his time in class and in the library and on hospital rounds with
professors. Grades were posted periodically for all to see, on a bulletin board. His name consistently
appeared in the top five. He had a plan by this time: on the day of graduation he would marry—he didn’t
yet know whom—then he would go to work helping the poor. He had dreamed of building clinics for the
country ever since that abortive attempt to build one in Sangaza. In the present, medical school
comprised a world all its own, both to him and, he thought, to most of his classmates. It claimed most of
his time and energy. But by now even he couldn’t help paying some attention to politics, first of all to
nearby international politics.
There was war up north in Rwanda. Its roots lay in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when colonial rule
