had ended. In Burundi, Tutsi elites had claimed power. But in Rwanda the opposite had happened: Hutu
elites had supplanted the former Tutsi aristocracy. In Rwanda, during the struggle for power, thousands
of Tutsis had been killed, and hundreds of thousands had fled. Some had settled in Uganda. For decades,
Rwanda’s governments had refused to repatriate those refugees, and like most countries where exiles
tried to make new homes, Uganda didn’t want them either. Now a force made up mainly of descendants
of the Tutsi exiles in Uganda was attempting what one scholar describes as “an armed repatriation.” The
group called itself the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the RPF. Its largely Tutsi army, the Rwandan Patriotic
Army, had invaded Rwanda in 1990. The RPF was supported quietly but effectively by Uganda’s
government. Its army was much smaller initially than Rwanda’s, which was supported fecklessly by
Zaire, to a greater degree by Belgium, and robustly by France. (The colonial language of Rwanda was
French, that of Uganda English. A main tenet of French policy in Africa seems to have been the
preservation of French-speaking governments at all costs. In French political circles, the RPF invasion
was called “an Anglo-Saxon invasion.”) Even so, the RPF had grown and become formidable. It had
taken territory and seemed certain to take more. Many Tutsis had been arrested in Rwanda in retaliation
for the RPF‘s successes. Hundreds, at least, had been killed. The so-called international community had
sponsored on-again, off-again peace talks.
Deo followed the events, desultorily. Once in a while he listened to accounts on Rwandan radio stations.
Several times he heard Rwandan officials or commentators say, “Slowly we will finish them.” But he
assumed the Rwandan speakers were talking about defeating the RPF, not about Tutsis in general.
These were unsettling times, but they only rarely frightened him. His first shock came on a day in the
spring of 1991. He was waiting for a bus in front of the Coca-Cola stand across the street from the
medical school. A fellow classmate, a casual friend, came up to him and said in a whisper, “Here, look at
this.” He handed Deo a folded newspaper and quickly walked away.
It was a tabloid-style paper, folded open to a page with this headline: “The Hutu Ten Commandments.”
Deo had heard of this newspaper, the international edition of a Rwandan paper, sanctioned by the
Rwandan government and called Kangura—the name meant “wake up.” The newspaper was distributed,
Deo had heard, by a Burundian Hutu-power group, outlawed by Burundi’s Tutsi government and
headquartered in refugee camps in Tanzania. The group called itself PALIPEHUTU, an acronym for,
roughly, “Liberation of the Hutu People.” The Hutu Ten Commandments had circulated widely
throughout Rwanda, but this was the first Deo knew of them. He read them surreptitiously on the bus
and reread them several times back in his dorm.
The first commandment stated: “Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, whoever she is, works for
the interest of her Tutsi ethnic group. As a result we shall consider a traitor any Hutu who: marries a
Tutsi woman, befriends a Tutsi woman, employs a Tutsi woman as a secretary or a concubine.” Other
commandments laid out additional reasons that Tutsis should be feared, despised, and shunned. They
didn’t actually suggest killing all Tutsis, but the eighth commandment declared, “The Hutu should stop
having mercy on the Tutsi,” and the ninth read, in part, “The Hutu must be firm and vigilant against their
common Tutsi enemy.” Other writings in the paper referred to Tutsis as “cockroaches,” an old epithet in
Rwanda.
Where was this coming from? Deo wondered. Was this sort of hatred going to burst out in the open here,
in Burundi? Did some of his family’s neighbors believe this stuff? If he traveled back home, would he be
in danger on the way? Who were his fellow students and where did they stand on all of this? He kept the
paper hidden in his room for several days, then handed it quietly to another classmate, one he happened
to know was a Tutsi.
Some of his classmates openly discussed the ethnic issue. Several made no secret of the fact that they
came from Tutsi families who had fled from Rwanda to Burundi during one or another pogrom. They
worried openly, saying, “Is it going to happen here?” But Deo didn’t know the classification of most of
the others at the school. If you were out on the street and you guessed that everyone you saw was Hutu,
you would, after all, be right about 85 percent of the time. And he thought he could identify some
classmates by stereotype. But most people’s looks fell, like his own, in a middle ground. He wasn’t even
sure about every neighbor’s ethnicity back in Butanza. Here in Bujumbura, the only way to know for
certain was to be told by the person in question, and he wasn’t about to go among his classmates asking,
“Are you a Hutu or a Tutsi?” The worry he’d felt when he read the Hutu Ten Commandments didn’t
pass entirely, but it abated.
Deo began to notice what seemed like a new fad around the university and in the city. He would be out
walking with student friends, often a mixture of Hutus and Tutsis, at least as far as he could tell, and
they would encounter other friends or strangers who would raise one hand to the top of an ear, then
make a fist and raise the hand higher, saying as they did this, “Inivo nu gutwi,” which to Deo meant “At
the level of the ear.” And then they might say, “Oh, hi!” Deo and his friends would laugh and repeat the
gesture. Once in a while he would be sitting with friends on the wall outside the medical school or on
the grass outside his dorm, or he’d be standing with friends on the street, and strangers passing by would
smile and say, “Susuruka,” “Warm them up.”
Deo assumed this was just a new greeting to go with the fist-raising gesture. “Susuruka,” he’d reply, and
then do the fist-raise.
It was only much later that Deo was able to make some sense of what had been going on around him
outside the medical school classrooms. He would come to feel that history, even more than memory,
distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living
in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don’t exist. “Everyone has a
different story,” he’d come to think. “It’s not like for one team if you are playing football, one team here
and one team there. No. It’s a chaos. And everyone says something depending on what they saw or lived
or felt.” Most people probably understood “Inivo nu gutwi” and “Susuruka” as political slogans, or even
as Deo did, as new and friendly greetings. It was only later that Deo came to think that “At the level of
the ear” was code for a machete’s proper target, and “Warm them up” meant “Pour gasoline on Tutsis
and light a match.”
In Deo’s third year of medical school, a big moment in Burundi’s political history arrived. In the
aftermath of 1988—the massacres of Burundian Tutsis and counter-massacres of Hutus—there had been
international condemnation of Burundi’s military government. In Burundi, as in much of Africa, foreign
aid had long been a principal source of wealth for the wealthy. Burundi’s unelected Tutsi leaders had
responded to the pressure by creating a new interim government, led by a Hutu and composed of equal
numbers of Hutus and Tutsis. A constitution providing for multiparty democracy had followed, and then
a general amnesty, and finally, in early 1993, national elections.
There was some trouble, of course. Hutu refugees were returning, some with their Ten Commandments
memorized, many with bitter, horrifying memories of 1972 preserved. Ideologues of Tutsi rule
attempted a coup to prevent the election. But the voting went on, and a Hutu named Melchior Ndadaye
defeated his Tutsi opponent. Inevitably, ethnicity figured in the election campaign, but after Ndadaye
had won 65 percent of the vote, he immediately began preaching peace. Thousands of Tutsi students and
members of the losing party held a march in Bujumbura to protest Ndadaye’s election. A month later, a
small group of Tutsi soldiers attempted another coup, which also failed. Ndadaye appointed a cabinet of
seven Tutsis and fifteen Hutus, with a Tutsi as prime minister. On July 10, 1993, at his formal swearing-
in, Ndadaye and the losing Tutsi candidate, a former unelected president, hugged in front of the cameras.
Deo hadn’t joined the Tutsi protest. He didn’t have any special feeling for either candidate. But not
everyone at the school was as indifferent.
He had a classmate who liked to declare that he was a Hutu and would say, “We need to share the small
cake.” Le petit gateau. Deo had never eaten cake, but he understood: Burundi was poor, only a handful
could be wealthy in Burundi. Right now Tutsi elites were enjoying almost all the scarce wealth and
privileges. They needed to share the small cake, not with the Hutu people in general, but with Hutu
elites.
Many students in Deo’s class thought this fellow difficult—cold and haughty, always spouting off about
the virtues of the rebel group PALIPEHUTU and taking it upon himself to discover his classmates’
ethnicities. Deo had the impression that most self-identified Hutus in the class disapproved of the young
man. Deo had avoided him, but evidently he had his eye on Deo and knew Deo was a Tutsi. On a day
soon after Ndadaye’s election, he came up to Deo in a hallway and, letting loose a burst of toneless
laughter, said, “This is your end.”
Deo knew he was talking about the election. He figured the guy just wanted to crow a little. “The end of
what?” asked Deo. “In power, or what?”
The young man laughed again. “You don’t get it,” he said. “You are like the tail of a beheaded snake.”
Deo knew his snakes, the mambas and cobras and other venomous species, and he knew the proper
response to an encounter with a snake, which was either to run or to chop off its head. Evidently, this
Hutu classmate was a country boy, too. No doubt he was imagining the same thing as Deo at that
moment—a decapitated snake with the tail still wriggling around, as if the tail didn’t know it was part of
an animal already dead, as if it didn’t know there was no hope for it. “My God,” Deo thought, “are we
Tutsis going to be wiped out? Struggling on the ground?” He had always tended to feel fear in his belly.
He felt as if his stomach had filled all at once with acid. He felt like running away from this guy. He
couldn’t think of a word to say. After that, whenever he saw his radical classmate he saw a beheaded
snake in his mind.
Chapter EIGHT
New York City,
1995–2000
Improbable as it would have seemed to almost anyone else, the fall of 1995 found Deo entering his
freshman year at Columbia University. It seemed improbable to at least one of his classmates, who asked
Deo if he was the son of an African king. Deo said he wasn’t. Well, the classmate asked, how did he
come to be at Columbia? Deo didn’t tell him that only a year ago he’d been delivering groceries and
sleeping in Central Park, or that a combination of student loans, scholarships, and Nancy and Charlie’s
money was paying his way. To explain would only have left his classmate more confused and more
inquisitive. Deo simply smiled and said brightly, “I don’t know why I’m here, but I’m here!”
Deo hadn’t known he’d accomplished anything special when Columbia had accepted him, not until he
met a few people from other New York colleges and realized they were impressed—“Really? You’re
going to Columbia?” Even then, the fact of being at college didn’t seem extraordinary to him. He had
already gone through three years of what in the European system constituted both college and medical
school. Starting college over again, as a freshman with at least four years between him and a return to
medical training, didn’t seem like a big deal. It felt like a demotion. And because he was in a hurry to
catch up, he got a little ahead of his abilities with English.
A few days after his first chemistry test, the professor took him aside and told him he had answered
almost every question wrong. When Deo said this was impossible, in an accent that was unmistakably
French, the professor looked at him quizzically, then smiled and said, “Je parle fran.ais aussi.” In his
answers, Deo had written down the names of chemicals as he had learned to do in Burundi—he’d
written “chloride hydrogen,” for instance, instead of “hydrogen chloride.” The professor regraded his
test and his score went from a zero to an A minus, but the professor also advised him to defer advanced
science courses and concentrate for now on his English. Deo thanked him, thinking there was no way he
was going to slow down. At midterm, he was summoned by the dean, who told him he was on the verge
of academic probation and gave him the same advice as the chemistry professor. Deo didn’t take it. He
botched his physics final because every question had to do with the motion of a “carousel.” He didn’t
know the word, and, out of old habit, didn’t dare ask the instructor for its meaning. At the end of the
spring term, however, Deo had made the dean’s list.
Sophomore year began with a struggle, too. He sat down at his desk in the Black Hole, opened his text
to the beginning page of his assignment in the English literature survey course, and saw “Whan that
Aprille with hise shoures soote …”
“Wah!” He reached for his English dictionary. There was no “whan” or “hise” or “shoures” or “soote.”
“What is this, Chinese?”
His teacher calmed him down, his professor in African-American literature gave him a modern English
translation of Chaucer, and he finished that course with an A. He had begun to find his way around the
curriculum, thanks mainly to a graduate student who befriended him. Deo was majoring in biochemistry
and, for reasons that were clearly not practical, in philosophy.
He loved his course in American literature, and most of all W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk.
He read and then reread it until very late in Butler Library, a favorite place at Columbia where he often
spent half the night before heading home to SoHo. There was a homeless man camped out in the subway
station. Deo could smell him from a distance, but went over to his campsite anyway, and talked to the
