Igifu

Igifu
You were a displaced little girl like me, sent off to Nyamata for being a Tutsi, so you knew just as
I did the implacable enemy who lived deep inside us, the merciless overlord forever demanding a tribute
we couldn’t hope to scrape up, the implacable tormentor relentlessly gnawing at our bellies and dimming
our eyes, you know who I’m talking about: Igifu, Hunger, given to us at birth like a cruel guardian angel .
. . Igifu woke you long before the chattering birds announced the first light of dawn, he stretched out the
blazing afternoon hours, he stayed at your side on the mat to bedevil your sleep. He was the heartless
magician who conjured up lying mirages: the sight of a heap of steaming beans or a beautiful white ball
of manioc paste, the glorious smell of the sauce on a huge dish of bananas, the sound of roast corn
crackling over a charcoal fire, and then just when you were about to reach out for that mouthwatering
food it would all dissolve like the mist on the swamp, and then you heard Igifu cackling deep in your
stomach. Our parents—or rather our grandparents—knew how to keep Igifu quiet. Not that they were
gluttons: for a Rwandan there’s no greater sin. No, our parents had no fear of hunger because they had
milk to feed Igifu, and Igifu lapped it up in delight and kept still, sated by all the cows of Rwanda. But
our cows had been killed, and we’d been abandoned on the sterile soil of the Bugesera, Igifu’s kingdom,
and in my case Igifu led me to the gates of death. I don’t hate him for that. In fact I’m sorry those gates
didn’t open, sorry I was pulled away from death’s doorstep: the gates of death are so beautiful! All those
lights!
I must have been five or six years old. This was in Mayange, in one of those sad little huts they
forced the displaced people to live in. Papa had put up mud walls, carved out a field from the bush,
cleared the undergrowth, dug up the stumps. Mama was watching for the first rain to come so she could
plant seeds. Waiting for a faraway harvest to finally come, my parents worked in the sparse fields of the
few local inhabitants, the Bageseras. My mother set off before dawn with my youngest brother on her
back. He was lucky: mama fed him from her breast. I always wondered how that emaciated body of hers
could possibly make the milk that kept my brother full. As for Papa, when he wasn’t working in
somebody’s field he went to the community center in Nyamata, on the chance that he might get some rice
from the missionaries, which didn’t happen often, or earn a few coins for salt by writing a letter or filling
out a form for an illiterate policeman or local bigwig. My sister and I eagerly waited for them to come
home, hoping they’d bring a few sweet potatoes or a handful of rice or beans for our dinner, the one meal
of the day.