Stamp your passport at my gate

Fifty percent of my current household is European. European men, to be exact. (Actually, with the exception of me, everyone who lives here at the moment is a man, and I am beginning to feel like something of the Central African Hostel Madame, if by ‘madame’ you understand ‘woman who cleans up the crumbs, puts away the bread, handles the house finances, washes lingering dishes, makes piles of people’s belongings left in the common room, and is therefore reconsidering ever having children.’)

The Great Dane has been here for a couple of months. His English is rapid and idiomatic, with only the slightest accent, which makes him hard for many of the Rwandans we know to understand him, but we all know that he’s funny. Really funny. Even if it’s unclear what he said, there’s a way in his delivery that makes obvious he’s made a joke, and then the giggling starts and spreads. Laughter translates universally, even if you have no idea what its catalyst was.

Then there’s the Crazy Belgian Boy Scout, who’s been here about a month. I’ve never encountered a Scout of such seriousness, and I went to high school with possibly the most earnest apprentice America’s Eagle Scouts have ever seen. But the Crazy Belgian Boy Scout knows how to have a good time; he loves dancing, and cares not a whit whether his moves seem impressive or just plain silly. I like this about him; it gives me a sort of confidence in my own questionable dancing abilities, even if at the moment I am only displaying them on weekend afternoons in my living room. And the Crazy Belgian Boy Scout, too, turns out to be very, very funny.

All of this is to say that I quite like my roommates. At the very least, we share a sense of humor, which is hard enough to find among one’s national brethren, let alone between people with three different mother tongues.

A few nights ago, the three of us, and one of the Crazy Belgian Boy Scout’s colleagues from work, a very nice Congolese man, planned to wander to a nearby restaurant for a drink. The topic of the Scout’s departure from the house came up—he’s staying a few more months in Rwanda, but planning to leave our house. From the moment he got here, he’d been thinking of moving in with some Belgians, so this was no surprise. But then he said he might move in with his Congolese Colleague. Closer to work. “And much more…African.”

I have not seen the Congolese Colleague’s living arrangements, to be sure, so I don’t know what this means. But in the kind of rhapsody that is usually inspired by alcohol, the two of them waxed on and on as we left our house. “This is Europe. You are living in Europe. We are standing in Europe, until we open the gate, and then we are in Africa again.”

This pissed me off.

The implication is, of course, that we live in a home so ridiculously cush that it isn’t actually “Africa.” (Forget that we live in Rwanda, which is a teensy slice of Africa, which is by no means all the same place; let’s not even quibble with the romanticized use of the all-encompassing adjective.) And I’m not saying we are not living in some serious luxury. I have wireless internet, for God’s sake. That is in fact a little ridiculous. Ours is a big house, with two bathrooms, a porch, and a sizeable garden whose lemon trees inexplicably bring me an inner calm. Our Frequent Traveler, the roommate who rents it and “sublets” to us and who splits his time between the US and here, has a fondness for acknowledging the complexity of “living in the palace in the neighborhood.” The rest of us say quietly that there are plenty of palaces in this neighborhood—the biggest, by the way, built by a wealthy Rwandan.

So yes, ours is a nice house (owned, by the way, by a nice Rwandan man), and it doesn’t resemble our immediate neighbors’. Their homes are smaller, though it’s quite possible, depending on whose kids live where, they have a denser people-to-room ratio than the 5 of us do. They are made of mud and have tin roofs; they look a good deal like the homes you see in the banner at the top of this blog.

Compared to our house they are much more…what’s the word… “African”?

I thought that perhaps my roommate’s comment pissed me off because I’m uncomfortable with my relative wealth. I sure as hell don’t feel wealthy—money slips through your fingers as fast here as it does in New York—but honestly, my own budget or shrinking bank account is rather beside the point. I can pretty much leave any time I want, and I am entitled to return to a place that many, many people here desperately want to get to and cannot. That is a kind of wealth, albeit less easy to measure. What I can spend while I’m here—that’s just details.

And this house is a big detail. It’s more expensive than any other I looked at, and I definitely was uncomfortable choosing it, as I did, largely because of its stand-out luxury, the internet. But I tried to imagine working as a freelance journalist while passing up that resource, and it just seemed stupid. Plus, I really like the Frequent Traveler, and I knew any place of his was likely to be full of nice people and good energy. I didn’t choose it for the Cush—the Cush freaked me out—but clearly, I’m still not at ease with the choice.

The point, of course, is that I’m sympathetic to part of what I think the Crazy Belgian Boy Scout was trying to say: we’re not living like most Rwandans. But what, exactly, is so “African” about the other side of my gate? The bumpy dirt road? Little black children without any toys? Small mud huts with roofs of tin–images Americans associate with shantytowns?

Was he saying what is so often said, in that way that uses sympathy and cultural curiosity to mask the most long-lasting of cliches: that what is “African” about the world on the other side of our gate is poverty?

I want to take the Crazy Belgian Boy Scout and his Congolese Colleague to the home of one of my Rwandan friends. We have been good friends since I first visited Rwanda two years ago, and he invited me to meet his family. I spent a Sunday afternoon at their home. And it looks—get this—a lot like mine. It is spacious and beautiful, decorated with more intention and care than my house is. There is a porch and a garden, home to beautiful flowers and to plants whose smells and utility sent my heart soaring. Lemongrass wanders here and there; aloe tendrils stretch upwards ten feet; thyme sprawls lazily; green beans lounge against the fence, and honey bees zoom from leaf to leaf and then home again, to a small hive under a banana tree where the family can collect ubuki a couple times a year. And those are just the things I can name. There is one beautiful plant whose thorny buds you pop open to pull out a small piece of fruit, and then you boil the fruit to make juice. I have no idea what it’s called, but I love it.

This home is in a place that we would call a subdivision in the States. The guy who lives at the top of the hill bought the land, divided it into small parcels and sold them to families, who designed their homes and financed their construction through a mortgage with either the bank or the developer directly. This is one of the places where the much-discussed but visually elusive Rwandan middle class lives.

It is not a big class, to be sure, and its numbers are likely highest here in the capital. If what is “African” is poverty, then Rwanda is still ‘African enough.’ And that creates all sorts of complicated emotions, some with their own set of moral demands, for people like me and my roommates.

But I don’t think the Crazy Belgian Boy Scout and I share an idea of the proper response. I’m as disdainful as the next person—as the Boy Scout himself seems to be—of the mzungus who come here, hole up in beautiful houses, and leave their change-the-world-through-program- management NGO jobs to drink at an expat bar. You could live in this country very easily without having to actually engage with the people here.

None of us in this here man-hostel wants that. That’s why the Boy Scout seeks out small local bars; why the Great Dane bops around to parties hosted by anyone who’s not white; why I take the bus and not a taxi. We look for ways to break through the bubble we would otherwise live in and to share social space with people who’s country this is.

Maybe moving to a house that’s more “African” is one way to do that. But it can also be a kind of theater, one in which you can become, even unwittingly, complicit in a nasty dramatic irony: In your good-hearted quest to find “the African,” your empathy twists into objectification.

To be fair, I don’t know what the Crazy Belgian Boy Scout meant. Maybe he meant that he wants to be closer to one of those local bars with good African music. Maybe he knows the Congolese Colleague’s (presumably African) neighbors, and he wants to spend nights sipping and passing urwargwa, instead of smoking with the Great Dane on our porch. I’ll ask, when he’s back from a trip and before he’s quite that drunk. I’ll let you know what happens.