Strength in What Remains

As the title suggests, this chapter revisits Deo’s childhood. His name, meaning “Thanks be to God,” is something that Deo’s mother learned in church. Many names in Burundi tell stories, and his attests to her gratitude as she gave birth to him. The villages, Kidder explains, are collines or hills, and Deo’s colline is on a hill called Butanza. The village is partially composed of his large extended family, who live in thatched wooden buildings in compounds surrounded by hardened mud walls. Cows are their only valuable resource.

The term “Hutu,” which will play a huge role in Deo’s life and in human history, is something he first hears in school as an adolescent when a girl becomes angry because she thinks he has called her a Hutu. Eventually, after much prodding, his relatives reluctantly explain that Hutus are defined as those who own no or few cows, while Tutsis possess many cows.

Deo’s family owns a bit of farmland down the hill by the lake and Deo becomes one of the young members responsible for tending the land and hauling the food the long distance back to Butanza. Deo’s mother is something of an eccentric figure, often lending out valuable resources like salt. It is shameful to have to borrow salt, and it is also infuriating to Deo’s father that his mother gives salt to shameful people.

Deo’s father is stern and a hard worker, and Deo spends less time with him than with his grandfather, Lonjino. Lonjino is often the one in charge of grazing the cattle when they must be moved to pasture further from home. One of Deo’s possessions after his escape is a photo of Lonjino, who once sold an old cow to be slaughtered. When young Deo protested, Lonjino returned the money and let the cow die a natural death. Lonjino also has experience of colonial injustice: he once worked on a Congolese rubber plantation, where the Belgian overseers would brutally beat workers for even minor offenses against arbitrary company rules. He also recalls the time in Burundi, prior to independence, when the Belgians extortionately taxed land and property. And he remembers the struggle in the region for independence, and the assassination of Prince Rwagasore—the Burundian liberation leader.

Deo distantly remembers a difficult time in his childhood, when a neighbor warned his family of trouble and they fled their home into the trees and pastures. When they return, a barn has been burned but the rest is intact.