Everyone told me not to leave Bujumbura by myself, because there was trouble in the hills. The slow process of finding a power-sharing formula so that Hutus and Tutsis could live together was beginning, but there were weekly ambushes on roads to the interior. Francine, the young woman who worked for the NGO based in Quebec, gave me the grand tour of the city, but we had to stop before she reached the lookout from which she’d hoped to show me the view because some sort of military operation was going on.Bujumbura lies on the eastern edge of Lake Tanganyika, the longest and deepest of Africa’s Great Lakes. The land which now is Rwanda and Burundi was colonized by the Germans at the end of the 19th century, and then administered by the Belgians after World War I. The European influence was still very present in Bujumbura nearly 40 years after Independence. French is widely spoken---Francine and her family speak it beautifully—and many aspects of the city show the hand of European city planners. Wide boulevards take off from a central circular park and climb toward the hills. Both the airport and the cathedral were built in classic modernist design from the 1950s and early 1960s.
The Club Tanganyika still serves excellent food on the shores of the lake, as it did before the Belgians left. Its elegant rooms have seen much drama over the decades, most particularly as the new nation was becoming independent. Prince Louis Rwagasore had just been elected prime minister of an interim government in 1961 when he was gunned down at the club. A local man of Greek descent was convicted of the murder, but it is generally believed that Belgian agents were also involved. This was the same time when Patrice Lumumba was killed in the Congo with the connivance of the CIA, remember.
Had these two men lived, chances are the histories of their two countries would have been much less troubled, most observers agree.
Photo: A remnant of colonial times, the Club Tanganyika sits on the shores of the lake.
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