Friday, July 29, 2011

How I Spent My Weekend


Banana sellers on the road to Gitenga.

The Bride: She cannot be seen by her future husband tonight. She does the cooking.

Bringing gifts of food


The father makes a speech.


The two families face each other at long tables.


Off to work on a bicycle taxi.

A seller at our car window.

It's not allowed and not possible to go in or out Bujumbura before 8am and after 4.30pm. Police hang out until 5 pm on the streets, and then they disappear and come back as rebels when it’s dark. No mountaineering starts possible here! Saturday the locals are supposed to do a city wide clean up. In reality, the population is simply sleeping off last night’s hangover.

But this weekend is to be a trip “up country” as they say. Up county means Gitega a provincial town a hundred – odd kilometers from Bujumbura. The air here is fresh and oh so delightful after the steamy capital. The streets are almost clear of traffic and a giant shading tree marks the very center of Burundi. A lovely sight.

We are here for the weekend and in the typical, pure hospitable sprit of the Burundians, have been invited to a “pre” wedding function. The Burundians have a fairly limited repertoire of weekend activities: they drink copious quantities of beer (women included). They go to church several times a week. And they attend wedding, birth and funeral ceremonies by the truckload. Weddings are not just one day: there are pre wedding ceremonies where the families meet for the first time, another ceremony is a formal request for marriage, another where the groom woos the bride, the bride then cooks a first meal… and these imaginative excuses for a ceremony go on. And why not?

These “pre”-wedding wedding ceremonies can last years. I suppose they do finally marry before they get bored…or run out of money for ceremonies.

We have a hotel called “Acolade”, basic with white wash walls, a TV with the live Tour de France and a sunny breakfast terrace for $7.50 US. Lovely. 
“Two women in a room will be double the rate,” the officious desk clerk announced.  My sunny face dropped. We had the exact same room type as our Burundian friends – who were married of course.

Anyway, that evening the ceremony is very formal with white table clothes draped over long tables in the garden of the bride. A bellbird’s haunted call resonates in the trees. Stars prick the firmament. The bride is traditionally kept hidden – and does the cooking for the 70 odd guests. Everyone else drinks beer with the Burundian “banana beer” concoction thrown in. (This is a fancy name for alcoholic banana flavored meths.) We politely listen to lengthy speeches made by men (in Kurundi), drink non - alcoholic beer, then finally scoop dishes from a smorgasbord of food: fish, cabbage salad, rice and baked bananas prepared by the invisible wife to be. 

The final stage to the night is to “evaluate” the opposing family. Thus we all dutifully retire to a cafĂ© (that sells beer of course). An eventful night.

Next morning I go running in the coolness. The sun has just come up, rising over the hilly country, over lake Tanganyika that stretched away to the Congo. Suddenly it is there, smiling on Africa, a slivered of golden red bull, inching up, floating effortlessly free.

We buy leeks and fresh peas and mangoes and oranges from the village sellers on the journey home. They crowd our car, all overly enthusiastic for a sale, dark faces peering, pleading in the car windows. The faces of Africa. There’s so much poverty in Africa that its tempting to just shrug your shoulders and walk away. But the world can’t do that. You just can’t.


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