certification

If you want to learn about a culture, you need to go to a wedding in-country.  Integration happens fast and hard.

There were two weddings this past month, and they couldn’t have been more different.  Both were for coworkers, both were humble and fun affairs, and both involved very tight spaces and loud music.  They were my first real weddings in the country and I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction.

The first wedding was for Olivier.  Olivier is a tall, thin man from the region.  He teaches science at school and I know him from the very loud, tinny Rwandan gospel music he plays, always accompanied by the most honest and heartfelt singing.  I gave him an extra pair of headphones that I had when I started working here and we’ve been friends ever since.

Olivier’s wedding was in Nyanza.  He couldn’t afford a wedding at a church, so he was married at the sector office.  Five other couples were married at the same time, the combined guests and families all packed in to a room smaller than one of my classrooms.  It was a hot day and I was wearing my suit, sweating through everything and embarrassingly given a seat in the front of the crowd, right behind Olivier and his fiancée.  The ceremony was simple: a district official gave a long rambling speech about the virtues of marriage, sitting behind a desk on the slightly raised stage at the front of the room.  There was a Rwandan flag drooped on a pole off to his side, next to a lectern, and one by one the couples went up on to the stage, raised their right hand, held the flag with their left hand, and recited an oath.  All of the couples were dressed in their best attire, which meant that the class divide between the couples were apparent; some of the grooms wore pressed shirts and ties, while one man wore a pearl three-piece suit.  One of the brides was unable to read and the official told her what to say while she recited word for word, visibly humiliated.  This is the “civil wedding”, recognizing the new legal status of each couple, and afterwards each party went off to do whatever it is they had planned.

Olivier, his new wife, and his guests walked to a nearby bar.  There was a large event space and tables of food.  Everyone sat around red plastic Mutzig beer-branded tables.  A long plastic “rug” was stretched from the back of the room, where the smell of the food enticingly wafted throughout the hall, to the front of the room, which had chairs for Olivier, his wife, and the man and woman of honor.  A DJ sat in one corner with two stadium-sized speakers and, true to Rwandan form, played the music at the loudest possible volume, despite the distortion and the small space.  Free beer was passed around according to seniority, with the oldest guests being served first, each one spending minutes glossing over the drink selection and confidently stating their order.  While all of the teachers at the school were invited, only seven or eight of the male teachers arrived, and we all knew what we wanted without having to be asked.

The afternoon was spent drinking, eating, and giving speeches.  I was invited to give a speech in Kinyarwanda; I said that “You are a great teacher and have a beautiful wife,” which went over well with those attending,” and that “You will have many beautiful children,” which did not sit as well with the older folks.  Rwanda is a conservative country, and talking about anything related to sex in a public setting is frowned upon.  Live and learn.

When the dancing started, I stayed for a few minutes until most of the guests were filming me on their phones awkwardly jutting around, and at that point I decided to dip out.  I don’t really like attention like that.  But the entire time, Olivier smiled and laughed and adorned the serious face of a new groom when pictures were taken and accepted his gifts with honor.  Compared to the weddings I used to cater back in Florida, this was a very humble affair; and yet the sincerity, and the excitement, could not have been more genuine.

***

By the time that you read this, the midterm elections will be underway.  The elections are a significant time for the United States, and will serve as a referendum on the Trump administration’s first two years in office.  Progressives across the country are running in force.  In Florida, Andrew Gillum (the former mayor of Tallahassee) is running against Ron DeSantis, a strong Trump supporter.  Bill Nelson is hoping to keep his Senate seat as Rick Scott, Florida’s former governor, attempts to take it from him and leave Florida with two Republican senators.  On top of the four men fighting for power, there are over a dozen ballot initiatives; one would re-enfranchise the fifth of Florida’s black population which had their voting rights taken away due to a Reconstruction-era ban on voting for convicted felons, another would ban offshore drilling, and another would outlaw greyhound racing.  There’s an initiative for legalizing casinos across the state, an initiative that would all but guarantee that Florida’s gerrymandered, Republican-dominated state legislature would never be able to raise taxes again, and another which would give more benefits to first responders injured in the line of duty.

At the national level, Democrats have the opportunity to take the House of Representatives from the Republicans, and a slim but possible chance to retake the Senate too.  With the lower house under Democratic control it is possible that lawmakers will create the kind of gridlocked conditions which dominated President Obama’s time in office and bring the Republican legislative agenda to a halt.  It is also possible that Democrats raise articles of impeachment, although without retaking both the House and the Senate it will be unlikely that Trump will be out of office early.  And while there seems to be the considerable momentum of two years’ worth of resistance to Trump motivating a large Democratic turnout, Trump’s “November Surprise” – sending over 5000 soldiers to the Mexican-American border to kill a “caravan” of refugees hoping to realize the American Dream – will likely scare his base in to turning out to vote for the Republicans.

By all counts, the midterm election will have significant ramifications for Americans.

But I’m not going to vote.

I’ve been asked by pretty much every person I still talk to in the States if I’ve voted yet or who I will vote for.  I usually give them the short story – that Florida is a notoriously repressive state to vote in, with restrictions on overseas ballots that would abhor rights-minded individuals – and if that doesn’t work, I say that I’m just too lazy to spend a large chunk of my monthly allowance, travel to Kigali, and miss preparing my students for national exams.  “There’s more important work to do here,” I say, and usually my friends and family will (I imagine) shake their heads in disappointment and move on.

But the truth is that I don’t want to vote in the upcoming elections.  At best, I don’t believe that voting makes a difference, and at worst, I believe that it is a distraction.

Voting has always been a right for a privileged class of Americans.  When the Constitution was written, voting was restricted to white, land-owning men over the age of 21.  The authors of the Constitution did not intend to create a country where the government was accountable to the will of “the people,” but rather was accountable to a small and numerically minor portion of the population.  Why was that?  Why is it that landless white men did not gain the right to vote until President Jackson came in to power?  Why is it that black men did not gain the right to vote until after the Civil War?  Why is it that women did not gain the right to vote until the First World War?  Why is it that until the latter half of the 20^th century, citizens could fight and die in the armed forces at 18 but not have the right to make a decision?

There are several thousand books written about these subjects, but the answers to these questions (from what my unread mind can gather) can be organized into several camps of thought.  One camp says that the increasing enfranchisement of the population over time reflects a “bend towards progressivism” in history, that it is natural for an aristocratic republic formed in the 18^th century to gradually grant access to the reins of power to an increasingly large portion of the population.  This camp holds the conclusion that, logically, access to voting will increase over time in correlation with a democratizing of power – that is, as more people gain the access to vote, decisions of the national government will increasingly become localized as more people give more inputs on how things should be decided.  This camp, which could be called the “Inevitable Democratization” camp, views the increasing size of the federal government as a byproduct of increased demands for federal protections of rights and powers for citizens, and likewise rationalizes that the decreased power of local and state governments is a product of a citizenry that views itself as increasingly “American” with less of an identity attached to the community or the sub-federal state that they live in.

The Inevitable Democratization camp misses several important facts that our most recent election brought to light.  The first is that the increased enfranchisement of Americans over history has not resulted in a certainty, at the federal level, that these rights will be protected.  During President Obama’s tenure, the federal government rigorously indicted states who organized their voting systems along rigged systems, but this trend has all but disappeared in the past two years.  State lawmakers are able to draw voting lines that all but guarantee an outcome for politicians.  And far from guaranteeing a more democratic representation of the total American population, our political system is still run by people who are far richer, older, whiter, masculine, and religious than the “average American.”  Our system of voting still privileges people that have the resources to mount a competitive race, so while the population of voters has become more “democratic” (diverse, representative), the population of elected officials has barely moved from the days of rich, old, white Christian men running the country.  The belief that granting more people the right to vote would result in a more diverse, representative and democratic government has proven to be wrong.

Another camp believes that enfranchisement has been a necessary step to prevent rebellion.  That may be an oversimplification, but from what I can gather, the belief goes as follows: the ruling class, rightfully occupying their space at the top of the political pyramid, has made concessions to ascending classes of people throughout American history to bring them in to the fold, so to speak.  Enfranchisement has thus been a necessary tool to quell resentment against the ruling class, and increasing enfranchisement at the federal (but especially state) level gives that ruling class more cover for politically significant actions while opening up that class to resistance from the population.  Members of this camp point to enfranchisements as necessary compromises between the accountability and the power of the ruling class.  Ending Jim Crow subjected the state to an unwarranted wave of progressivism, but in the long run, this wave could be curtailed with enough subtle methodology (such as gerrymandering).  Giving voting rights to landless men in the 19^th century had a similar effect in that it increased the fervor of populist movements in that era, but political machines were able to subvert the larger, constitutional shift in voting rights by establishing poll taxes and reading tests, ensuring that a large degree of meritocracy still existed.  Essentially, as different populations “proved” themselves capable of making decisions, enfranchisement was extended to bring them in to the political classes and ward off popular challenges to the status quo.

This camp – occupied by realists and neo-realists like Henry Kissinger and Sean Hannity – see voting as a privilege, and a privilege that one is not necessarily born with.  Only people “American enough” should be given the privilege to vote, and in jurisprudential terms, they have a point, because the “right to vote” is not written anywhere in our Constitution or it’s 27 amendments.  And while such a worldview is gritty and uncomfortable to read about, it also has a longevity that is hard to ignore: Thomas Hobbes wrote The Leviathan in the 15^th or 16^th century and it has served as a guidebook for rulers since its publication, arguing that the will of the people must be curtailed by a strong state to preserve order, within which all conversations about democracy and rights can take place and beyond which nothing is possible.  Order is the principal determinant in political will, and someone has to preserve it.

I’ll come out and say it: I find this view of democracy to be disgusting, not because of its fallacies (assuming that power comes from a ruler or ruling class and is granted to subjects, rather than arising from the bottom and being temporarily extended to those at the top) but because of its affects.  Realism has allowed Agent Orange to be sprayed on peasants in South East Asia.  It justified the willful deception of the American public with pretexts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  Realism broke the skulls of labor activists in the early 20^th century and locked up those protesting the imperialistic Great War under the revived Alien and Sedition Acts.  And principally, realism excuses any action which can be made in the ultimate, utilitarian calculus, and for that reason, it must be opposed as the intellectual cancer that it is.

The result of these two ideologies has been a morally bankrupt conflict that in many ways defines American political history.  Liberals (again, I stress this word in its academic sense, as people who believe that rights are natural and the state exists to protect those rights) hold fast to the certainty that progress is inevitable: that in 2008, we will have our first black President, and that in 2016, we will have our first female President.  Liberalism has made action unnecessary by arguing that history, reason, or God will guarantee a morally righteous outcome, and in doing so, looks upon direct action – strikes, protests, mutual aid – as unnecessary and even harmful to the relentless march of progress.  Realists have completely subverted reason to the thirst for power – and make no mistake, when order is realized as the primary goal of the state, power is its necessary precondition.  Realism excuses any action, any ideology, as necessary to supporting order.  When Trump said that there were “bad people on both sides” after Neo-Nazis murdered a protester in Charlottesville, he was in effect saying that the preservation of his power was dependent on the militant racism of fascists, whom he could not offend lest his base – his base, the wellspring of his political support – left him behind.  That’s what realism does.

And while Liberalism undoubtedly has dominated the American political class for decades (if not longer), it cannot and will not address the conditions that give rise to Realism and it’s militant offspring.  There is no vocabulary within the Liberal paradigm to explain the rise of populism or fascism, nor is there any need to attempt an explanation: liberalism rests on the belief in inevitability, and idiots like Hilary Clinton thought that labeling her opponents “deplorables” would be enough to maintain the status quo that saw her rise to power.  There is no effective method within the Liberal toolkit to combat genuine democracy, an expression of popular will like was seen in the election of Donald Trump, nor will there ever be.  After Trump leaves office, barring a sea change in American political discourse, Liberals will resume their place at the top of the ladder, and the next era of hatred and violence will be as unpreventable and unexplainable as the times we currently live in.

From across the ocean, this is the binary within which I can understand American politics.  And while voting can make a difference in the lives of those who are unfairly persecuted by existing law, every vote cast is an endorsement of the binary which has supported those laws in the first place.  If the point of voting is to articulate your political beliefs, we can do so without supporting a rigged system.

If you work in an industry that has strong unionization, join.  Encourage your coworkers to report unethical practices by management and learn about laws relating to worker’s compensation and safe workplace environment.  If you work in a state with anti-worker “Right to Work” laws, you can still make a difference in the workplace by organizing your coworkers.  I used to work in the food service industry and a group of organized workers, even without a legally recognized union, can still impact unethical management’s unethical practices.

If there is a strike in your city, support it.  Strikes require courage, organization, and willpower.  Showing solidarity with strangers and their working conditions is how Americans are able to escape the arbitrary partisan divide and present a united front against the established ruling class.  University students have the privilege of being in a highly visible and organized environment within which multiple interest groups – janitorial workers, graduate assistants, sports players – can benefit from direct action and the solidarity of their peers.  Your presence at a strike, or your public support of one, normalizes resistance to oppression.

Most importantly, we can articulate real political change through mutual aid.  Mutual aid is the practice of supporting members in your community through charity.  Many cities have organizations which feed the homeless and the unemployed, offer free childcare services, and provide pro-bono legal counsel, especially for undocumented immigrants.  If there’s a natural disaster, volunteer.  Mutual aid has supported my family in the past and marks a defining point in my civic development.  Mutual aid is the most direct way to change the economic reality of our society.

Parting thoughts: I’ve written all of this on way too much coffee and way too little sleep.  Voting isn’t inherently wrong, but it’s not inherently right, and my fear is that too many Americans look at voting as a “civic duty” that satisfies one’s obligations to society without actually pursuing more impactful political action.  If you do vote, don’t be a dick.  Vote for things that help people who are suffering, and vote for people who oppose the suffering of the unfortunate, regardless of party affiliation.  Put please, don’t stop at voting; the deep partisan gash in our shared civic identity cannot be healed without direct action in support of those disadvantaged by our political environment.  Voting has always been a tool of the strong to consolidate power by creating a class of people that feel “engaged” but who are unmotivated to protest injustice or fight for real change.  Don’t become a part of the problem.

***

The water tap is not out of water, they say, but the key to open the cement box containing the valve is missing and the owner is not here.  It’s hot, very hot, and the air above the dirt street is wavering, unsure of itself.  There’s a single drip staining the concrete block at the base of the spigot, enough for a child to wrap her parched lips around, but not enough to fill seven bright yellow jerry cans.

An old man, sleepy in the shade, waves a passing student over to his nest.  He calmly explains the situation and without a response the boy walks to his friend.  One takes off at a blistering pace downhill, towards the market.  The other sprints uphill, towards the Adventist church.  Together they will pass every house of the one-street village, looking for the owner of the key to the concrete box holding the valve to let the water in to the seven large, bright jerrycans of the friendly foreigner.  Wearing plastic slippers, the boys kick dust and race each other to find the person of interest.

I just stand there, mouth agape at the display of respect.  The old man goes back to sleep.

***

When I stepped down in to the recently excavated crater surrounding the boulder, my boots slipped along the decline and became trapped in the mud.  I wedged my legs, bent up as if on a tiny twege, between the muddy wall and the boulder.  My arms pressed against the side of the rock and my entire body was wound up, the potential energy in my arms and core and legs ready to explode against this singular object.  Together with another hapless young boy, I pushed against the rock.  And together, the two of us grunting and crying out against the sheer mass we wanted to roll down the hill, we failed, strained and sweaty and overall embarrassed by our fruitless attempt.

This is not the correct way to move a boulder.  The correct way to move a boulder is as follows:

Fifteen men stretch their arms over their heads in a practiced, measured and certainly peacock-like stretching motion.  Every one of them spits in their hands, skin thick from years of callouses, and pulls three-meter long thick steel bars out of the dirt.  In the royal period of Rwanda, when kings roamed the countryside and demanded safe lodging from the homes of his subjects, the royal entourage would plant their spears in the yard outside the quartered household – in my imagination they would heave their long weapons out of the dirt with the same hefty tug that these men today have wielded their own tools.

These tools are simple enough, like massive crowbars.  When passed one – a bent one, better to save the higher quality tools for the professionals – I falter and almost fall from the weight.  One end is sharpened to a point from hundreds of stabbing motions, shining in the rain and mist that has ordained our community work day as cool enough for hard labor.  The other end is flat, and is used as a grip for what comes next.

Spit in palm, the men grab their metal poles and jam them in the miniscule gap between boulder and earthy floor with extreme precision.  Their aim is immaculate: my pole embarrassingly scrapes against the side and vibrates with a loud hum that brings out a few chuckles.  One man stabs his tool with such force that a chunk of rock cracks and falls to the side at the point of impact.  I bend down to pick it up and have to use all my strength to lift this fraction of debris from the mud.  The whole stone must weigh at least two tons.

Fifteen men now have wedged their prybars under the rock.  Their legs are pushed against the mud enclosure around them, their hands gripping the bars with an iron vice.  Younger men pile in to the spaces between the bar-wielders and grab at the spaces between gnarled hands.  Everyone is tightly wound, like a twisted rubber band, with ripples of muscle corkscrewing down limbs and veins bulging.  It is still raining, albeit gently, and for a moment there is a complete stillness.  Someone begins singing turagubaka (“we are building for you”, a traditional work song) and as the first chorus comes to an end, a loud grunting voice spits out a countdown.

Everything engages.  The sound of loosely planted prybars slapping against stone is intense.  The boulder slowly starts to turn and the men rip their bars out of the muddy ground and stab in to the earth again, seeking a better vantage point.  As the boulder begins to shift, poorly positioned workers leap over the backs of their compatriots and stab in to the earth again, pressing in to the sweaty bodies next to them.  Everyone is screaming and gruffly encouraging the team, chanting out turagubaka and encouragements in colloquial, hard-to-understand Kinyarwanda.  The sheer power is immense; all arms are rippling with black muscle, all biceps are mountainous, all teeth are bared and clenched, all brows are sweaty, bare feet press indentations in to soft ground, and still the rock is immovable, reluctant to roll down the hillside and meet its fate as an ornament for our fences.  Without noticeable cue the group pauses and at the shout of “Kora!” (Work!), a chorus of fresh grunts spit out of the tight frowns and heave forward.

The boulder shifts slightly and enthusiastically half the team leaps over the other to find that perfect position for their crowbars, now looking like enthusiastic acupuncturists attempting to treat a particularly problematic spot. Another inch, another reposition.  The crowd has stopped their work with their hoes and shovels and is cheering on the team.  With an almost Olympic flair, they push one last time – Kora! – and the boulder turns end over end, making a dull thud as its weight carries it down the hillside.  The sound was unique: solid and muted as the stone it came from, but seeming to displace a great amount of air around us, almost like a primordial dog whistle.

In contrast to moving a boulder, the rest of our umuganda is relatively relaxed.  Despite the rain (Rwandans are notorious for refusing to do anything in the rain), everyone is planting their hoes in the wet dirt.  We’re clearing space for two new classrooms and a new computer room to be built here next year.  Everyone is tossing dirt so there’s an air of stagnant, hung dust that’s trapped in by the rain and gives the entire corner of the school an earthy scent.  Everyone is smiling and singing, switching between church songs and work songs, all call-and-response and all known by heart.

As a foreigner, it is an honor to be a part of umuganda.  Here is a practice that works: it gives people a stake in their community, brings together neighbors for a productive endeavor, and improves the lives of everyone.  Umuganda is compulsory so everyone is required to work the last Saturday of every month, but Adventists are able to work on Sunday or Friday instead (because it says in the Bible, “Thou shalt not move boulders on the sixth day of a calendar not yet in use at the time of this writing.”).

At first glance, umuganda is pretty abhorrent.  Imagine a hundred Africans, all wearing one of their two outfits (or maybe their only one), leveling a hilly, rock-strewn roadway.  Everyone is using hoes and shovels that hands have touched hundreds of times and are thus smooth as tile.  Everyone is sweating.  There may be a few police officers or community volunteers walking idly around, a rusty AK-47 dangling from their shoulders.  Umuganda’s compulsory nature and seemingly-brutal conditions are uncomfortable, even offensive, for an uninformed outsider to witness.

But there’s so much to unpack in that offense.  You’re not looking at doctors or professors (although some assembled invariably will be skilled laborers) forced to work in the sweltering heat; these are people who wake up at 4am every day to make it to their small plot of land, perhaps an hour’s walk away (at least), and pitch the unbearable weight of their children’s diet and thus their future in to each swing of a hoe.  Farm work is brutal, barefoot and bloody: hands are torn apart, shoulders are impossibly sore, necks are constantly strained from lugging around materials on the crown of the skull.  Compared to subsistence agriculture, umuganda labor is a literal vacation.  No one is going to die of starvation because an umuganda wasn’t enthusiastically worked.

And then there’s the glaring poverty, the seeming futility of the action: poor people, actually poor people, clearing a roadway from a recent landslide that will undoubtedly become swamped in the next major rain.  There’s a question about how this community work will change living conditions, or how the product of this labor will really benefit anyone in the long run.  It’s painful to see wretchedness, to see a pointless act carried out by people the world would seemingly be perfectly comfortable letting die.

Until actually working an umuganda, this is how I (and I would imagine many foreigners) see the tradition.  This perspective couldn’t be farther from the truth.  There’s a dignity to the work, a pride in taking ownership in your community’s roads and the fresh soil that will one day support a new classroom.  When the police show up, the event has an air of formality that is pretty well-replicated in other Rwandan social situations (such as how weddings are “more legitimate” if an important community member attends, or how the 5 August church grand re-opening had a dignified air about it due to the presence of the Archbishop of Rwanda).  They don’t have to bring the guns, sure, but it’s not like they use them.

Umuganda is actually the cultural aspect of Rwanda that has had the clearest impact on my worldview.  Put simply, if Americans had to work one day a month to improve their communities, I am confident that many of our longstanding social divides could be bridged.  People who hold opposite partisan viewpoints never need to interact with each other.  We don’t take pride or ownership in our environment, we don’t struggle collectively.  There is no solidarity among our fellow countrymen.  It’s a damn tragedy, and an inexcusable one, given the sheer volume of work that needs to be done to improve the eroding natural environments and pitifully preserved infrastructure across the States.  If we spent one day a month working with that guy who voted for the opposite party, I wonder how difficult it would be to empathize with his struggles, with his effort, and with his potential.

Finally, umuganda is how I realized the impact of African media and historical tropes.  If someone with a video camera walked down a line of pickaxe-swinging Rwandans working in dirty clothes stained with sweat, a poorly maintained view of a slum behind them, armed guards menacingly overlooking the operation – it would be golden footage, they could sell it to any number of international aid organizations and make so much money.  You can’t capture the eagerness with which Rwandans want to see their daily lives improved, or the genuine sense of shared responsibility with which they take pride in their communities.  You can’t easily condense how a community work day, bringing together neighbors who might literally have tried to murder each other 25 years ago, can mend painful wounds and redefine a culture.  You can’t understand how this scene shows Rwandans working for Rwanda, how each of the people in the shot is protesting their perceived helplessness and pitiful situation, how every single boulder moved is an act of rebellion against a world that left them for dead and hasn’t thought of them since.

***

Short blog post this month, probably another short one in November too.  Sorry for being late, but things are getting busy at GS Nyagisozi.  Talk soon!