Charmed by the stylish gentility of Rwandan women
Apart from the incredible green hills and valleys, Rwanda is blessed with gorgeous women whose smile and drooping <br>eyes suggest innocence
By Raphael Okello
I was enthralled by Rwanda’s remarkable hilly landscape but disappointed by Kigali’s poor infrastructure. Nonetheless, it was an exciting journey through this ‘land of a thousand hills’ and a thrill to be in Kigali.
When I met the Rwandese woman, I pronounced her beautiful.
In the darkness, the van raced at breath-stealing pace. We were driving through Kabale towards the Uganda-Rwanda border. It has been a long time since I travelled this way. I could feel the Kabale hills calling out to me like an absentee friend.
My friends and I were among thousands of Ugandan football fans on a night exodus to Kigali to watch the Cranes, the national team play in the African nations cup qualifier against the Amavubi, Rwanda’s national soccer side.
Just as it was my first visit to Rwanda, it was the first time I joined any clique of frantic football fans in the stands! I was excited and all, not because I anticipated to participate in a grand pulsating cheer and chant, something else was quietly sending my adrenaline in over drive.
For a long time now, Rwanda has filled me with incredible mystery, fantasy and horror! The beauty of her woman permanently fascinates the Ugandan male and invokes huge chunks of envy from the female. (Sulk and sulk, Ugandan woman, I just said it.)
At 4:00am, we arrived at Gatuna border, Kabale. We waited for the darkness to clear before the borders opened.
With relentless accusations and counter accusations being traded between the governments of Uganda and Rwanda, we expected to encounter hundreds of nervous security officers on patrol. This was not the case however. We met a few unarmed security personnel, among whom there was a stunningly pretty woman on guard! Even with a serious look on her face when she was trying to control the hordes of fans at the immigration office, she remained pretty.
When driving through Rwanda, you realise that many things appear ‘wrong,’ confusing and annoying. Traffic has to keep right but disembark on the left, and kilometre signs posts indicate distance so far covered!
Unlike the familiar gentle rolling hills of Kabale, the hills in Rwanda get steeper like icecream cones turned upside down, the road gets more winding and the vegetation deeply green. It is a refreshing mountain green, cool and enduring. This atmosphere only compares to Kisoro in Uganda. Only the road in Kisoro hangs precariously on hill edges. The ride is therapeutic.
Like an intriguing play plot whose climax is shrewdly delayed to create suspense and anticipation, the dramatic land sinuosity twists my mind. The plot compulsively takes me over as the illusionary playwright weaves a string of glorified landscape scenes.
The valley floors are carpeted in brilliant display of dazzling tropical green vegetation and the undulating hills merge imperceptibly into one another to form one stupendous tide. It is impossible not to imagine that a Ugandan taxi driver, with all his fortified arrogance and uncalled for urgency (wasi wasi), would miss to spectacularly plunge into these yawning green valleys.
The hoe has tamed every inch of these incredible hills marked in beguiling contours. Cattle ranches, horticultural farms, lush banana, tea and sugarcane plantations occupy slopes and valley floors while rice puddles take up swampy decks. I imagine agriculture, like in most African states, is the lifeline of Rwanda’s economy.
As we drive down the road fluidly snaking through the hills, something strange happens. The prevailing desolate countryside scenes in this play awaken eerie thoughts of an era, nine years ago, when this country collapsed into a ‘theatre’ of Hutu and Tutsi savagery that left about 800,000 dead and two million displaced.
This abrupt flashback sets up a melancholic aura. I cannot help but imagine that this beautiful land is soaked in human blood and filled with bones!
The sight of humanity slowly brings me back to reality. The scene of adults and children standing by the highway replaces the gruesome image that had sipped in from the past. The afternoon sun casts its pleasant warm rays upon the land that retains its good nature and lustre.
After 80 kilometres of travel, Kigali appears at a distance but disappears simultaneously behind imposing hills like a craven coward. I imagine it’s the ‘playwright’s’ technique to keep me edgy.
But Kigali’s streets are dusty. The countryside green and bliss are elusive. The hills are blighted with a concentration of modest construction. Simple flat-roofed box houses are spread out for distances on gently rolling hills and valleys. Hills are more defined than the ones in Kampala. But for a capital city, Kigali’s stunning shantytown semblance is shocking, almost offending.
But alas! I catch sight of the Rwandese woman. Her beauty so exotic. It is not the annoying generic beauty rampant in Kampala’s Kikuubo.
She toys with a smile and drooping eyes suggesting innocence and loyalty. Her graceful gait and over flowing hips cast upon a swivelling waist inexplicably flirts with me, mildly suggesting romance and submission. She moves about with a certain stylish laziness equalled only by the woman from western Uganda.
The Ugandan woman, perhaps with a pinch of envy, accuses her of promiscuity. Cruelly put –– “loose.†(So she does not make a good wife. So what?) I stubbornly learn to look at her amiably.
Beyond her ‘debauchery’, she still
manages to trap me.
Whenever our eyes meet, the fluidity of her beauty and sexual disposition just sinks in. I am floored by lust. Ah hem! There I said it. I, however, drop all these impure thoughts as we join the caravan of wild and clamorous fans for the match that unfortunately ends in a stalemate.
The night is cold, relatively quiet and uneventful. We have braved more than 24 hours without a decent meal. We ‘suspiciously’ mill from one point of Kigali to another in search of food. For all we know, in a country where the security personels are paranoid, we could be trailed by some internal security officer.
A Rwandese tells us, albeit proudly, that they do not prepare commercial food because “here we only feed on milk.â€
Budget restaurants (Bufundas) in Kigali are as rare as an Eskimo on a horseback. But when we are hungry, we never fool around. We still manage to trace for a dingy restaurant shrouded behind flimsy structures. When we ask a waitress for soft drinks, she flatly says, “There is no fanta.â€
“Who sent you for fanta? Get us anything,†a baffled friend tells her.
“I said there is no fanta,†she scoffs at our persistence.
Later we learn that the Rwandese generically refer to sodas as fanta! So if requesting for a Coca-Cola, you might want to say fanta-coca or sprite-coca! for a Sprite.
Scores of fans cuddle in their buses for the night. Kigali quietly goes to sleep. In the morning, a constant breeze sends a shiver. A canopy of thick mist hovers over Kigali like a cosmic shield covering the hills and collecting in the valley cleavage. Nothing is visible. Like a timid female afraid to expose her looks, the mist grudgingly unveils with the rising sun exposing Kigali’s upcountry demeanour. But the image of her woman strongly replays in my mind.
I was enthralled by Rwanda’s remarkable hilly landscape but disappointed by Kigali’s poor infrastructure. Nonetheless, it was an exciting journey through this ‘land of a thousand hills’ and a thrill to be in Kigali.
When I met the Rwandese woman, I pronounced her beautiful.
In the darkness, the van raced at breath-stealing pace. We were driving through Kabale towards the Uganda-Rwanda border. It has been a long time since I travelled this way. I could feel the Kabale hills calling out to me like an absentee friend.
My friends and I were among thousands of Ugandan football fans on a night exodus to Kigali to watch the Cranes, the national team play in the African nations cup qualifier against the Amavubi, Rwanda’s national soccer side.
Just as it was my first visit to Rwanda, it was the first time I joined any clique of frantic football fans in the stands! I was excited and all, not because I anticipated to participate in a grand pulsating cheer and chant, something else was quietly sending my adrenaline in over drive.
For a long time now, Rwanda has filled me with incredible mystery, fantasy and horror! The beauty of her woman permanently fascinates the Ugandan male and invokes huge chunks of envy from the female. (Sulk and sulk, Ugandan woman, I just said it.)
At 4:00am, we arrived at Gatuna border, Kabale. We waited for the darkness to clear before the borders opened.
With relentless accusations and counter accusations being traded between the governments of Uganda and Rwanda, we expected to encounter hundreds of nervous security officers on patrol. This was not the case however. We met a few unarmed security personnel, among whom there was a stunningly pretty woman on guard! Even with a serious look on her face when she was trying to control the hordes of fans at the immigration office, she remained pretty.
When driving through Rwanda, you realise that many things appear ‘wrong,’ confusing and annoying. Traffic has to keep right but disembark on the left, and kilometre signs posts indicate distance so far covered!
Unlike the familiar gentle rolling hills of Kabale, the hills in Rwanda get steeper like icecream cones turned upside down, the road gets more winding and the vegetation deeply green. It is a refreshing mountain green, cool and enduring. This atmosphere only compares to Kisoro in Uganda. Only the road in Kisoro hangs precariously on hill edges. The ride is therapeutic.
Like an intriguing play plot whose climax is shrewdly delayed to create suspense and anticipation, the dramatic land sinuosity twists my mind. The plot compulsively takes me over as the illusionary playwright weaves a string of glorified landscape scenes.
The valley floors are carpeted in brilliant display of dazzling tropical green vegetation and the undulating hills merge imperceptibly into one another to form one stupendous tide. It is impossible not to imagine that a Ugandan taxi driver, with all his fortified arrogance and uncalled for urgency (wasi wasi), would miss to spectacularly plunge into these yawning green valleys.
The hoe has tamed every inch of these incredible hills marked in beguiling contours. Cattle ranches, horticultural farms, lush banana, tea and sugarcane plantations occupy slopes and valley floors while rice puddles take up swampy decks. I imagine agriculture, like in most African states, is the lifeline of Rwanda’s economy.
As we drive down the road fluidly snaking through the hills, something strange happens. The prevailing desolate countryside scenes in this play awaken eerie thoughts of an era, nine years ago, when this country collapsed into a ‘theatre’ of Hutu and Tutsi savagery that left about 800,000 dead and two million displaced.
This abrupt flashback sets up a melancholic aura. I cannot help but imagine that this beautiful land is soaked in human blood and filled with bones!
The sight of humanity slowly brings me back to reality. The scene of adults and children standing by the highway replaces the gruesome image that had sipped in from the past. The afternoon sun casts its pleasant warm rays upon the land that retains its good nature and lustre.
After 80 kilometres of travel, Kigali appears at a distance but disappears simultaneously behind imposing hills like a craven coward. I imagine it’s the ‘playwright’s’ technique to keep me edgy.
But Kigali’s streets are dusty. The countryside green and bliss are elusive. The hills are blighted with a concentration of modest construction. Simple flat-roofed box houses are spread out for distances on gently rolling hills and valleys. Hills are more defined than the ones in Kampala. But for a capital city, Kigali’s stunning shantytown semblance is shocking, almost offending.
But alas! I catch sight of the Rwandese woman. Her beauty so exotic. It is not the annoying generic beauty rampant in Kampala’s Kikuubo.
She toys with a smile and drooping eyes suggesting innocence and loyalty. Her graceful gait and over flowing hips cast upon a swivelling waist inexplicably flirts with me, mildly suggesting romance and submission. She moves about with a certain stylish laziness equalled only by the woman from western Uganda.
The Ugandan woman, perhaps with a pinch of envy, accuses her of promiscuity. Cruelly put –– “loose.†(So she does not make a good wife. So what?) I stubbornly learn to look at her amiably.
Beyond her ‘debauchery’, she still
manages to trap me.
Whenever our eyes meet, the fluidity of her beauty and sexual disposition just sinks in. I am floored by lust. Ah hem! There I said it. I, however, drop all these impure thoughts as we join the caravan of wild and clamorous fans for the match that unfortunately ends in a stalemate.
The night is cold, relatively quiet and uneventful. We have braved more than 24 hours without a decent meal. We ‘suspiciously’ mill from one point of Kigali to another in search of food. For all we know, in a country where the security personels are paranoid, we could be trailed by some internal security officer.
A Rwandese tells us, albeit proudly, that they do not prepare commercial food because “here we only feed on milk.â€
Budget restaurants (Bufundas) in Kigali are as rare as an Eskimo on a horseback. But when we are hungry, we never fool around. We still manage to trace for a dingy restaurant shrouded behind flimsy structures. When we ask a waitress for soft drinks, she flatly says, “There is no fanta.â€
“Who sent you for fanta? Get us anything,†a baffled friend tells her.
“I said there is no fanta,†she scoffs at our persistence.
Later we learn that the Rwandese generically refer to sodas as fanta! So if requesting for a Coca-Cola, you might want to say fanta-coca or sprite-coca! for a Sprite.
Scores of fans cuddle in their buses for the night. Kigali quietly goes to sleep. In the morning, a constant breeze sends a shiver. A canopy of thick mist hovers over Kigali like a cosmic shield covering the hills and collecting in the valley cleavage. Nothing is visible. Like a timid female afraid to expose her looks, the mist grudgingly unveils with the rising sun exposing Kigali’s upcountry demeanour. But the image of her woman strongly replays in my mind.