Fossiloctopus

Fossiloctopus

Forrest Aguirre

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Copyright 2012 Forrest Aguirre

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The Bones of Ndundi:

An Archaeology

Time is measured here by physical need.  Asking “when is mealtime?” gets you an incredulous stare and: “Whenever you are hungry”;  “When is bed time?” – an exasperated sigh and “When you are tired”.  This does not, of course, betray any kind of “savage innocence,” as the colonial officials of the past would have called it – time is largely irrelevant in the camps.  All things are provided: shelter, food, water, medical aid – though not at the same comfort level to which Westerners are accustomed.  With these needs met, what need does one have for “last week” or “next month” or “at three o’clock”?  Time as measured by watches and calendars is an indistinct smear in this part of Africa.

Eras, however, are not a foreign concept, imported from across the seas and imposed by governmental edict.  Our mid-twentieth century is referred to as “The Time Before the Big Troubles” – not because “big troubles” (a euphemism for ethnic cleansing) were unknown, but because the space between these culturally traumatic events during that period was much greater than it is today.

I once asked an elder to tell me about the time before Nyanya Baruki bore children; when she and the elder were young.  “Oh!  That is ancient history – when the colonials were in charge.”  The twenty years before the refugees fled to this camp was a cacophony of fear and blood sprinkled with short pauses of uneasy, near-paranoid “peace”.  People refer to the era in which we now live as “The Time of Sadness”.

As events unfold these eras compress and expand in the minds of past participants like some chronological accordion, speeding up and slowing down the historical tempo.  These fluctuations of collective memory cannot be caught on paper.  Paper records are unknown among camp dwellers.  Only the military keeps such records – or outsiders, such as I.

I am the nexus of catalogue and internal reflection.  Two journals cover my desk: the thin, jittery hand of my personal diary – loose sheaves, tickets, knick knacks and souvenirs spilling from the pages; and the official tribunal evidence record: sharp, neat records painstakingly typed in a uniform font on a device entirely too modern for such a remote rural piece of Africa.

I knew the bones animate, speaking, laughing, drunk and playing.  The catalogue knows numbers, diagnoses, the marks of evidence.

Rarely do the two works cite one another.

Sample NR201a:

Large pitting of female os coxae indicates possible ante-mortem parturition, though the weak correlation between pitting and pregancy leave a large margin for diagnostic error.

Nyanya Baruki is not, despite the Swahili title “nyanya,” a grandmother at all.  While she had children of her own, the line seems to have been cursed with barren-ness.  This curse, as it appears to some, combined with widow Baruki’s methuselanic age, has done much to spawn rumors of sorcery and black magic around her person.  Pregnant women dutifully avoid her gaze, fearful of spontaneous abortion.  Even those who distribute food from the rice trucks hand her portion to her next of kin to avoid any possibility of contamination by evil spirits.

I once interviewed Mzee Mangome about her youth:

“Her father was a carpenter?”

“Yes.  Ndwele Baruki made the best plows for many villages around.  He would take a cart full to market each week and come back jingling with money – real money, like the kind you could pay taxes with back then.”

“And her mother?”

“Grew tomatoes as big as your clenched hands.  She also sold at market.   Between the two of them, they were a rich family indeed.”

“What of her education?”

“Well, the Belgians only let her take four years of grammar, but she was very good at it.  Of course the elders at the time were furious at her, though they could not express their anger around the missionaries.  When the fathers weren’t looking, though, they would give her a good scolding, if not a beating for her cheekiness.”

“What did she do after her schooling came to an end?”

“Raised goats, like everyone else her age.”

“Goats?”

“They did not own cattle.  They were no Tutsis.”

“And after that?”

“A young man from Butare, who was passing through trading goats at the time, became enamored of her.  He gave half his flock to make the young woman his bride.”

“And he stayed in the village?”

“He traveled frequently to do his trading.  She bore him four children before he died.”

“What happened?”

“He drowned trying to cross the Rusizi to Bukavu.  The news took a few days to reach the village, but when it came it spread silence across her face, like her soul had left for the dark of the forest.”

“I’m sorry.  It must have been devastating.  And what of her children?”

“They grew old and have married.  But that is part of another time.”

Through this and several other conversations with Mzee Mangome, I never heard any hint of condescension, no evil speaking behind Baruki’s back.  I thought that perhaps his non-judgmental attitude was simply a mark of respect born out of shared experience – both had seen the schismatic transition from colonial to post-colonial rule at a young age.  Those of the next generation had grown up under black rule their entire lives.

Only later did I understand the dichotomy of attitudes regarding Nyanya Baruki.  An over-zealous young woman, a Christian girl, newly baptized, came to me in a state of great alarm, warning me that a group of women were about to administer “the old rituals” to some young women who had recently reached puberty.  I knew what the old rituals entailed, and was concerned from a wholly sanitary viewpoint – religious disagreements were not my concern, nor was it my purview to interfere in this regard.

I gathered my bag and headed for the forest, running behind the young zealot.  Muffled screams greeted me as I rounded a thicket and walked into a grove just as Nyanya Baruki exited the hut, clitorodectomy stone in hand, the blood of pubescence covering her arms and hands.  From the hands of the grandchild-less – a new group of mothers-to-be.  Fruit from the barren hands, a blessing from the cursed.

Sample NR19b,c,d

Cranial metric methods for establishing geophysical ancestry are fraught with difficulty, though several such procedures exist.  The large skull fragments of individual 19 were tested against both Howells’ and Gill’s criteria in this instance because of the abundance of comparative material and because the remains of individual 19 were identified by locals as that of a prominent moderate Tutsi allegedly killed by other, more radical Tutsi soldiers during the massacre of Ndundi Hutu . . . indeed, the cranial metric methods employed reveal that the remains of individual 19 are morphologically indistinct from those of other individuals in the study sample.

Peter Banyuro came to me on a stretcher.  He had been badly wounded while interfering with a Zairean soldier who had taken a fancy to one of the local girls.  Banyuro’s delicate cheek was swollen purple, bruised from shattered flecks of orbitale and ectoconchon that had been buried in the muscle.

“He caught the soldier with his pants down,” one of my attendants told me.  “But the soldier’s caught prying Peter with his rifle butt, even with his ankles all tied up!”  Banyuro laughed at the comment, then winced in pain, smiled, then groaned.  His agonized frivolity was not lost on my attendant, who pulled faces and cracked jokes in an effort (I hoped) to distract the suffering man from his wounds.

“Peter, you should have knocked!  Then he would not have knocked you!”

and

“You must tell me, was it the rear guard or just the guard’s rear?  It’s good for you he didn’t make a frontal assault!”

I shushed them and asked my attendant to hold Banyuro’s head still while I made some incisions.  The bone was close to the skin and I wanted to remove some of the splinters to prevent festering and infection.  I sliced his smooth cheek as delicately as possible, crimson pouring over the scalpel blade and handle, dripping to the table, and removed as much of the damaged bone as I felt I ought to, Banyuro smiling all the while.

The cheerful gleam suddenly left his eye, though, as someone entered the room behind me.  I was too busy applying pressure and gauze to note who had walked into my office uninvited.  I expected to look up to the barrel of an AK-47.  I raised my eyes to my attendant, his dread-washed expression sending cold shivers down my back, then turned to see Banyuro’s Hutu wife standing there in the doorway.  Her narrow eyes revealed displeasure.

“Misses Banyuro.  Come in.”

She looked through me at her husband.  Peter Banyuro wore a grave face, frightened, but dignified.

“Carousing again, Peter?”  Ice.

“Misses Banyuro,” my attendant defended the patient.  “Mister Banyuro was defending the honor of a young woman when he was viciously set upon by a group of Zairean Askari!”

She looked decidedly unconvinced, resolute in her conviction that it was all a lie, hands on hips, pursed lips and head bobbing side to side:  “Mm-hmm?”  I averted my gaze, a feeling of embarrassment pulsing in my chest, like a child who must watch his friend being reproached by his mother in public.

“My wife,” Banyuro spoke seriously for the first time since he was carried in to my office.  “Go home.  I will be with you after the doctor has bandaged my wounds.”

Then silence.   Long silence.

The sighs that simultaneously hissed from the men’s mouths signaled the OK to speak freely.  The woman was gone.  Banyuro was sitting up now, and spoke first.

“Thank you, my doctor,” then, turning to my attendant, “my friend.”

They smiled at one another.

“Peter,” my attendant laughed, “maybe you should try your luck again with the soldier!”

And Peter Banyuro once again recoiled in pain, holding his hand to his bandaged, mangled face, laughing in agony.

SampleNR34g,h

Tibia exhibit significant morphological divergence from other bones in the sample study.  These bones are clearly shorter than the sample’s adult average and are more dense.  Cut marks to malleolar groove and soleal line might be indicative of cannibalism, though lack of intentional fracturing and signs of burning make this assessment unlikely.

Bernault was the laughing stock of the camp, though he hardly knew it.  Like any good participant-observer the journalist-turned-aid worker did his best to live as the locals, to “go Fante” as the British used to say. Unfortunately, Bernault misunderstood the dynamics of loyalty, mistaking empathy – in the Western sense of feeling the pain of others by suffering as they suffer – for dedication, for fondness, for brotherhood.

His sacrifices went deeper than condescension, though the elders would still ridicule him: “There is no news here,” they would tell him, “and you are lucky the soldiers only stole one of your cameras!”  He would smile back, wanting to believe that their comments were in good-humor.  They were not.  Their smiles were confused – fed by a hope that if one smiles long enough, problems sort themselves out.  Why would he, a wealthy (by their standards) European, choose to spend his time and health feeding and filming a few hundred Rwandan refugees?  Why did he eat rice when he could afford meat?  What was the purpose of asking questions, of taking photographs, of a ragged group of landless farmers and goat herders?  Was the Frenchman making money from this venture?  Was the aid-worker’s uniform all a guise?  Confusion and questions.  This is what the West brought.

By the time I took him in, Bernault (he preferred to be called by his last name) was deteriorating quickly.  His already thin frame was beginning to appear etiolated, as if he were one of the refugees whose plight he so desperately wished to document.  His eyes were languid, but I could not be sure if this listlessness came as a symptom of starvation or of willful naivete.  At the least, his lack of energy belied the habit of eating only high-fat foods – he was getting enough calories, as did all in the camp, but to show satisfaction at mealtime would mean a betrayal of his martyrdom.

Nevertheless, I fed him.  My maid, Buranda, was an outstanding cook, trained at a restaurant in Kampala that fed wealthy Europeans who had “lost their way”, they would tell her, on safari from Tanzania.  Buranda’s sense of propriety forbade her from asking where these wayward rich were going – and from whom they were fleeing.  Instead, she would offer a special discount to these renegades:  “You give me a recipe, I give you free drinks”.  Her offer was never turned down.  Alcohol lubricated the road from the past, speeding the banished to their destination: anonymity.

Buranda saw in Bernault a young man in flight.  “No, not from the law, not from criminals,” she would tell me as he slept on a cot on the veranda.  “He is trying to escape his family.  He feels bad that his family has so much money.  Guilty.  He looks for secrets here to escape his own.”

“But you can’t fault him for feeling this way,” I replied.  “Nor for acting it.  If he wants to starve himself for some higher good, can you blame him?  It’s not the most intelligent act, but perhaps it feeds his soul in some meaningful way.”

“No!” she responded sharply.  “No!  It burns his soul.”