A copper cloud of dust kicked up from the tires as our truck pulled itself up the steep hill towards the Muyumbu Health Center. Every few minutes, Anatole, our driver, would swerve to avoid the gaping potholes in the road and the yawning precipice which bordered it. Originally, these drives to rural health centers were a bit of a bother, but, by this point, I was unfazed by the constant jostling and, instead, used the time to catch up on sleep or debate politics with Charles. In this sense, the day was like any other.
It was a Wednesday morning, and we were running late as usual. I was dozing in the back seat as we zoomed over the steep terrain. Suddenly, the car lurched to a stop so quickly that my head banged into the front seat. As the dust settled, I rubbed my forehead and hastily scanned the perimeters of the truck. Did we run over something? A goat? A small child? “Charles, what happened?” I asked, still looking around. He was unresponsive, gazing out the window. “Charles, qu’est qui se passé?” I demanded, wondering if he had understood my harried question in English.
“Look.” That was all he said. I followed his gaze to an adjoining pasture which I hadn’t noticed in my frenzied search. There, over 30 long-horned, Ankole cows grazed in blissful ignorance of our white truck and its gawking onlookers. “We stopped for cows?!” I asked, not meaning to shriek in the process. The higher octave must have caught Charles’ attention because he then turned to me and proceeded to patiently explain the merits of each respective cow, noting their color, the size and shape of their horns, and their thickness and breadth. While this educational session didn’t calm me as Charles had perhaps hoped, it did serve another purpose, as a useful introduction to an element of Rwandan culture to which I previously hadn’t paid much heed before our drive-by cow-gazing that day.
This episode took place about three months ago, but since then I have been witness to several other moments when Rwandans displayed an almost undue reverence for cows. Instead of going to a country home or lake house for the weekend, I visit people’s pastures and cows; neighbors offered me gifts of cow butter when I first arrived in Rwamagana; and when lusty men try to woo me, they call me “cow eyes.” (Charming, right? You boys in the US could learn a few lessons from your African counterparts :P) In any case, through conversations with Charles and other Rwandan friends, I eventually came to appreciate their attitude towards cows and how it developed.
Long-horned cows or inka are woven into the fabric of Rwanda’s history, culture, and language even though they are actually an exotic species to region. Cows were introduced to the fertile Great Lakes region early on by traders and thrived in the environment, unique in Africa for its ability to host grazing livestock. Inevitably, cows became important fixtures of life in Rwanda, and their significance continues to this day. Not only do they provide milk and other dairy products critical for sustenance, but they also have symbolic importance in Rwandan culture. It’s difficult to e
scape them; cows are everywhere, physically and figuratively. When visiting a friend or family, you often sit down to share news over African tea (milk and tea with ginger); in dances performed at religious and cultural events, the women rhythmically sway and throw up their arms in a graceful V-shape, palms outward to mimic the slope and curve of cow horns; and, when I first arrived in Rwamagana, old women routinely asked me, “urushaka amata?” (Do you want milk?), sly smiles playing over their lips. I was always hesitant when responding to this question but, out of politesse, usually said yes. At this point, the women would always throw up their hands in a “Thanks be to God” salutation and call for their eldest son. I eventually figured out that “urushaka amata?” had a double meaning – are you looking for a husband? Needless to say, I don’t accept milk as often as I once did now.
Cows are also used as an informal currency in Rwandan culture, and the number of cows attributed to an individual is often used to gauge that person’s stature in the community. Once, towards the beginning of my service in Rwanda, Charles shyly admitted that he had over 20 cows at his pasture in Gisenyi and invited me to come visit them sometime. As I made more connections, I met more individuals who seemed similarly abashed while divulging the number of cows to their name. Eventually, I realized that these seemingly modest admissions of wealth were not modest at all, but a way to slyly establish their position and power in relation to others without overtly bragging.
In a culture which so glorifies cows and the stature they confer, it’s easy to see how this system could be manipulated to create and/or sustain a hierarchy. In fact, this is exactly what happened when Belgian colonialists assumed control of the Ruanda-Urundi region from the Germans in 1923 following the conclusion of World War I. Before Belgian’s began their governance, ethnic identity was a much more fluid concept. The Tutsi-Hutu distinction was not determined based upon physical appearance, as the Belgians preferred to believe and eventually instituted, but rather by the number of cows one possessed. The prevailing class system featured a minority Tutsi upper class and lower classes of Hutus and Tutsi commoners; however, one’s Tutsi-Hutu designation could change depending on the number of cows he or she acquired. For example, a Hutu pastoralist who attained a significant number of cattle would come to find himself and his family considered Tutsi.
The Germans and Belgians co-opted this economic system to create puppet rulers of the Tutsis, using Hamitic theory as its religious support. Individuals with 10 cows or more were labeled as Tutsi, issued an identity card, and educated through the public education system creating an educated Tutsi elite. Conversely, all those with 9 cows or less were labeled as Hutu and systematically disenfranchised by Belgian colonialists and the Tutsi class of rulers. In 1926, the Belgians also abolished the local posts of “Land Chief,” “Cattle Chief,” and “Military Chief” which further stripped Hutus of any local power they might have had over the land. Eventually, the labels which were originally economic in nature (akin to our labels of blue collar and white collar perhaps) became forever attached to physical traits.
It’s April - Genocide Memorial Month in Rwanda - and during this time of searching reflection and remembrance, I can’t help but wonder how the genocide would have been different or even if it would have occurred at all had these labels not been manipulated. Would the original economic divisions between Hutus and Tutsis have fomented into mass genocide as well or might they have found outlet in some of the socialist movements which gripped Africa in the wake of independence? But these “what if’s” are useless in retrospect. They do not heal the physical and mental wounds left by genocide nor do they address the very real issues of living and working in this developing country…of preventing this still very stratified society from shattering yet again.
Some believe that cows could still help this divided society even as many revile them as part of the problem. In 2006, President Kagame instituted a program to distribute cows to 250,000 of the poorest households at absolutely no cost. His hope and that of the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources is that the cows will help support low-income households through milk and manure production. Heifer International also has an active presence in Rwanda and, since 2000, has been working to distribute cows throughout communities as part of their “Fight For Peace” initiative. When Heifer provides a family or household with a cow, they also educate those individuals about zero-grazing technology, better breeding practices, and conflict mediation techniques.
And yet while some, like Paul Kagame and Heifer, seek to increase Rwandans’ access to cows, others aim to limit it. It’s interesting to examine some of the compelling efforts at present to modernize Rwanda’s economy. The organization One Acre Fund is working in several districts to measure the actual worth of cows – the foodstuffs which they produce, their social value, and their monetary value at the time of sale versus their buying price. Though they are still in the process of conducting their evaluation in several districts, the results from some completed surveys reveal that, in general, “cows are not worth their fat.” The money which people use to buy, feed, and keep cows is not equivalent to the money and stature received in turn, especially for those small-scale and subsistence farmers who are only able to keep one or two cows at most. One Acre Fund argues that the money spent on cows would be better spent on education, health, and improving agricultural practices. One of my closest friends here, an English Education volunteer in Cyangugu, is working with Once Acre Fund’s campaign to educate Rwandans and help them to reevaluate the worth of their cows compared to health insurance, school fees, and nutritious food. It’s difficult work, she confessed to me, but she has faith that the “right” priorities will eventually prevail. Honestly, I’m a bit conflicted on the subject of livestock aid and am inclined towards the skepticism of One Acre Fund till proven differently.
Some of my language facilitators during training seemed similarly convinced that owning and obsessing over cows was a passé practice and that the importance of cows in Rwandan culture would fade as individuals confronted the necessities of modernization. Perhaps there is some merit to their claims, but, in speaking with my best friend, Janet, she seemed equally insistent that Rwandans would never fully free themselves of their ties to cows. I also asked Janet, who was recently engaged, whether she would accept money in lieu of cows at her dowry ceremony. She seemed affronted by the idea and immediately nixed any possibility thereof. According to her, when a family gives the bride’s family money in exchange for her hand, it is akin to selling her whereas if they give cows, they honor her and her family. Not being Rwandan, both practices seem terribly antiquated to me, but a small part of me (the anthropologist inside) wishes that Rwandans still practiced their previous custom in which a male member of the bride’s family took a spear and threw it as far as he could in the bride-groom’s pasture. According to tradition, all the cows between that male and the place where his spear landed would be apart of the dowry and herded from one pasture to another in an elaborate ceremony involving both families.
Alas such ceremonies are untenable now, but, at least for the time being, cows remain entrenched as both figurative and literal presences in Rwanda, and I hope this doesn’t change any time soon. Honestly, I’m not ready to wave goodbye to this cow-crazed culture just yet. I mean, where else can I use the insult I just learned? Kunnywa cy’inka. Roughly translated, “shit on your cows.”
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