INspire: April 2023

Urban Legend of Refugees

Integrated in urban Townships

The Case of Hostility on Rwandese Refugees in Lusaka

An analysis feature article as part of the fulfilment for the Master’s degree in International Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid at Kalu Institute, Madrid, Spain.

April 2023

Note: This is an analysis based on journalistic information research and cited cases from open-sources and interviews.

Mazuba Mwiinga

Student

MA International Cooperation

and Humanitarian Aid

Kalu Institute

Madrid, Spain

0965659614

___________________________________________

The Man in the shop

Mujomba[1] is a stilt sinewy 42-year-old man. He is barely a meter and a half tall. Dark in complexion with a pure charming smile that exposes his ivory white teeth. He owns a grocery shop in a fairly quiet residential area of Makeni Buffalo west of Zambia’s Capital Lusaka. The business is doing well, and he has a great deal of friends, mostly the middle working class of the area, though a substantial number of low-class residents from a nearby mushrooming unplanned settlement also come to his shop to drink alcoholic beverages he stocks, even when he doesn’t have a liquor trading license.

Mujomba is an integrated Rwandese refugee. He is a Hutu, but around here, no one seems to care about his tribe, at least for now. They all call him the Rwandese with a shop he is using both as his residence as it is his business place. A few regulars though, time to time, whisper about his living a given life; meaning his business success is due to UNHCR sponsorship. On his own, they presume, he would have been begging from them. The whispers sound innocent jokes, but in drunken conversations, one feels the seeds of discontentment from locals who are economically struggling to make ends meet, are real.

Loaves of bread and liquor are the most selling items that are making his trade tick. He wakes up early in the morning before sun rise, cycles to a bakery, more than three kilometres away to order bread and stocks in his shop. Then he gets back to a liquor supplier, buys crates of liquor, and carries them on his bicycle to the shop. Before midday, all his loaves of bread, sometimes as many as twenty would be sold. His liquor too, as many as ten crates would not see the end of the day every day. His conduct is way above the bar of Sustainable solutions for refugees Reintegration, that tries to empower them in such a way that “they are not seen as a burden, but as a contribution to the society and economy of the host country for as long as they are forced to remain there and avoiding as far as possible settlements in camps where stigma, cost and dependency are higher[2].”

Before he settled here and later turned his small one roomed house into a grocery business, five hundred meters away, Gabriel[3], a local resident was famous for his liquor trading. During weekends, hordes of locals would converge outside his rented two roomed house to drink till late in the night. Since Mujomba arrived and started stocking alcohol in his shop, pegged at way lower prices, Gabriel lost his big buyers to his new business competitor. He stopped his trade and relocated it to another area. The move didn’t go well with some of his customers, because as regulars, they would drink Gabriel’s liquor on credit, a service Mujomba doesn’t offer.

Hotel Rwanda

Most Zambians are movie fans. In townships, it is even a lifestyle. Movies of low standard, downloaded on internet are played in makeshift plastic covered shelters on small tv screens. Residents shove themselves in, after paying a few coins to watch, mostly action-packed genres. Hotel Rwanda, a film depicting the 90-day, 1994 Rwandan Genocide is one of the famous movies shown in these shelters. The film shows some horrific scenes of human brutality, among people of the same nationality, with the name Hutu, coming out strongly as instigators of the whole macabre; at least as the film story is showing viewers the Hollywood perspective of the matter.

According to Britannica, the genocide saw more than 800,000 Rwandan Tutsi and moderate Hutu die[4] during the three-month period, and more than two million people fled the country with an additional 1.5 million internally displaced.[5] It’s interesting to note that, the number of Tutsi who died is officially known, yet that of Hutu is not known. They are just referred to as ‘moderate’. How moderate, probably is another fiction film based on true events that needs to be created. Whatever the case however, millions of people; men, women and children fled Rwanda to neighbouring countries to seek refuge. Those with enough stamina, by any means possible, managed to go as far as Zambia; more than 2, 300Km from their home country. These desperate treks were made on different times. At the beginning of the civil war, during the heat of the moment of the war, towards the end of the war, and some months and even years after the civil unrest was gone. Though each stage had its own perils of existence, the motive of running away was the same: seeking safety.

Mujomba took one of these stages of treks. He was a victim of the violence. At least as far as his story goes. As the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees (1951), states, he had a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, …. membership of a particular social group or political opinion, … outside the country of his nationality and… unable …owing to such fear, … to avail himself of the protection of that country.[6]” He arrived in Zambia asking for refuge. And refuge he was offered by the State through the resident UNHCR. Whether the State or UNHCR had a Prima facie group determination of his refugee status or used the Refugee Status Determination (RSD) process, it seems to matter less for him. He is now settled well in Lusaka.

The Hollywood film, however, has no scene where those fleeing the atrocity are granted asylum, showing gestures of good will from States that are respecting the dignity of humanity, just as the Convention (1951) says that “it is the Host State which has almost all the obligations regarding the respect for fundamental civil, cultural and other rights which a refugee would have in his own country,” indicating that the state should accord him the same treatment as it accords its own nationals. The township dwellers watching the film, however, are given just one part of the story of the whole larger picture of reality. And from this, comes out the urban legend of reintegrated Rwandese refugees in capital Lusaka. The Hotel safety seen in the film, doesn’t come anywhere near the State safety the Rwandese refugees thought will have. Just as the Hotel was finally broken into by insurgents, so is the safety of these Rwandese refugees in Lusaka. It was broken into by a different kind of ‘insurgents’. The superstition imbued movie fans, and it is at risk of having many other waves of breakages in future.

Political Election Fever

Politics everywhere in the world is played with rules, just like a sport of soccer. The only difference is that, in politics, often times, these rules, change in the middle of the game. No wonder former republican president Kenneth Kaunda once referred politics to be a ‘dirty game’. General politicking, however, can be a fun tussle of mind games, but politics during an election period, can be a whole brutally different sport. All manner of things goes around.

In Zambia’s capital Lusaka in 2016 bloody political skirmishes erupted between political cadres of the two major political parties[7]; the ruling Patriot Front (PF) and the main opposition United Party for National Development (UPND) in most low rated townships among them Kanyama and Matero. Reasons were varied, sometimes as silly as being found wearing a political ligalia in an area perceived to be either a UPND or PF strong hold. The fights were vicious so much that riot police had to be called in to quell the fracas every time. Businesses would close for hours sometimes days as police ran battles with the now entire townships which are a home to many, if not all integrated Rwandese refugees in Lusaka.

The nation was at a brink of tribal unrest. Political lines were distinctively drawn between the Bemba and Tonga. In Lusaka the fear could be felt from every corner of the city. In townships, the story was even getting bizarre. One could only imagine what went on, in the minds of these integrated Tutsi and Hutu refugees, hearing fights based on tribal lines, sounds of guns, seeing men wielding pangas, some brandishing guns others walking and running with stones in their hands breaking vehicles, houses and shops, slapping, and beating up perceived political opponents. And seeing police losing control of the situation, while others getting involved into partisan political battles, like it was start point scenes of Hotel Rwanda film.

A few weeks before an election day in 2016, bizarre stories started emerging, leading to the skirmishes, shifting from political opponents towards foreigners running businesses in the townships. The targets were Rwandese nationals. Reason? The Urban Legend Conspiracy.[8] Ritual Killings.

Urban Legend Conspiracy

Mujomba’s hard work at his shop paid off. He owned a good condition used car. A white Toyota Mark II he bought from one of the businessmen in the area. He also built an extension of two rooms to his one room shop and used it as his bed and living room with his newly wed wife. In front of the shop, he built a similar but small adjustment he used as a bottle store. His life surely picked up normally.

According to his close friends however, three months into his marriage, life wasn’t okay with his wife after she lost the baby during a complicated delivery. That was the not-so-official side of the story because no one could verify it. Neither did Mujomba himself had an opportunity to give his side. The friends say, the wife would often curse all the time, alluding the loss of their baby to Mujomba’s business charms. The story that begun with whispers among Mujomba’s trustees, escalated to the area around. It was revealed that, his pregnant wife in fact delivered in the house a healthy baby, but that Mujomba sacrificed the baby for his business prowess, hence the thriving trade. No one had proof of it. The story nevertheless agitated the residents. They begun spreading the rumour, and people started avoiding his shop.

In April of 2016, Mujomba was in Kanyama township about five kilometres from Makeni Buffalo where he lived, ordering groceries from one of the wholesale shops run by another Rwandese national. While there, a woman appeared at the shop looking for her twelve-year-old daughter. She said she sent her to buy giggies (snacks) at the shop about an hour earlier and she had not returned. In desperation the woman got in the shop demanding to know where her child was. Shortly, residents started gathering round the shop until it was a crowd of them shouting and threatening to burn the shop down if the child wasn’t availed to them. As Mujomba sneaked out of the crowd and stared walking towards his car carrying some groceries, one of his neighbours saw him and told people the rumoured story of his miscarried baby.

It didn’t take any longer time; a group of men surrounded his car demanding that he allowed them to search the car. The situation at the place got tenser. Presumably in fear, Mujomba locked himself in the car, started the engine and sped off. He only went for about five hundred meters, a huge stone hit the windscreen on his side from one of the people who pursued his car, and he lost control of the car and it overturned. The rumour about the missing girl in the shop had already reached the width and breadth of Kanyama township. Everyone dashed to the car and ransacked it, as some tried to find ways of pulling him out of the wreckage. Even the presence of the police that later arrived, could not dissuade people from smashing the already damaged car. Mujomba was whisked away by the police and taken to Kanyama Police detention for safety.

At the shop where he was ordering his groceries, people forced their way in, and looted everything. When the story of his misfortune reached his home in Makeni Buffalo, his young brother who was manning the shop, immediately closed it just before a group of young men from the nearby unplanned settlement arrived and hovered around chanting political slogans. The shop was saved from attack by alert Makeni Neighbourhood Watch team that rushed to the shop after receiving a radio message from police officers at Kanyama Police Station where Mujomba was detained.

This incident was the beginning of more attacks on Rwandese nationals on the basis of alleged ritual killings.[9] According to the police more than 60 foreign-owned shops were looted or destroyed in Lusaka and there were calls to “rid the country of all immigrants”[10]. The twist then went to politics, as PF and UPND members accused each other of using Rwandese nationals as alleged agents of death to make charms to help them win the elections. The days that followed, saw an escalated number of reported missing people. Then of bodies being discovered with missing body parts. The legend fell on Rwandese refugees. They were the killers. So, the story went. People accused them of barbarism due to the horrors of the genocide most of the township people only know about from the Hotel Rwanda film.

With the heightened stigma against them, people were convinced that no Zambian could have done such horrific acts to their own people apart from Rwandese they alleged to have had a similar experience. Their risk was high, as there was no proper protection from the State security wings, reason being, the refugees are a part of the communities and isolating them for proper protection was hard. Surprisingly, even when the state asked them to find refuge back at the Makeni Transit Refugee Camp, they refused, citing poor conditions there among other issues.

Al Jazeera’s Fahmida Miller, reporting from Lusaka, said “People here say they don’t want to return to refugee camps because there is no way to make a living and conditions are poor.” While Joel a refugee talking to Fahmida Miller said, “We are dead already. Our brothers are dead there. They have burned the shops, they have burned the houses.”[11]

This calls to show how much things need to be done differently when it comes to the implementation of the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) that “guides governments and international organisations on how to support host communities in integrating refugees and helping them rebuild their lives in a productive way with dignity.”[12] Though the government expressed distaste over the incidents, saying, “the riots were unexpected,” the sporadic attacks did not stop even in times of heavy police presence in the townships.

Discovered Remains

The discovered human remains of people reported missing suddenly gave a different impression to the investigating wings later. They indicated that the perpetrators might have been professionals in the way the bodies were found, and body parts were cut. Medical instruments were highly suspected to have been used in the operations. The heads of the victims were smashed in similar ways and the same type of body parts were removed.[13]

With that police report to the agitated public, the attacks on Rwandese receded, but not the suspicion and mistrust. A few weeks later, four suspects were arrested in connection with the killings. Among them were two serving military personnels, a civilian clinical personnel serving in the military and a witchdoctor. This however did not stop people’s anger against Rwandese.

Construed Mistrust

The continued construed mistrust of the integrated Rwandese refugees is surely nothing but, the negative tags that come with the effects of war. There are always high chances that, people who have been in war, are socially thought of having been part of the problem of the events they experienced. That “people who are more exposed to war are more willing to personally harm another person,”[14]as one recent study indicates. Probably this could be one of the reasons, residents of the communities, they integrate in, tend to see them as carriers of behaviours that may start the problems they went through. However, some Zambians who share spaces with some of the Rwandese, say that the Rwandese’ behaviour towards each other, has continued to cast spells of suspicion on themselves.

One incidence that continue coming out so often in people’s minds is that of a Rwandese woman Angela Kalumambo who killed her husband in Kafue in December 2022 after a marital dispute[15]. After killing him, she hired a taxi driver in the night to dispose of the body, but the body couldn’t fit in the boot of the car. So, the driver came up with a plan. To cut the body in pieces and put the pieces in a sack and drove the car more than 150 Km from Kafue to a small town of Magoye where they dumped the bundle.

The story started another series of aspersions against Rwandese, with some unknown similar stories that were alleged to have happened in the townships being shared. However, such couldn’t surely be nominated as clear cases to judge integrated Rwandese as this to be their way of life. The nation has had so many brutal murder cases, gender based and otherwise, among citizens, without anyone categorically stating that, that’s how Zambians are. The Rwandese case could be counted as one of those very unfortunate human errors anyone could have done under certain circumstances beyond our own understanding. And mistrusting the Rwandese on this bases would surely be uncalled for.

Nevertheless, the way they are perceived regardless of the reasons, has led to their being treated differently, yet their protection hasn’t been well handled according to international legal statutes. The influences of unverified social media stories and especially the fictionalised film depicting the events of 1994 in Rwanda, may seem innocent but has had a huge impact of negative perception on the majority of the ill-educated township dwellers. This whole perception without doubt, hinges on misinformation and disinformation among the perpetrators of hate of Rwandese refugees in the city. Probably because there aren’t enough strategies being put in place to help the communities in which these refugees have been integrated to understand the whole idea of refugee integration.

Nip in the bud

Just as the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) recognises that the “vast majority of the refugees settle in urban areas”, which are in, “low or middle-income countries,” the coming in of ‘strangers’ in form of refugees in these communities that are highly struggling to make ends meet and are already densely populated, can bring a lot of insecurities on the residents. With the negative perception already figuring around the Rwandese even before they were integrated in these townships, residents would not look further than them for any suspicious acts.

On the other hand, as they settled in these communities, the refugees came in with substantial amounts of money, looking at the way they started setting up their businesses. Some of them bought off struggling families to give up their pieces of plots so that they could put up better structures for their businesses. This ‘improved’ kind of lifestyles by foreigners, in communities where residents are bitterly struggling economically, were felt as an injury on their egos. Most of the residents started blaming the government, saying it took care of foreigners leaving its own citizens wallowing in dire poverty. As if that wasn’t enough, most, if not all of the Rwandese businesses, mostly shops, have their merchandise sold at lower prices than the shops of the local residents. These factors quickly sowed seeds of discontentment from the local traders. Like the case of Mujomba and Gabriel above, Gabriel had to close his liquor business because Mujomba sold his liquor at almost half the price of Gabriel’s. Though Mujomba’s customers enjoyed lowly priced booze, the fact that he is a foreigner who put a resident’s trade out of business just on the basis of low price, over his income many thought was a government subsidy for his being a refugee, brewed hatred in some residents.

Its this reason the government could not understand where the whole dramatic rioting targeting foreigners especially Rwandese was coming from. President Edgar Lungu was quoted by Aljazeera saying: “It’s a shame that this has happened in Zambia. The country is known for its peace, and it was done to refugees. I will not allow this to happen again, and I will make sure that police bring every culprit to book[16].” This statement clearly showed that government was so ignorant or lacked understanding of the CRRF’s expectations of government, as one of its goals is to, “ease pressure on countries that welcome and host refugees.” According to police statement, 262 people were arrested for allegedly attacking Rwandan nationals and looting their shops. This easing surely is in terms of international organisations like UNHCR helping refugees build self-reliant ventures as in case of Zambia, so that the government doesn’t have to source for funds for looking after them as part of its Geneva Convention obligation. In reacting to such a situation, the government would have levelled the situation by setting up economic livelihood projects in these townships, that targets local youths in an effort of leveraging employment opportunities with the refugees. Without such, the local host communities felt being robbed of their own resources in favour of foreigners. This was a ticking a bomb, waiting for time to explode. And it did explode when an excuse presented itself.

What Now?

UNHCR and government owe the local township residents in which these refugees reside, properly set up refugee integration information centres, within the communities. These information hubs need to be operated by local community leaderships along side selected integrated refugees. Deliberate community meetings need to be organised on a regular basis, probably quarterly, to give residents the true picture of the refugees. If the refugees have to share their own personal stories in these meetings, then they have to, for the residents to appreciate their statuses and understand what led them to be there.

Most of these refugees have been discovered to having very strong business minds. It would be great opportunities for these meetings, to end up having skills sharing clubs for instance, in which business skills could be shared. Making integration one sided; in terms of just ‘dumping’ refugees in communities, without the host communities understanding well their presence among them, brews unnecessary suspicions and distaste. There is need for intentionally clear coexistence plan of activities between the refugees and the locals that may strengthen their cooperation and earn each other’s trust by understanding their varied cultures, beliefs, and languages.

Government too needs to explain the Refugee Integration Policy through the local structures and media, how the refugees’ sustenance is being supported to flush out any dust of suspicions and rumours on government favour-treatment of refugees.

International NGOs implementing projects that help refugees have sustained livelihoods in the communities, need to co-opt local residents too. This will in a long run strengthen trust and cooperation. The case in mind is that of Caritas Czech Republic in Zambia. With support from UNHCR, it implements a livelihood project[17] among refugees in which though the focus is on empowering refugees, it also co-opts a few vulnerable host community members in the empowerment activities. This enhances coexistence and a great starting point of making refugees’ lives more sustainably secure.

Such activities also need to be interrelated in such way that, there should be times when the beneficiaries from their different locations in the townships meet to share challenges and lessons and discourage letting them work in isolation, even when their empowerment activities are different.

Last Thoughts

Short of some of the above thoughts, may seem okay for now when the tide is low. With economic indicators pointing to tough times ahead, a recurrence of the 2016 is likely to happen in future. And when it does, the repercussions will be more dire than before because now, there are a lot more Rwandese doing better in the townships than most residents. If the coexistence isn’t strengthened, and refugees are let to live in isolation, and only meet the locals when they visit them as customers in their shops, it will build up the hatred and discontentment in the locals that may see disastrous outcomes in the near future. This trend when it comes back, will be during an election period again, when residents feel fooled hearing the same political outbursts that haven’t changed their economic wellbeing, and will rant their anger on the foreigners as being the reason for their lack of financial opportunities. Afterall they will see no human or brotherly interconnectedness with them, to apply restraint on.

References

Africa Press: https://www.africa-press.net/zambia/

Al Jazeera News network: https://www.aljazeera.com/news

Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/event/

British Journal of Criminology: https://academic.oup.com/bjc

Caritas Czech Republic in Zambia: https://zambia.charita.cz/

UNHCR Africa: https://www.unhcr.org/

Reuters News Agency: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/

The Namibian Online: https://www.namibian.com.na/

[1] Real name withheld for identity protection.

[2] UNHCR - The 1951 Refugee Convention

[3] Real name withheld at a request.