The Rwandan Play-by-Play

Living in Rwanda can admittedly be a very stressful experience. Everyone obviously suffers different stresses according to his or her own personality and individual placements. Evan and I usually have to contend most with dysfunctional organization at school and a growing water shortage problem at home. Travel can be painfully slow and uncomfortable. Food is universally bland and often unappealing (like small bugs and rocks in school lunch). Rwandan people are almost unfailingly friendly (especially if you speak some Kinyarwandan), but paradoxically they are often impolite and intrusive. On the whole though, most stresses are bearable and even understandable. I’m easy-going and prefer to just relax or disengage in situations of great stress.

However, there is one annoying widespread practice that really irks me. Across Rwanda people are obsessed with western music, television, and film. Walk into any mom-and-pop shop or restaurant and there’s a good chance western music is blaring from a beat-up AM-FM radio perched on the counter. Or, there’s a miniature TV stacked precariously on some dubiously constructed shelf connected to a veritable rainbow forest of AV wires pushing out a fuzzy, bootleg version of some random western (or kung-fu!) movie.

Occasionally in these movies, there is what can only be described as Rwandan play-by-play. That is, a man (it’s always a man’s voice) screaming a description of the film’s proceedings as they play out on the screen. These most unwelcome disruptions are interspersed amongst the dialogue, sound effects, and soundtrack of the actual film. It’s so wacky but I guess people dig it. Movies I can accept. However, when you mess with Bob Marley, you’ve crossed the line. Crossed by about 100 kliometers.

Evan and I were recently on a bus returning to Nyagatare from Kigali. The driver was playing all manner of obnoxious music as loud as he possibly could. I had no real qualms aside from the fact that my eardrums were on the verge of rupturing. Then he popped on a Bob Marley CD (some sort of greatest hits compilation). Inexplicably there was some a-hole screaming in Kinyarwandan over poor Bob. Totally unacceptable. What could have been a mellow, relaxing trip turned into brain-liquifying migraine. I had to restrain myself from unleashing a hail of foul-mouthed expletives at the driver as I exited the bus (not that he would have gotten everything, but the gist would have been clear). I mean, have a little taste and respect. He’s six feet under. Honestly.