Q 50 | HEART OF AFRICA
Escaping genocide, but true liberation comes in teaching the world to talk
Questioning the River of Turmoil Elavie Ndura Elavie Ndura is a Hutu from Burundi, a Fulbright scholar, a worldrenowned speaker, and professor of Multicultural Education at the University of Nevada at Reno. She, her family, her community, and her nation have experienced colonialism, exploitation, and genocide. Ndura specializes in cultural identity development and peaceful conflict resolution. Her call is for teaching tolerance and multiculturalism, reconciliation, and nonviolence.
I am inspires these urgent words of hope. We can only solve these problems if we communicate. In Burundi, it is not just a political problem. When people are killing with a machete so intimately with joy and priding them selves on dead bodies in the river, it is beyond politics.”
I
learned to be a truth seeker from my father. He was always getting in trouble. We lived in Burundi, a country just below Rwanda in Central Eastern Africa, in a society that does not permit questioning. Although my father was a farmer with a 5th-grade education, he was a brilliant man and he would raise issues that put him in prison for several months at a time. Being Hutu in a country that was politically dominated by Tutsis meant that we were kept under control and silenced in many ways. The truth is a frightening thing from a Burundian perspective. When I got older and went to Catholic school, we were not allowed to question either. We were taught to be “good girls,” to do the right thing, to pray to God, and to study hard. As a girl, as a Catholic, and as a Hutu in Burundi, being blind and silent was the best way to survive. There has been a continuous cycle of killing and ethnic cleansing in Burundi since 1965, and we had our own genocide in 1972. I fled the country for my life on a Fulbright scholarship with my two babies, who were 3 and 4 at the time. My husband and my sister had been killed. My parents were crippled; they lost their right arms due to the violence.
help us build a culture of nonviolence. When we are culturallycompetent, we are willing to question our own values, articulate and communicate, break down systems of inequalities, catalyze transformation, and care for others. I appreciate the power I have as a teacher. When I am teaching, I am liberating myself and my oppressor at the same time. It is a dual liberation. It is healing. I’m helping my oppressor to see the light. I’m not blaming and I’m not succumbing to victimhood. I know that I cannot depend on the Tutsis in Burundi to mend my wounded heart. I cannot expect White society in the U.S. to mend my heart. But if I can somehow garner whatever strength I have left to bounce back up and remain standing positively and refuse to let my life and dreams be taken away—because I do refuse—then I’m still here, moving forward. Though I am now “safe” in the U.S., when I look at my life, I see there are many parallels to the devastation I experienced under Tutsi domination in Burundi, especially as a mother to a Black son. In the United States, my family lives under White domination. There are so many African American men wasting away in prisons and I fear for my boy. On bad days I wonder—“What did I run away from?” To me the remedy is very basic: Start talking. We can teach how to do this in schools. We rarely get to talk about the important things like: What is it like to be White? What is it like to be homosexual? What is life like for you? What are your ideas? We pound the kids with all these social studies books that keep getting heavier and heavier, but they aren’t learning a damn thing!
When I finally broke away from Burundi, that was when I thought, “I don’t have much to lose now, so I’m just going to be me.”
We can bring deep conversations into churches. Too often in church we sing together and then everyone dashes out to their own cars, goes home, and closes the doors.
I arrived in the U.S. from Burundi in 1989. Since that time, I have devoted myself to teaching. I don’t focus on objective facts, but rather on what I call “cultural competency,” which I believe will
Media can be a valuable tool allowing space for these conversations to flourish. The people behind the media need to do some serious soul-searching and get more creative. Media needs to
©Stuart Freedman www.stuartfreedman.com
“ I am neither a politician nor an activist—but whatever