An Ordinary Man Read Free

face and letting it dribble down
     my cheeks. It was the best part of the rain. When those storms came in September the lightning and thunder scared me. My three
     younger brothers and I would sometimes huddle together during the worst ones. And then we would laugh at each other for our
     cowardice. Thunder, inkuba.
    My parents raised nine children altogether, and I was an island in time’s river, separated by six years from my older sister
     and five years from my younger brother. I got a lot of attention from my mother as a result, and trailed her around the house
     hoping she would reward me with a chore. The firmament of our relationship was work; we expressed love to one another in the
     thousands of little daily actions that kept a rural African family together. She showed me how to take care of the baby goats
     and cows, and how to grind cassava into flour. Even when I came back to visit my parents when I was grown it would be only
     minutes before I would find myself holding an empty jerrican and going to fetch well water for my mother.
    There was a narrow path from the main road that twisted up the side of the ridge and passed through groves of banana trees.
     I had learned how to walk on this path. It was our connection with a small village called Nkomero, which occupies the top
     of one of the hundreds of thousands of hills in Rwanda. The nickname for my country is “the land of thousands of hills, ”
     or le pays des mille collines, but this signifies a gross undercount. There are at least half a million hills, maybe more. If geography creates culture,
     then the Rwandan mind is shaped like solid green waves. We are the children of the hills, the grassy slopes, the valley roads,
     the spider patterns of rivers, and the millions of rivulets and crevasses and buckles of earth that ripple across this part
     of Central Africa like the lines on the tired face of an elder. If you ironed Rwanda flat, goes the joke, it would be ten
     times as big. In this country we don’t talk about coming from a particular village, but a particular hill. We had to learn the hard way how to arrange our plots of corn and cabbage into flat terraces on the sloping ground so as not
     to turn a farm into an avalanche. Every inch of arable land is used this way. The daily walk up to a family grove can be an
     exercise in calf-straining misery going up, and in thigh-wracking caution going down. I think our legs must be the most muscular
     on the African continent.
    There is a story about the conqueror of Mexico, Hernán Cortés, who was asked by the king of Spain to describe the topography
     of the rugged new nation. Cortés reached for the map on the table and crumpled it up into a ball. “That, ” he said, “is what
     Mexico looks like.” He could just as easily have been talking about Rwanda. If you didn’t grow up here you would be likely
     to get very, very lost among those seductive hills and valleys.
    Our family had rows of sorghum and bananas planted on the slopes of two hills, which made us solidly middle class by the standards
     of rural Africa in the 1950s. We would have been considered quite poor, of course, when viewed through the lens of a European
     nation, but it was all we knew and there was always plenty to eat. We worked hard and I grew up without shoes. But we laughed
     a lot. And I knew there was love in my family before I knew the word for it.
    I think the greatest hero in my life was my father, Thomas Rupfure. He was already an old man, well into his sixties, when
     I was a child, and he seemed impossibly tall and strong. I could not comprehend that I could one day be his age, or that he
     was once mine. I assumed he had always been old.
    I never once heard him raise his voice. He didn’t need to. He always spoke without apology or flourish and with a calm self-possession.
     If he and my mother ever fought I never knew it. On special days he would fold my hand into his and take me up the winding
     path to the top