An Ordinary Man Read Free Page B

weren’t supposed to tell anybody else about it. Other kids tried to make you confess your igihangos by holding you down and tickling you or poking you in the ribs or whatever other kind of boyish sadism they could dream up.
     I was always very good about keeping my igihango confidences to myself, at least verbally, but I think I always exposed them when I ran to save one or another of my secret
     allies from being interrogated. I probably should have been more subtle.
    When I went home from school in the evenings I would help my mother cook supper. My brothers and I used hoes to carve out
     brick-shaped pieces of dirt and we built a kind of domed oven out of them. We stuffed a bunch of sweet potatoes inside and
     then lit a small fire underneath them. They came out charred and delicious. Every oven was used only once. We kicked it back
     into the ground, so as to bury the ashes, and then built a new one the next night.
    Our suppers always came with small tastes of a bitter and delicious beer made out of the juice of bananas. Let me tell you
     about this drink, which we call urwagwa. Visitors to Rwanda always complain that it tastes like spoiled buttermilk, but I think it is tasty. It plays a central role
     in Rwandan social life, and is also an important symbol of the good-heartedness and collegiality that I think represents the
     best side of my country. There is a saying: “You never invite a man without a beer.” It is the symbol of hospitality, a way
     of saying without words, “You are my friend and I can relax in your presence.”
    Brewing banana beer is like the art of friendship: simple and very complicated at once. First you dig a pit in the earth.
     Because Rwanda is just a few miles below the equator, the ground temperature is always warm. It acts like a very slow, gentle
     oven for the fermentation. You take a bunch of ripe bananas, as many as you want, and bury them about four feet deep. You
     make a lid for the pit out of the broad leaves of the banana tree. Come back in three days and dig them up. They should be
     very overripe. You transfer the mushy fruit to a basin made out of a hollowed tree trunk and then press down on them using
     handfuls of tough grass as your gloves. You drain out the juice into a clay pot, strain out the chunks, mix it with sorghum
     flour as a fermenting agent, let it sit for about a month, and then you have your banana beer.
    It is a simple recipe, but it takes years of practice to get it right. You have to feel your way around and make mistakes.
     This is normal. We have all tasted bad beer. Sometimes the banana juice comes out too light and you have to put it over a
     fire to reduce the quantity. Sometimes the juice comes out too potent and you have to add water. Almost every house in Rwanda
     has a yellow plastic jug of banana beer tucked somewhere on the premises. It is like a mailbox in America or a teapot in England;
     everyone has to have one.
    The beer is not really the important part; it is the friendship that it cements. Everywhere in my country you see people talking
     and laughing over bottles of banana beer. It most often happens at what we call cabarets, which are an indispensable part of life in rural Africa. They are like a bar and a convenience store combined, sometimes made
     of nothing but a few planks of wood. You see them on the sides of roads, in the suburbs, and even in the smallest little villages.
     Here you can buy canned goods, soap, soft drinks, batteries, toys, and all kinds of other things. The most important part
     of the cabaret is the front, where the owner has set out chairs, benches, and maybe even an old, ratty couch. This is where the local people,
     no matter what their station in life, will come together for a round of banana beer, often sipped through the same red straw.
     It is very hard to hate someone with whom you have shared a beer. There is too much laughter and good feeling between you.
     Even people who might be predisposed to be