Canizius Ukurikiyimana was only 19-years-old when he was forced to leave Tanzania and resettle in Rugeyo, a small village in Rwanda’s eastern province. He is one of many thousands of Rwandans who were expelled from Tanzania in late 2006, leaving almost everything he worked for and loved behind.
And for Canizius, this included his entire family.
“I was forced to leave one day when I was walking alone. They didn’t make my family leave because they have identity cards,” he said.
Families like Canizius’s were often split up because the Tanzanian government had an uneven policy of giving out identity cards to some Rwandan refugees and not others.
Canizius was born in a village in Karagwe, the western province of Tanzania, and his family, like many others in the region, raised cattle and occasionally sold milk for a living.
On a day like any other, he was in the forest grazing his cows when a group of armed Tanzanian guards approached him and told him he had to leave the country immediately.
“They came and took me from the woods and told me it’s time to go back to my motherland,” he said.
Canizius, who still lived with his parents, was not given the chance to go back home to inform them that he was being forced to leave.
“I pleaded with them, telling them that I wanted to tell my parents what was happening, but they wouldn’t listen. They had guns, so I couldn’t disagree.”
Although he wasn’t expecting it that day, he said he wasn’t completely surprised when the soldiers came to take him. He had heard that Tanzanian authorities were starting to round up Rwandans without identity cards, seizing their property, and escorting them to the border.
Canizius is one of the lucky ones because the authorities didn’t seize his cows like they did to many others. Determined to bring his only possessions with him to this new and unknown life, Canizuis walked seven days through the forest with his ten cows.
“I slept only when the cows did,” he said.
After a week, he reached the border and the Rwandan authorities helped him bring his cows to Rwanda.
“After crossing the border, I first went to Cyiyanza [a small town about three hours outside of Kigali in the eastern province of Rwanda] and my cows went to a farm nearby. I came back to check on them later.”
Canizius said he felt welcomed by the Rwandan authorities. He spent his first three months living in a tent at a refugee camp in Cyiyanza.
“They gave me a place to live and food to eat, so I felt good about being there.”
In Cyiyanza, Canizius met other people like himself also forced out of Tanzania.
Jerome Cyiza was only 16-years-old when he arrived in alone Cyicanza in late 2006. He lived in the tent next to Canizius and the two men soon realized they shard a similar history.
One day in September of 2006, Jerome walked to the market in his village in western Tanzania to sell the family’s milk. When he arrived, he found people rounded-up in small trucks. They were carrying bags and were surrounded by a lot of cars.
“The Tanzanian authorities grabbed me and threw me into one of the cars. I waited there with other Rwandans two whole days and nights before they moved us anywhere. On the third day we began the journey to the Tanzanian border.”
Like Canizius, Jerome said he wasn’t really afraid when the authorities took him away because he had seen it happen too much to his neighbours.
“I knew I was being taken to Rwanda with a lot of other people,” he said.
Many repatriates in Rugeyo said that when they witnessed the mistreatment of Rwandans in Tanzania, it was enough to make them want to move to Rwanda.
This was not the case for Jerome.
“I grew up in Tanzania, so I didn’t even know Rwanda. I would hear about it from my parents, but I never thought of coming here. ”
Since he’s left Tanzania his parents have died. He said he wants to go back to visit his brothers and uncle who still live there, but that he wouldn’t stay there.
“I know I can’t live in Tanzania anymore. They hate us there.”
With both young men now living without their families, they say they think of each other like brothers. In fact, they’re still neighbours today in Rugeyo. They arrived in the resettlement village together in April of 2007 to begin their new lives with 1,600 other repatriated refugees with the assistance of CARE Rwanda.
They said the first task when they got to Rugeyo was to clear some land to make room to build their houses. Both of them had to bear the brunt of much of the manual labour, as few returnees are as young and strong as Canizius and Jerome.
“I built this beautiful place myself last July,” said Canizius, chuckling, gesturing to his four-metre circular mud hut. “It only took me one week.”
Canizius’s house is a round hut similar to the other 100 or so that dot the landscape in Rugeyo. The base is made of mud, straw and water, and the roof out of dried husks. The space inside divided in two, one for sleeping and storage and the other for sitting.
Local CARE staff provided instructions on how to build these basic semi-permanent accommodations to people like Canizius who have never built a house before.
“For me, it was the hardest thing I had to do here,” said Canizius.
CARE has also helped these young men learn how to cultivate the fields for food by providing instructions and seeds to plant.
Like the others who cultivate in the village, they have problems of too much sun, not enough rain, and wild animals eating the crops at night.
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Canizius is a handsome young man, with carved cheekbones and piercing dark brown eyes. He wears a crisp sky blue shirt, khaki pants and a pair of black sandals with a matching bracelet around his wrist.
When he talks about what the future might have in store for him, he says that he wants to get married in the next three or four years.
He doesn’t think he’ll find his wife in Rugeyo though.
“I’ll go find my wife in the next village and bring her back here.”
Another one of his hopes is for the problem of the wild animals to be solved by local government officials so that he can have a more successful harvest than last year.
“If the animals get taken care of, I can buy more seeds to cultivate more crops and sell that produce. With that extra money, I can sell my old cows and invest in better ones that produce a lot of milk.”
Jerome has similar hopes as his friend: to marry and raise a family, and to cultivate more food.
In Rugeyo, there are eleven boys 21-years-old and younger who were forced out of Tanzania without their parents and had to start their lives over again from scratch.
Sitting together, Canizius and Jerome play fight and giggle like school boys appearing to only have light-hearted cares on their mind. They seem to have accepted their new way of life in Rugeyo, even though it has forced them to grow up faster than they would have otherwise.
