'Coffee heals genocide scars'

2005-11-24 14:05

Maraba - In the hills of southern Rwanda, the production of specialty coffee is improving lives and fostering reconciliation as the small central African nation slowly recovers from the 1994 genocide.

This remote village dotted with eucalyptus and banana plantations was home to the oldest of the country's 12 organic coffee grower co-operatives, whose work in promoting unity and development was to be honoured on Thursday in Sweden.

The six-year-old Maraba collective - known as Abahuzamugambi ("those who share the same goal" in the local Kinyarwanda language) - had taken the lead in exporting its Arabica coffee and served as the model for the other groups.

International Environmental Prize

Tim Schilling, head of Pearl Project, a USAID-funded scheme that backed the groups, said: "All the collectives are based on the model of the Maraba collective and they all send their agronomists to Maraba to learn how to cultivate specialty coffee."

For its efforts in promoting socially, ecologically and economically responsible coffee production, the Abahuzamugambi collective was being awarded the International Environmental Prize of the Swedish city of Gothenburg.

The prize reflected both the collective's success in producing organic coffee, using only the smallest possible quantity of chemical products, and its social achievements within the community.

800 000 people slaughtered

Maraba Bourbon coffee had earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for its members, money that had increased incomes and expanded work that had helped to heal scars left by the genocide in which some 800 000 people were slaughtered.

Its exports, marketed along with the other collectives' products by the Rwandan Coffee Growers' Company which represented some 20 000 growers, were sold in North America, Europe, and recently expanded to Japan.

A 29-year-old Claire Kampeta, who was known as Rwanda's best coffee taster, said: "Thanks to our coffee we earn money, we can open bank accounts, we can buy cows and we can pay school fees. You can see a change in the way we live."

Self-assurance

About 40% of the Abahuzamugambi coffee growers were women and Kampeta had self-assurance rare among her contemporaries, particularly since the genocide that targeted members of the Tutsi minority.

Maraba was a place where survivors, aware that coffee might be their future, were reluctant to dwell on the past. If pushed, they said only that during the genocide they were persecuted by another category of society.

Otherwise they worked, seemingly without bitterness, alongside people whose relatives were accused of having killed their families.

Francois Habimana, the executive secretary of the Maraba collective, said: "When people are members of an association or a collective, they have a common activity that brings in money and it is therefore easier for them to overcome their differences."

- AFP