University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: May 6, 2004

By DONNA BUDNIEWSKI
Reporter Assistant Editor

Zena Ntiranyibagira and Musindu Kanya-Ngambi, adjunct faculty members in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, have much more in common than the fact that they teach French to UB undergraduates. Their neighboring home countries, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, have suffered dangerous ethnic tensions and major political upheaval, forcing them to flee their homelands, leaving family and friends behind.

In 1993, Ntiranyibagira left Burundi to escape what she knew was coming—ethnic violence between Hutu and Tutsi factions following the assassination of the country's first democratically elected president and first ever Hutu in power. Since then, about 200,000 Burundians have been killed and hundreds of thousands more have fled the country as refugees.

Zena Ntiranyibagira and Musindu Kanya-Ngambi, adjunct faculty members in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, fled their respective homelands.
PHOTO: DONNA BUDNIEWSKI

When the trouble started, Ntiranyibagira traveled with her sister to Malta to live there with a brother. She stayed for six years before coming to Buffalo in 1999 to study journalism at UB.

"You leave everything behind. You think it's something temporary and that you're coming back—you don't think of it as exile," says Ntiranyibagira, who is working on her doctorate in French.

Before 1961, Tutsis and Hutus got along, she notes. "The Hutu or Tutsi problem didn't exist before colonization. They (the Belgians) made people aware of the differences," she says.

After the assassination of the country's president, cycles of violence ensued on both sides, with retaliatory attacks killing hundreds at a time, often wiping out whole Hutu and Tutsi families and villages. Ntiranyibagira's mother was a Tutsi and her father a Hutu, but either way, the Tutsi army and Hutu fighters hid behind ethnicity and politics as excuses for trying to gain control of the country, she says.

"When it is time for killing, they don't really look at who you are; sometimes they mistake you for something you are not. It's about 'who do you hate and who do you like,' but people are mixed and you can't always tell the difference.

"It was genocide, but nobody talks about it. But you can say that because the numbers of people killed are really big numbers. It was the whole country. They started by killing educated people in schools and business people," says Ntiranyibagira.

She has never returned to her country because the situation is still too volatile. Moreover, the difficulties that accompany immigration, learning English in Malta, finding a job in the U.S. and working toward a doctorate haven't been easy. But Ntiranyibagira instead focuses on the positive.

"It's been a challenge. It's now in my nature to be more open to other cultures. You come to a point when you have to accept—not by force—the differences in others. You always feel like a foreigner. Although you may adjust and make a home here, you always feel like going back," she says.

She met her husband, also from Burundi, in Buffalo, and now the couple has a 2-year-old daughter. Both dream of going back to Burundi to make a difference.

"I plan to finish my studies and go back home because I am convinced there will be a change," she says. "Maybe there will be an agreement to share power. They need people because so many people died and most of them were educated people, teachers, so there is a gap. All of the educated people are gone. If I stay abroad, there will always be a gap. I think I can do something if I go back."

Ntiranyibagira says she misses her country—the mountains, rivers, the climate, but most of all, the ways of her people.

"After church, we used to meet somewhere and just talk and enjoy life. Here, that doesn't happen—I have two neighbors here and I don't know their names and if I had a fire, they wouldn't know my name," she says.

Kanya-Ngambi, a lecturer in French, has longer and deeper ties to Western New York than Ntiranyibagira, coming here in 1973 as a Fulbright scholar from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire. By the time Kanya-Ngambi completed his doctorate in the U.S. and was ready to return home, he received word that the political situation in his country had deteriorated.

"The news I was getting was unbearable, so I stayed on in the U.S. and worked for nine years as a principal at Hopevale High School in Hamburg," he says.

In 1986, immigration restrictions required him to return to the DRC for two years. When Kanya-Ngambi left that country in 1973, he was the first Congolese principal of the largest high school in the country. The dictator Mobotu Sese Seko was in power and had changed the name of the country from Congo to Zaire, as well as changing the names of the country's rivers, coinage, cities and maps. He also forced people to drop their Christian names and use traditional names, which, Kanya-Ngambi says, had a psychological impact on the country akin to an identity crisis.

"If I didn't do it, I would go to jail. I didn't have a choice. He was so popular and people believed in him. They hoped there would be a change. But before independence, people were working and making money; they were living. After independence, people weren't prepared. It was just a disaster," he says.

In spite of being forced to leave a good job and his wife and children, Kanya-Ngambi was enthusiastic about going home. He left on good terms with the Hopevale Union Free School District, assured that a leave of absence agreement with the board of education was in place that would guarantee him a position upon his return. But, as fate would have it, two years in Africa turned into 11.

"I arrived in Kinshasa (the capital) excited—I thought I would be able to pick the job I wanted. But, there were no jobs there. It didn't happen. I got to the airport, no phone booth, nothing. I had lost contact with family members. Former acquaintances didn't know me anymore.

When he asked to see his employment file in a government office, it was stamped 'deceased.'

"No one would take me for teaching. I had been away for 13 years. I could not get a job. They were worried I would get too demanding, asking for too large a salary. They preferred locals," he says.

Eventually, he located a younger brother and was able to stay with him for seven months, each of them doing odd jobs to survive. "We survived doing small things—sometimes you go hungry and sometimes you eat," he says.

His fortunes quickly turned and over the next several years, Kanya-Ngambi worked from time to time as an educational consultant for USAID-Zaire and as a temporary consultant with the World Bank in Chad. Although it took six months to get the money, he opened an elementary school, buying textbooks on the street and from embassies, combining the best aspects, he says, of American and Congolese curricula.

"That's what kept me alive. We ended up with four small schools before coming back to the U.S. and we used college graduates who were willing to teach in elementary schools. It was very exciting. We were getting good results and the kids were succeeding very well. The system worked out pretty good and we were very strict," he says. Even though parents often paid for their children's schooling with sacks of maize, rice or beans, Kanya-Ngambi would sell those goods to pay the teachers. The schools were open for 10 years.

Once again, however, civil war intervened. The Ebola virus struck and the schools shut down. "During the crisis (Ebola), we were there. The kids couldn't come to school. It was just unbelievable," he says.

By 1996, says Kanya-Ngambi, "the house"—his country—was burning down. It was time to leave for the U.S., he decided, when Laurent Kabila's army, which eventually overthrew Mobotu, was just 50 kilometers from Kinshasa. His home already had been broken into twice by soldiers in the middle of the night.

After selling everything he owned, he left the country in a rowboat, eventually making his way to the Ivory Coast and Dakar, then back to Buffalo. Once here, he accepted an invitation to conduct research at UB in community-based education without pay. He has been teaching as an adjunct for the past six years.

In spite of having to start over from nearly nothing at least three times in the past 30 years, Kanga-Ngambi still loves the two countries he calls home, but longs to go back to the DRC to finish what he started—building schools for his people.

"I believe all these problems, such as what Zena (Ntiranyibagira) was talking about and what I'm talking about in Congo is lack of education. We cannot talk of building a democracy until we educate our people. It's just like building a house; it's like starting with a roof with no foundation—you can't start with the roof, you build from the foundation. All my life, my objective has been to educate those young Congolese. I want to build community schools with basic education, basic health and basic nutrition because kids are starving," he says.

But, he adds, America means everything to him.

"Sure, there have been some problems, but if you have the will and you want to do something, you're going to make it. I came here (in 1973) with a briefcase and $20, and when I left to go back to Africa, I had three cars and a house," he recalls. "Even though I love the U.S., I feel underused. I go crazy every day because I have been (employed) part-time for the last six years."