Bujumbura by Nicolas Clemesac

I would like to introduce you to the city of Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi.

Lying between hills and lake Tanganiyka, it is a small city where about 300 000 inhabitants live. From the rising sun to the night, it is full of life, people who walk to the market, taxi motos waiting for their clients, talking together, buses starting their trips to Uvira, on the other side of the lake, or to the « interior » of the country, full of people barely awake but ready for sinuous roads across the mountains.

Children around the buses carry baskets full of colours, cigarettes, sweets, bottles of water, selling to the travellers what they will need during their journeys, negotiating toughly with the drivers, who sometimes try to get free stuff from them.

Women, always the first in the streets in the morning, transporting all at once babies, goods to sell on the market, or going to the fields, several kilometers away, spades on their shoulders. They wear all colors of the rainbow on their clothes, forming a sweet kaleidoscope in the rising daylight.

All the sounds are mixed - laughs, shouts, klaxons, songs, they compose the music of the city, the best alarm clock ever made. Smells of fruits, vegetables, fish, exhaust pipes, the sweat of walking people are also mixed, swinging the heart between hell and heaven, like the broken roads which are winding through the city.

No big monuments in Bujumbura, apart from the cathedral, planted at the end of one of the main streets, its overgrowth as if its builders wanted to give evidence of the existence of God. No need to convince the inhabitants, who for some of them go to church twice or three times a day.

No monuments, except the presidential palace, kept by lazy soldiers, their Kalashnikovs like toys hanging on their backs. No monuments, except the inhabitants who are each of them full of history.