The House with Three Stones: Life in Traditional Rwanda and Its Tools

1Before you read

1. Name three objects in your home that your great-grandparents would not recognise, and three that they would.
2. Who is the oldest person you know? What is one thing they have told you about their childhood?
3. What do you think "the fire was the heart of the house" means?

2Reading: The House with Three Stones

A feature for a school magazine. The writer, her grandmother and their village are imagined; the customs described are real.

1 When our English teacher asked us to interview the oldest person we knew, I went home to Gisagara and sat with my grandmother, Nyirakamana, on a mat under the avocado tree. She is eighty-one. She laughed when I switched on my phone to record her. "Your phone remembers for you," she said. "When I was a girl, we remembered for ourselves."

2 Her family's homestead, the urugo, stood on the shoulder of a hill inside a tall fence of woven reeds and hedge plants. Within the fence lay a yard that was swept every morning, a granary raised on poles to keep the sorghum dry, and the main house. The house was round. It was built on a frame of wooden poles, bent and tied together, and it was covered from the ground to its pointed top with thick grass thatch. There was no chimney: the smoke from the fire found its own way out through the thatch, blackening it and keeping insects away at the same time.

3 In the middle of the house stood three hearthstones, the amashyiga, on which every cooking pot was balanced. "The fire was the heart of the house," Grandmother said. "You could lend your neighbour a hoe, but you did not let your fire die. If it did, you went next door with a piece of broken pot and carried home a few live coals." Around the hearth were kept the family's tools: hoes with wooden handles, a curved machete, gourds for milk, clay water pots and a flat winnowing tray.

4 Every day had its order. Early in the morning the men and boys milked the cows into carved wooden pots and drove the cattle out to graze. Women and girls fetched water from the spring, ground sorghum on a flat grinding stone and hoed and weeded the fields. Small children had small jobs: chasing birds from the ripening sorghum, collecting firewood, or carrying a pot of milk to a sick neighbour. "Nobody was idle," Grandmother said, "and nobody was paid. Work was how you belonged."

5 The evenings belonged to talk. When the meal was over, neighbours gathered round the fire for igitaramo, an evening of stories, songs and poetry. The old taught the young through riddles and proverbs, and a child who solved a hard riddle was praised for days. Young people also learned the values of their community, such as courage, honesty, self-control and respect, in itorero, where they practised dance, public speaking and good conduct.

6 The year, too, had its order. Its greatest festival was umuganura, held when the sorghum was harvested. Families offered the first fruits of the harvest, shared food and drink with their neighbours and gave thanks for the year's work. "We were not rich," Grandmother said, "but nobody ate alone on that day."

7 Before I switched off my phone, I asked her whether she missed that life. She thought for a long time. "I don't miss the smoke in my eyes, or the hour's walk to the spring," she said at last. "But I miss the evenings. You young people have more light than we had, and fewer stories." Then she asked me to play back her voice, and she listened to it with deep suspicion.

3Inside the homestead

Paragraphs 2 and 3 describe a place. Drawing it helps you check that you have understood every detail, which is also the first step in describing a place in writing.

The plan is a simple drawing for this lesson; real homesteads differed in size and layout from region to region. The reading does not say where the cattle slept; the plan places them inside the fence, as was common.

4Comprehension

Answer in full sentences. Questions 1 to 5 ask what the text says; 6 to 8 ask what it means; 9 asks what you think.

1. Why did the writer interview her grandmother?
2. Why was the granary raised on poles?
3. How did smoke leave the house, and what two effects did it have on the thatch?
4. What did a family do if its fire went out?
5. Name three jobs that small children did.
6. What does Grandmother mean by "Work was how you belonged"? (paragraph 4)
7. Why do you think umuganura was the year's greatest festival? Use two details from paragraph 6.
8. "You young people have more light than we had, and fewer stories." Explain the two meanings of "light" that this sentence may carry.
9. Which part of traditional life described here would you most like to bring back into your own community, and why?

Show answersHide answers

1. Her English teacher asked the class to interview the oldest person they knew.
2. To keep the sorghum dry.
3. It found its own way out through the thatch. It blackened the thatch and kept insects away.
4. Someone went to a neighbour's house with a piece of broken pot and carried home a few live coals.
5. Any three of: chasing birds from the sorghum, collecting firewood, carrying milk to a sick neighbour.
6. Doing your share of the work made you a real member of the family and the community; your place came from what you contributed, not from money.
7. It marked the end of a year's work and the success of the harvest: families gave thanks with the first fruits, and everyone shared food and drink, so "nobody ate alone".
8. Literally, electric light: young people can see at night. Figuratively, more information and knowledge from phones and books, yet fewer evenings spent telling stories together.
9. Open answer. A good answer names one custom (for example igitaramo or the sharing at umuganura), says what it gave people, and explains how it could work today.

5Vocabulary: traditional tools and objects

Many traditional objects have no single English word, so in English we name them in Kinyarwanda and explain them. Learn the English words in the second and third columns: you will need them to describe any tool.