Fancy footwork


The president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, has just introduced a new law which demands that all schoolchildren wear shoes – or at least flip-flops. Fair enough I guess – looking after their feet - even if cynically you can see this as another part of his drive to make Rwanda ‘esthetically pleasing’ for outside donors who come for a week and for whom a good impression needs to be made. The shoe enforcement had already been in place for a while in Kigali the capital city, and is there are regular clear-ups of street kids and beggars to make Kigali look ok. Clear-ups to where - nobody is really sure...

Unfortunately, there are now an inordinate number of kids wearing shoes on their hands.

Why? Shoes are massively uncomfortable for many kids in the rural areas who have reached the age of 15 without ever wearing shoes before. They are too expensive, and anyway, why wear shoes when you’ve been scrambling along ok as a kid all your life anyway? When you walk in the country nobody has shoes, not even the old women huddled under their huge baskets of potatoes, nor the tiny old man with a torn blazer and tattered pinstripe trousers.

The kids have taken to wearing the shoes on their hands so that if the Local Defence Force comes along they can quickly drop them on their feet and avoid being fined or hauled off to some court or be ‘cleared up’.

And then I was thinking, surely that’s the same as suddenly being demanded by Mr Blair to wear gloves at all times – looking after our delicate hands because England is a cold country. Just as you might not be able to write a letter very clearly or eat a hard boiled egg, the kids now find themselves clumsily picking their way up hills which they were practically able to skip up before, getting the best grip by feeling every stone and rock beneath their toes.