Guitar buying in Kigali
on Geri Skeen (Rwanda), 11/Feb/2011 18:29, 34 days ago
Rachel who works for VSO in Kigali phoned her friend Masimamgo, who runs a guitar school, and he offered to take me to buy a guitar. I waited at the appointed place and time, not expecting a Rwandan to be punctual. After half an hour he rang me to say he’d been arrested, but still to wait for him. After another hour he rang again to say he’d been released. Hey, I only just realised typing this now that that’s the latest song I’m learning: I Shall Be Released. Anyway, he did turn up and took me to a shop which had some very big amps and a few electric guitars and two acoustic guitars, one with those bits inside which you only need if you are going to plug it into an amp. I asked him to tune the fully acoustic one, which seemed to take him a very long time. Mind you, it was hideously out of tune, and we weren’t helped by the fairly loud music playing in the shop or the fairly loud street sounds (the shop didn’t have a door). I tried playing it but it sounded so dire I asked if we could look elsewhere. We went into another shop which only had electric guitars and that seemed to be it. So I suggested we try the guitar with the bits inside. This time I tuned it myself, not easy given the noise around, and played it a bit and it seemed to stay in tune and certainly didn’t sound as awful as the other one so I thought this might be as good as it gets buying guitars in Rwanda and Masimamgo and I discussed how much we might be able to get the price down by. We settled on 95,000Rwf, which is about£95. Then I asked about cases. They got down a very dusty one and brushed it off and tried to fit the guitar into it, with Masimamgo and I trying to explain to them that as it was a case for an electric guitar, mine wasn’t going to fit. So they found an acoustic case, again very dusty and we tried that but the zip was broken, so they started trying to stuff the guitar into another electric guitar case. At this point I suggested we leave. I got the bus back to Gitarama with my shopping bag (I’d bought exotic things you can only get in the capital like wholemeal bread and peppercorns and olive oil) and guitar on my lap, wedged in beside a woman with a shopping bag and toddler on her lap. It’s actually not a bad guitar; nowhere near as nice as mine in the UK but perfectly playable. Now back to I Shall Be Released.