MAKAMBA: Piled up next to the road were bicycles and benches, rolled up mattresses and squawking chickens, radios with wonky antennas, battered suitcases and yellow jerry cans. Amid it all, wearing an oversized blue blazer and plastic sandals, sat 85-year-old Michael Bihonzi. With a walking stick in one hand and a floppy hat in the other, he stared at the green hills he had long given up hope of ever seeing again.

More than three decades had passed since Bihonzi fled ethnic massacres in Burundi that left up to 200,000 people dead. In a Tanzanian refugee camp he found safety and peace, but not in his heart. So when offered the chance to return home for the first time since 1972, Bihonzi did not hesitate to climb on a truck with 23 of his children and grandchildren and cross the border.

“I have come to reclaim my land,” he said after his arrival in the southern Makamba province, while waiting for another truck to take him to the village where he grew up. “And then I can die.”

Bihonzi’s homecoming is a part of a final repatriation of refugees to a country that at last appears destined for a definitive peace. Nearly a tenth of Burundi’s eight million people fled between 1972 and 2003, a period of “slow genocide” where the ruling Tutsi elite used force to suppress the Hutu majority, eventually triggering all-out civil war.

But over the past five years stability has steadily increased. With mediation efforts led by South Africa and Tanzania – Burundi is one country where “an African solution to an African problem” has worked – the fighting has all but stopped.

For most of Burundi’s post-colonial history, political and military power was in the hands of an elite from the Tutsi ethnic group, who make up 14 per cent of the population, compared with the 85 per cent who are Hutu. In 2005, after the signing of a peace agreement to end more than a decade of civil war, former Hutu rebel leader Pierre Nkurunziza was elected president. Power-sharing is now enshrined in the constitution, with a 60:40 split between Hutus and Tutsis. The last remaining rebel movement, the FNL, is Hutu-based, like the ruling party, and some believe political dynamics have fundamentally changed from the pre-2005 days.

More than 450,000 refugees have already returned. Now, with the last active rebel group in Burundi, the Forces for National Liberation, showing willingness to lay down its arms and join President Pierre Nkurunziza’s government, Tanzania is closing the remaining refugee camps near its western border that still housed 320,000 Burundians at the beginning of the year.

About 90,000 of them had fled Burundi during the 1990s, and now are arriving home at the rate of several thousand a week. The other 220,000 asylum seekers – the so-called “1972 refugees” – were given a chance to stay. The Tanzanian government said they could be naturalised, an offer whose scale may be unprecedented in Africa. But 46,000 people, including Bihonzi’s family, chose instead to accept a grant the equivalent of $40 from the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), which is managing the repatriation effort, load up to 100kg of possessions on a truck, and go home.

“Coming back takes a lot of guts because they were fine in Tanzania and reintegration is difficult,” said William Mututa, UNCHR’s office head in Makamba. “But most say, ‘We love our country’ and that their problems will be sorted out in time.”

The problems are many. Burundi has a shattered economy and the lowest per capita gross national income in sub-Saharan Africa. Outside the main towns, most people rely on subsistence farming. But the hills are densely populated, and competition for land is intense.

Many of the 1972 refugees returning to their old villages are finding the land that was once theirs is occupied. Established late last year, the state-run Land and Other Properties Commission, which helps returning refugees recover their assets, has already registered more than 10,000 land and 18,000 property conflicts.

Katebo Ngarama, 62, is one of the claimants. He abandoned his family home in Nyanza Lac, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in 1972 when, in response to a Hutu insurrection, the Tutsi-dominated army began slaughtering all Hutus with even a basic education. Fleeing on foot, Ngarama took with him his wife, his parents and two pairs of trousers.

Like most Burundians at the time, Ngarama’s father did not have a title deed. When Ngarama arrived home in May, the family now using his land angrily refused to move. For a few weeks he feared for his safety – one returning refugee was savagely attacked when he pitched tent on his former plot. Now, however, Ngaramba is on speaking terms with the family on his land, and is considering offering them half the plot to settle the dispute. If resolved amicably, it will be a good omen for his children, who were all born in Tanzania, and are the main reason that he returned.

“I always dreamed of coming back to show them that this is their country too,” Ngarama said. “They can decide for themselves if it is bad or good.”

Other returning refugees, especially those who fled when they were young, have no claim to land, and no idea of where their home villages are. For now they are being housed in corrugated iron shelters in temporary camps in southern Burundi.

The authorities have promised to build them houses, with the help of the UN, and there is even talk of building entire villages for the landless. But the plans are moving slowly. Already the promises of free healthcare and schooling made by government officials who visited the camps in Tanzania last year are sounding a bit hollow to some.

At the Gitara temporary camp, on the edge of a dirt road cutting through the hills of Makamba, Isaie Niyongabo, his wife and six children were among the 50 families who have been awaiting housing since March. The government had given them clothing and rice, but they were eager to start a more normal life.

“Our children need to go to school,” said Niyongabo, who left Burundi when he was nine. “They need to learn to speak Kirundi and French, not just English and Swahili like in Tanzania.”

In their decades outside the country, many of the refugees have managed to temper their anger over their forced exile, and now talk vaguely of “the war” or “the trouble” that drove them away. But for some the homecoming has made forgetting impossible. Francois Nyabenda has his house back but must also each morning walk past the banana grove where his father and brother were murdered. It was difficult to deal with, he said, but so far he had no regrets about leaving Tanzania. Neither did Eliphas Cubwa, 73, who returned last month to Nyanza Lac after 36 years away.

“When you live in another country which is not yours you live like a slave,” he said. “It is not your grandparents’ country.”—Dawn/Guardian News Service