Cockroaches

by Scholastique Mukasonga

  We both lay stock-still under the mat, waiting for daybreak to come so we could be sure that our leopard had gone on its way. Every evening, at nightfall, we trembled as we waited for its next visit.

  The Bagesera were great hunters, of course. Often we heard the sound of their trumpets, big antelope horns – ihembe – announcing that the hunt had begun. Armed only with bows and spears, they hunted even the rogue elephants that demolished their crops, but they didn’t eat them. The hyenas and vultures went after the massive carcasses as they rotted in the bush. When we went to work in their fields, the Bagesera would tell us, “Watch out for the ubushya!” We soon discovered what an ubushya was: a trap, a big trench that they dug around their fields for protection. The trenches were covered over with grass, and the animals fell into them. We dug ubushya of our own wherever we found animals often passed by, thanks to which we could get meat for ourselves. No one minded eating antelope or gazelle: evidently they tasted like beef. But the men adamantly refused to touch warthog.

  When we first came to Gitwe, there was no school. Then, after a few months, the refugees managed to put together a class. Again the mission agreed to provide rice. Rutabana went back to his huge cookpots. I rediscovered the rice I so loved, and this time I was actually old enough to go to school. Classes were held under tall trees we called iminazi. They bore beautiful fruits, like apricots, that fell on us as we sat. We ate them as our teacher, Bukuba, taught the lesson.

  There were a few Bagesera among the pupils, and they taught us a great deal. They introduced the little refugees to all the wealth of the savannah. And the bush was filled with all sorts of fruit! There were imisagara, which looked like sorghum seeds, slightly bitter but easy to gather, even for the tiniest children. The iminyonza were also within everyone’s reach, but you had to watch out for thorns. Gathering amasarazi and amabungo was harder. You had to climb the trees. We worked in teams. Some climbed the trees, others stood underneath to pick up the fruit, and also to chase away larcenous monkeys or rival gatherers. I myself didn’t want to climb. It was my friend Candida, a real tomboy, who scrambled up to the top. We loved amabungo most of all. It was a vine that climbed along the trunks of the tall trees. You could find that fruit only where the brush was particularly dense, far from the houses, on the heights, at Gisunzu. It was a veritable expedition, and you had to choose: go to school or gather amabungo. Very often we chose amabungo.

  So that we would be forgiven, Candida and I brought back amabungo for the whole family. Our harvests were awaited at home like so many rare treats. Only my father couldn’t bring himself to taste the wild delicacies of the bush.

  Once we’d more or less assured our survival, we considered how to go about earning some money. We had to buy salt. We had to buy fabric for our clothes, because the few pagnes we’d been wearing since Magi were now falling into rags. Above all, we needed money to pay Alexia’s and André’s tuition. My father went looking for work. He knew how to keep books – a rare and valuable skill. He was hired in an infirmary in Ngenda, a long way from Gitwe. We only saw him on Sundays. Nothing defeated my father. Even with all the trouble that had come crashing down on us, he never gave up. Not only did he work in Ngenda, he also thought nothing of walking all the way to Kigali if he glimpsed some possibility of earning money for Alexia’s and André’s studies. As he walked, he went days without eating and sometimes nights without sleeping, because he took advantage of the cool after sunset to cover as much ground as he could. He ended up with tuberculosis and was hospitalized for months in the sanatorium at Gishari. But he never abandoned what had become for him his life’s single goal: making it possible for his children to go to school.

  Ever industrious, my mother began to grow peanuts between the dirt road and the house. I went off to sell them at the market in Nyamata. She set aside two little plots for Alexia and me to farm on our own. Alas! Our gardens were soon taken away from us. Even in the depths of the bush, “civilization” was catching up with us. They (who “they” were, I have no idea) made a rule that every family had to grow coffee plants. By all appearances, “they” hadn’t given up on the old colonial farming projects. Every family had to grow a certain number of plants, and they had to be planted along the dirt road, in front of the house, so they’d be easier to inspect and eventually to harvest. We had to pull out all our own plantings, and even worse, uproot a good part of the banana grove, which was just beginning to bear fruit. We had to go all the way to Rwakibirizi, more than ten kilometers from Gitwe, to pick up the plants. Coffee plants take a great deal of care, and they left us little time to tend our field. School was no longer the children’s priority: our first job was to change the mulch around the coffee plants. Whenever the grown-ups turned their backs, we seized the opportunity to lie down for a few minutes on that mat of fine grasses, because it was much softer than our beds. But those breaks never lasted long. The agronomists sent to teach us how to grow coffee kept a close eye on us. They came from the Karama Agricultural Institute. With our bare feet, we were fascinated by the polished black leather of their boots.

  1961-1964: “Democratic” exclusion

  On July 1, 1962, Rwanda officially became independent. With the aid of the Belgians and the Catholic church, the MDR-Parmehutu could establish what a UN report from March 1961 called a “single-party racial dictatorship.” Thousands of Tutsis had been massacred, more than one hundred fifty thousand had fled to neighboring countries, and those who stayed behind in Rwanda would be forced to live as outcasts. In Nyamata, the internal refugees were subjected to the benefits of ethnic demokarasi.

  My father had a bitter memory of that democracy’s inauguration. The history books say it came on September 25th, 1961, the day of the legislative elections. They didn’t skimp on the democracy in Nyamata. They’d built little straw cabins for voting booths; facing them, in the open air, was a big table and a box. Excited by the novelty, the children played around the little cabins. My father and other refugees he’d convinced to come out and vote presented themselves at the big table that served as a polling station. Piles of ballots were very visibly laid out, one pile for each party. But, on either side of the table, the town councillor Mbarubukeye and his men stood looking on with a threatening air, and another councillor, Bwanakumi, was sitting behind the table. Bwanakumi handed out the ballot and envelopes, and patiently watched as each voter put the ballots in the envelope and the envelope in the box, before the vigilant eyes and the ever-more menacing truncheons of Mbarubukeye and his gang. And that, said my father, was how he and all the Tutsi refugees in Nyamata ended up voting for Kayibanda, who’d vowed to destroy us.

  The refugees did their best to convince themselves that they would one day go home (and those who stored up reserves or plowed new land for their fields were mocked), but despair often got the better of them, and sinister rumors of the fate that awaited us made the rounds. There was talk of the Rwabayanga, the bottomless pits. These were three very deep crevasses on the Burundi border. The plan had been to throw the Tutsis into them when they first got here in 1960. Why that had never happened no one knew. The Bagesera were the first to speak of them. Then my brother Antoine’s friend Froduald had seen them. He worked in the tsetse eradication campaign, traveling all over the region, even as far away as Kirundo, in Burundi. He too had seen the crevasses one day, but, he said with a laugh, “there are a lot more dead elephants in there than dead Tutsis.” Nonetheless, people went on talking about the Rwabayanga, and whenever someone disappeared, which happened often, they said he’d been thrown into the Rwabayanga.

  In late 1963, a rumor spread through Nyamata: King Kigeli was going to return and lead the displaced people back home. The rumor’s source in Gitwe was our neighbor Sebeza. His oldest son Kazubwenge had left for Burundi, but his parents had heard he would soon be coming back, and he wouldn’t be alone. He would be with the king, who was returning to lead the downtrodden deportees home again.

  Everyone made feverish preparations for the kin
g’s arrival and our return to Rwanda. The men constructed oversize bows in honor of the eagerly awaited sovereign. They weren’t war weapons, and no one had any intention of using them. They were only meant to show the king that they’d stayed faithful to him, that they were still his men, his ingabo – his warriors. My father made a particularly big bow, the biggest in the village. It was hung up over the hearth, not too visibly, wrapped in a fine mat called an ikirago, because deep down no one was entirely convinced that the king would be coming to take us away. As for the women, they made urugori, crowns of sorghum bark that mothers wear as a sign of fertility and the permanence of the family. They’d chosen the widest pieces of bark, which turned a beautiful golden color as they dried, and they’d inscribed the words “Long live Kigeli!” with a metal point heated in the fire. This was all done in secret, of course, but with the utmost excitement.

  And then one fine day – it would have been somewhere around Christmas, if we can believe the historians – everyone emerged from their houses well before dawn, dressed in their finest clothes, as if for Mass. All the mamas had carefully shaved their children’s heads, leaving nothing but one pretty, round tuft of hair, the igisage, on the front of the skull. No one went off to their field. The men stood in the middle of the road, with a serious air, speaking in turns. The women went off and sat down on the termite mound they used as a meeting place. We children danced around it; we didn’t know quite why we were dancing, but we danced. It seems to me that the sun rose earlier than usual. The great day had come, our long-awaited deliverance was at hand.

  Slowly the hours went by. Morning came to an end. The women went off to feed their children. Nothing was happening. Everyone listened for some sound. The men had fallen silent. Finally, we heard a distant rumble, growing slowly louder. That noise didn’t fill us with confidence. It wasn’t the cheers we’d been expecting, the cries of triumph. And then all at once we saw black dots appear in the sky, black dots speeding straight for us. We’d heard of helicopters, but we’d never seen one: the ngombabishire, the exterminators! Now they were almost overhead. Terrified, everyone began to run. The fastest ones took cover in the bush, while others, more fear-crazed or less vigorous – the children above all – burrowed under the thick straw mulch around the new coffee plants, but the helicopters flew back and forth above us, just off the ground, kicking up the straw and uncovering anyone trying to hide under the last remaining stalks.

  I don’t know how I ended up under a bush at the far end of the field with my little sister Julienne. The helicopters went back and forth over the houses. My parents and big brother had disappeared. I never found out where they’d hidden, maybe on Rebero Hill, where, some thirty years later, the last surviving inhabitants of Gitwe and Gitagata would resist to the end the attacks of the murderers trying to finish their “work.”

  The helicopters went away, but soon we saw a long row of trucks coming toward us. The trucks were filled with soldiers firing in every direction and throwing grenades. They jumped down from the trucks, searched the banana groves, pillaged the houses. But evidently they didn’t dare venture into the bush, where we were hiding. When night came they got back in their trucks and drove off.

  My little sister and I stayed hidden in our thicket all night long. Desperately hungry, we crawled to the very end of the field and dug up a few sweet potatoes. We ate them raw, then hurried back to the shelter of the bush, our hearts pounding. Everything was strangely silent. Even the animals seemed to be keeping quiet. A little before dawn, we saw the neighbor’s son Kazubwenge coming home, looking worn and exhausted, his clothes in rags. There were three or four other young men with him, men I didn’t know, armed only with bows. They crept around, from one house to the next, then went off in the dim, early-morning light. I think I heard them say, “It’s all over, there’s no hope.” I don’t know if I really heard them say that.

  Over the next few days, the refugees gradually returned to their houses. The men hurried to break their beautiful bows, and the women tore up their sorghum-bark crowns.

  They could hardly bear to do it, knowing the bad luck it would bring them. And indeed, the soldiers came back, patrolling all through the area, in the houses, in the bush. Now they weren’t afraid. They were emboldened. They wore their helmets pulled down low on their heads. We thought we could see implacable hatred in their eyes. They called us Inyenzi – cockroaches. From now on, in Nyamata, we would all be Inyenzi. I was an Inyenzi.

  The soldiers arrested many people, starting with teachers and shopkeepers with businesses in Nyamata’s little town center. Among them were Bwankoko – his daughter Marie was in my class – and Ruboneka, whose wife Scholastique was so kind: when the teacher sent us home from school because he thought our heads were badly shaved, we ran straight to Scholastique, who was always ready to be our coiffeuse. Bwankoko, Ruboneka, and many more were taken off to the prison in Ruhengeri. They never came back.

  One shopkeeper had a business in Nyamata like the others, but lived in Gitwe. His name was Tito, and he came from Butare. The soldiers showed up to take him away. Through our sheet-metal doors, we heard the sound of boots, the clamor of rifle butts hitting Tito’s door. We heard the sobs of his wife Felicita, the cries of his children. People who’d ventured outside told us the soldiers had searched and sacked the house like all the others, but they’d also dragged Tito away to their truck. His son Apollinaire, who must have been four years old, ran up and clung to his father. Felicita shouted to him to let go and come back to her. But Apollinaire wouldn’t listen: he kept his little arms wrapped around his father’s legs. Then the soldier said – and the whole village heard – “Well, if he wants to go with his father, let’s take him too. After all, he’s the son of an Inyenzi, he’s a baby snake, a baby cockroach. One day he’ll be a big snake himself, a real cockroach, an Inyenzi.” The soldiers threw Tito and his son into the truck, and we never saw them again.

  A suicidal offensive launched from Burundi by a hundred-some badly armed refugees gave the government of Grégoire Kayibanda a pretext to initiate a brutal repression of all Tutsis still living in the country. The months of January and February 1964 were a real foretaste of the 1994 genocide. They were especially bloody in Gikongoro province. My parents sometimes spoke of family members who’d stayed behind in Cyanika, whom they never saw again. My mother had heard that the Rukarara ran red with blood. One day Karozeti, a little boy of five or six, appeared in the village. He was the nephew of Bukuba, the schoolteacher. He’d come from Gikongoro. His whole family had been massacred. He was the only survivor. No one knew how he’d found his way to Nyamata. The phrase “unaccompanied minor” hadn’t been invented yet.

  Bertrand Russell was all alone when he condemned “the most horrible and systematic human massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.” The Catholic church, the former mandate authority, the international criminal courts, none of them had anything to say, apart from denouncing Inyenzi terrorism.

  Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis chose exile. Many of the families in Nyamata left for Burundi. It wasn’t hard: the border was close by, and you could make a discreet escape through the thick, uninhabited bush. But soon a great influx of soldiers arrived at Gako military camp. From now on, the displaced people of Nyamata would be under heavy surveillance. Maybe the soldiers had been sent to prevent a mass escape, maybe to fight off potential incursions; more than anything, they were there to impose a daily regime of terror on every last refugee.

  Gitagata: The fields, the school, the parish

  As I just said, a good number of Nyamata’s displaced people fled to Burundi. Many of the lots had no one living on them. That was when my father decided we should move. After a few good harvests, Gitwe’s soil was depleted, and turned out not to be very fertile. People said the harvests were better near Lake Cyohoha – Lake Cyohoha North, that is – so we set off down the road for Gitagata. We moved into an abandoned house, formerly lived in by Mbayiha, an ener
getic young man who’d managed to clear a sizable patch of land. My father declared it just right for our family. He thrust his stick into the ground. The ground of Gitagata. He would spend the rest of his life there. He would be killed there, along with my mother. Nothing remains of all that now. The killers attacked the house until every last trace was wiped away. The bush has covered everything over. It’s as if we never existed. And yet my family once lived there. Humiliated, afraid, waiting day after day for what was to come, what we didn’t have a word for: genocide. And I alone preserve the memory of it. That’s why I’m writing this.

  That move was another heartbreak for my mother, like a second exile. In Gitwe, families from Gikongoro and Butare were placed together. My mother had her friends right on her doorstep, so to speak. In spite of everything, we still felt somewhat at home there, which at least helped us bear the burden of our sadness. In Gitagata, on the other hand, most of the displaced came from Ruhengeri, from the North, strangers to us southerners. We’d have to find some way to earn their acceptance, and get used to seeing our friends only on Sundays, after Mass. My mother dreaded that, but she faced the prospect with her usual courage, and never let anything show.

  Those days in Gitagata! The days of my childhood! So many were days of pain and sadness … And then others were strangely peaceful, as if our tormentors had forgotten us. Ordinary childhood days, few and far between.

  Days in Gitagata began before dawn. My mother was always the first one up. She washed her feet in the fresh dew and then went to knock on the neighbors’ doors. She was the one who woke up the whole village. Meanwhile, my father pulled away the mats we used as blankets, shouting “Henuka! Henuka! Get up!” And we jumped out of bed.