Sitting beside the three stones of the hearth, my mother spun out her tales – her stories of wicked stepmothers, talking animals, the songs of the kindly old aunt – and I was the only one listening and drowsing, rocked by the interminable motherly singsong, and in my half-sleep, lulled by the heat of the fire, I said to Mama: “More! More!”
The 1960s: Hutu terror, between the militias and the soldiers
Those peaceful days were a rare thing in Nyamata. The soldiers of Gako camp were always there to remind us what we were: snakes, Inyenzi, cockroaches. Nothing human about us. One day, we’d have to be got rid of. In the meantime, the terror was systematic and organized. On the pretext of training or security checks, the soldiers endlessly patrolled the road, between the houses, in the banana groves. The soldiers pointed their weapons from the trucks that drove back and forth over the dirt roads. Sometimes they fired.
From Gitagata to the school in Nyamata, the dirt road joined up with the highway that went on to the Burundi border. All the children were in a hurry to reach school before the drum sounded. But they had an even more pressing concern: they had to listen for engines. If they heard the tiniest sound, they had just time enough to dive under the coffee plants, leap into the bush, or take cover in the first house they could find. The road to Nyamata was also the road to Gako camp. Military trucks often went by, and the soldiers fired or threw grenades to terrorize any child foolish enough to walk by the side of the road. Nothing the soldiers did on the Nyamata road was a scandal, since no one ever walked it but Tutsis.
One day there were four of us on the way to school: Jacqueline, Kayisharaza, Candida, and me. A truck suddenly appeared behind us. We hadn’t heard it coming. All we could do was dive into the coffee plants. Too late! The soldiers had seen us, and they’d thrown a grenade. Kayisharaza’s leg was shredded. She had to give up on school. She couldn’t drag her dead leg all the way to Nyamata. She was the oldest girl in her family, and she became a burden for them, for her brothers and sisters. I don’t know how many schoolchildren were wounded like that on the road to Nyamata.
And so paths had to be cleared through the brush, making the walk much longer. But the risk of running into an elephant or a buffalo frightened us far less than the thought of coming across an army truck.
A house was no sanctuary either. The soldiers often burst in, especially just before dawn or after nightfall. The sheet metal door fell to the ground with a clatter, and three or four soldiers raced inside. They brutally shoved us out; anyone unlucky enough to be slow about it was struck with a rifle butt. They lined us up along the dirt road, and while one of them kept us at bay with his rifle, the others inside scattered the straw of the beds, overturned the jugs, took the clean mats – our spare bedding – down from the walls to throw them into the mud or the dirt. They claimed to be looking for correspondence with the Inyenzi in Burundi, or photographs of Kigeri. Once they’d made sure Kayibanda’s portrait was hanging in the place of honor, they went off into the night or early morning to bring terror to other houses.
Sometimes, on the contrary, they confined us inside our houses. No one knew why this curfew had been imposed, or how long it would last. Then they forbade us to farm. The children couldn’t go to school. The soldiers methodically patrolled the village. Anyone careless enough to set foot outside was beaten. Life became hard if the curfew went on: there was no way to fetch water or wood. We couldn’t dig sweet potatoes or cut bananas. Even the latrines, which were generally far from the houses, off in the banana grove, were off limits. Closed up in our houses, we were paralyzed with fright. We didn’t dare speak.
The only seemingly inviolable refuge was the church of the Nyamata mission. As soon as we sensed some threat coming, we knew we had to get to that one place of safety. There was something reassuring in what happened next, since we’d seen it many times before. It would happen on a Sunday: the Tutsis gathered for Mass would hear the roar of a hostile crowd coming from outside the church’s front door. The mob had clearly been mustered up by the local authorities, who took great care to keep their hatred at a fever pitch and incite them to violence. Sometimes the howling crowd would try to get in. Then the priest saying Mass, a German named Father Canoni – that’s what we called him, at least – stepped away from the altar, took off his chasuble, went into the sacristy for his rifle, and slowly advanced toward the assailants. They hesitated for a moment, then backed away and ran off as fast as they could.
In 1994 the Tutsis of Nyamata once again sought shelter in the church, but this time there was no Father Canoni to chase off the murderers: the UN soldiers had come to evacuate the white people, and the missionaries went with them, knowing they were leaving for dead more than five thousand men, women, and children who thought they’d found sanctuary in their church.
Today the Nyamata church has become a genocide memorial. The survivors had to fight hard to keep it from becoming a place of worship again, as the Catholic higher-ups insisted. In a crypt, the skulls are lined up in neat rows, the bones carefully stacked. The sheet metal roof is peppered with bright, shiny spots where it was struck by bullets or grenade shrapnel. Against the brick wall, to the left of the altar, the Virgin of Lourdes watches over the now-empty pews, her veil red with blood. That Virgin of Nyamata was lucky. She too escaped the carnage. In many other churches, the killers shattered the statues of the Virgin. They thought she’d been given a Tutsi face. They couldn’t stand the sight of her straight little nose.
Things turned still worse in 1967. From the earliest days of that year, we could feel the tension rising, something dangerous coming. Among the Bagesera, the town councilors held mysterious meetings to which only Hutus were summoned. The rumor was that machetes were being handed out. Some were even distributed at the town hall, people said. Then sometime in April, maybe Easter Monday, all the adults over sixteen were called to the town hall.
I stayed home alone with my little sisters, Julienne and Jeanne. It was raining. One of those violent downpours typical of the long rainy season, transforming the dirt roads into muddy torrents. I was inside, watching over the few beans heating up in the kettle. My two little sisters were outside in spite of the rain: the corn field had to be guarded, or the monkeys would beat us to the brand-new ears. The only sound I could hear was the patter of the rain on the banana trees’ huge leaves. Those banana trees grow faster because of the household waste we throw at their feet. But suddenly I made out another noise I knew well – shuwafu! shuwafu! – the sound of boots in the mud. I rushed outside and ran straight into two soldiers driving my two sisters along with blows from their rifle butts. The little girls collapsed at my feet. The soldiers walked into the house, ransacked it in the usual way, then disappeared.
Trembling in terror, the three of us held each other tight. I’d put the sheet metal back over the doorway, as if that might protect us.
And then came the sound of shouts and tramping feet from the road. Through the holes in the sheet metal, we saw something that left us petrified with fear: a huge crowd of soldiers heading toward Lake Cyohoha, dragging bodies that looked like broken marionettes, among which I recognized some neighbors of ours, Rwabukumba and his brother. They were young men, not yet twenty. The bodies being dragged along – not all of them corpses, some were still moving and groaning – belonged to young men, snakes, cockroaches, Inyenzi, who had to be eliminated before they could turn dangerous.
We spent the night waiting for our parents. They came back very early the next day. They never said a word. My mother always took such care to elegantly tie on her pagne, but now she had it draped over her head, like the Holy Virgin. She said nothing. Neither did the neighbors, when they reappeared. They took care not to cross each other’s paths, they pretended they hadn’t seen each other. My mother murmured a strange word, a word she didn’t understand: the English word meeting. We weren’t supposed to have meetings. And when three people greeted each other, someone murmured “meeting” and they all fled in different directions.
When we went back to school, there were bodies by the highway to Nyamata, in the ditches. Some had been thrown there, others had been swept along by the rushing rainwater. Among them we recognized Ngangure, the father of Protais, who was in my class at school. Their families had been forbidden to pick up the bodies.
No one wanted to fetch water. We didn’t dare. We made do as best we could with our stored-up rainwater, but soon it ran out, and we had no choice but to head to the lake. Drawing water is traditionally the children’s job, so I went off with Candida.
On the lakeshore, things had changed. There were people we hadn’t seen before: very young men, adolescents, just kids in uniform. But not military uniforms: they were dressed in shorts and khaki shirts, a little like boy scouts. They didn’t have rifles; they had big sticks or clubs, studded with sharp spikes. They were living in the buildings that had recently been put up by the lakeside. Until that day, we had no idea who they were meant for.
Many of those boys were posted along the shoreline, as if standing guard. When we walked into the water to fill our calabashes, we saw what they were guarding: the tied-up bodies of victims slowly dying in the shallows of the lake, little waves washing over them now and then. The newcomers were there to keep away the families who wanted to rescue their children or at least take home their bodies. For a long time we found little pieces of skin and rotting body parts in our calabashes when we fetched water.
Soon our new persecutors made themselves known: they were the revolutionary youth brigade of the single party, the MDR-Parmehutu. In truth, they were hoodlums picked up in the streets of Kigali and trained for violence and murder. They were quick learners, and soon mastered the only lesson they were ever taught: how to humiliate and terrorize a defenseless population.
Every day toward mid-morning, the youth of the single party paraded in double time, their cudgels or clubs on their shoulders. They sang at the top of their lungs, and their songs seemed to be meant for our ears. They sang the praises of Kayibanda, the emancipator of the Hutus; they celebrated the people who would forever be the majority, the only real Rwandans, authentic and indigenous, the Hutus. The parade route was always the same: from their camp on Lake Cyohoha up to Rwabashi’s hut, where the dirt road met the highway from Nyamata to the Burundi border. The first half of the parade was fairly orderly, but not the return trip. Once they reached the highway and turned around, the young people of the party broke ranks and spread out along the path back to camp, turning into a violent, pillaging mob. Woe unto any careless passerby who hadn’t had time to take shelter: he would be punched, thrown to the ground, beaten. The women who sold peanuts and sometimes bananas in front of their houses hurried to bundle up their wares before they could be trampled and looted. Sometimes the thugs invaded the houses, simply for the pleasure of wreaking havoc. And we heard their laughter, mingled with insults, as they boasted of their exploits.
From then on, going for water from Lake Cyohoha meant exposing yourself to all sorts of torments, because you had to pass by their camp. Coming back from the lake with our calabashes on our heads, we found our persecutors waiting. Now we were at the mercy of their sadistic whims. And they had plenty of imagination. For a little fun, they emptied our calabashes so we’d have to go back for water, then broke them when we came by again. They laughed and laughed. Or else they would line us up along the path, spit in our faces, and stomp on our feet with their big army shoes. And they laughed at the tears of the little snakes, the cockroaches, the Inyenzi. Sometimes it was more serious, their eyes were red, they weren’t laughing, they beat up the boys and dragged a girl into the undergrowth behind their camp to be raped. That was why we took to fetching water only in the fierce heat of the early afternoon, while they were taking their siesta, doing our very best not to make a sound.
Of course, it was the girls that interested the young revolutionaries the most. On the way home from their parade, they would come after any girl who hadn’t had time to hide. Rapes were not rare. A few poor girls became their playthings, just as young Tutsi women and girls would be during the genocide. At least there was no AIDS in those days.
The hunt for girls was especially intense after dark. At that time, I was spending the nights with my cousin Mukantwari, who might have been twenty years old. It’s a custom in Rwanda for girls to share the bed of young women of marriageable age. This is especially common among cousins: they spend the night telling stories, posing riddles, making fun of boys, and laughing without end.
My cousin lived with her grandmother Bureriya, a bent-over old woman she kept company. Her parents lived across the way. Her father Ngoboka was a very strong man, afraid of no one. He had an axe that kept away anyone who might mean him harm.
More than once, the Parmehutu youth tried to get their hands on Mukantwari. As soon as we heard them coming, Mukantwari and I would dive under her grandmother’s bed while the old lady brandished her little stick and shouted, as loud as she could: “Go away! Go away!” She snatched up a burning branch from the hearth and waved it in the assailants’ faces.
Hearing her shouts, Ngoboka – whose name means nothing other than “He-who-comes-when-he-is-needed-most” – came running and drove off the would-be abductors, whose bravery did not extend to confronting a colossus and his terrible axe appearing all at once in the night.
The Tutsi girls fascinated the Hutus. Their leaders set the example: marrying a Tutsi was one of the privileges of the victors. They came to Nyamata to take their pick.
In Nyamata, then called the municipality of Kanzenze, the mayor was the first one to do so. He was a Hutu, “from Rwanda,” as we said. No one educated enough for that post had been found among the Bagesera. The mayor was an old bachelor. No one knew why he’d never married. But in Nyamata it wasn’t hard to find a wife. He set his sights on Banayija, a very beautiful girl whose impoverished mother supported herself and her four daughters by selling loose cigarettes and sorghum or banana beer. When the mayor came for her daughter, he didn’t ask Banayija’s opinion, or her mother’s. “The Tutsis and their daughters have lost the right to be proud,” he liked to say. And he went off with Banayija.
Many others came to help themselves in Nyamata. Any girl whose beauty put her in danger was hidden away. Often, though, the parents felt so threatened that they didn’t dare refuse. Besides, handing a daughter over to the persecutors might mean saving the family.
1968: The national exam, unhoped-for success
After six years of primary school, students found themselves facing a formidable barrier: the famous and dreaded national examination, the competitive test you had to pass at all costs if you wanted to be among the select few admitted to secondary school. The challenge was even more daunting for Tutsis, because the ethnic quotas put in place by the Hutu regime allowed them no more than ten percent of the admissions. That percentage had been grudgingly granted, and was often applied according to criteria that had nothing to do with the scores. We in Nyamata never came close to the fateful quota: most years, not a single candidate from Nyamata was named on the lists.
It was in 1968 that I took the national exam. Obviously, no one had any illusions about the results, but that didn’t stop the students from studying hard, nor the teachers from encouraging them, nor the parents from hoping. Nonetheless, we knew perfectly well that of the five hundred-some students taking the test in Nyamata, we would be able to count those who passed on the fingers of one hand.
When the morning of the exam came, I was firmly resolved not to take it. I claimed I’d come down with agapfura – a sore throat. I suddenly developed an irresistible zeal for housework; it was vitally urgent that I sweep the yard and fetch water – far more urgent than walking ten kilometers to take a test I had no chance of passing. My mother was about to give in, but my father didn’t see things that way. His children’s scholarly success meant more to him than anything. He thought that might give his family some chance of surviving, of being spared. He clung to that illusion for a
ll he was worth. André and Alexia had gone on to secondary school before the ethnic apartheid was imposed. Now it was my turn. Like them, I would keep up my studies.
In a tone that allowed no objection, my father ordered me, “Get ready, and be quick about it.” I splashed water on my face, washed my feet – there wasn’t enough water that morning for anything more. I put on my school dress. My father had already tied on his white pagne, shouldered his stick, and now he was pushing me out onto the road to Nyamata.
As usual, they’d set up a testing room in the mission. The three classes of the Nyamata primary school were there, along with the classes from Cyugaro, Ntarama, and Musenyi. You had to be good at French, at math, you had to know the names of the ministers, the date of Rwanda’s independence, the role of the Party … You had to be smart, but not too smart. Everyone had noticed long before that the best students never passed. Better to stick to an unremarkable average grade. In any case, the standards they used to pick the winners from Nyamata remained deeply mysterious to us.
Cockroaches Page 5