We waited to hear the results all through the long vacation. They would be announced on the radio, when the new school year was near. We didn’t have a radio in our house, but that was of little concern to me. At twelve years old, I’d come to accept the idea that I would always be a peasant. In my torn pagne, a filthy scarf tied around my head, I would hoe the earth. I would do that all my life, assuming they let me live.
One afternoon, just after the meal, we were outside in the shade of the big manioc tree, resting and shelling beans. All at once a crowd appeared at the end of the dirt road. They seemed to be celebrating. There were women, girls, children dancing. And they were shouting, and as they came toward us, we made out what they were shouting: “Mukasonga! Mukasonga!” They poured into our yard. Leading the parade was the Gitagata merchant who sold cigarettes, gasoline, and boxes of matches from his tiny shop. He was the only one in the village with a radio, and he explained, breathless with emotion, that he’d heard my name announced, Mukasonga Skolastika, and not only had she passed the exam, but she was enrolled in the Lycée Notre Dame de Cîteaux, the secondary school in the capital, the best in all Rwanda. “Yatsinze! Yatsinze!” the crowd cried, “Mukasonga passed!”
I couldn’t understand what was happening. My mother knocked over her basket of beans and began to cry. Then I burst into tears myself. For some reason, my brother André was spitting insults at me. My father, who was taking his siesta, came out of the house wrapped in his covers. He raised his stick as if to strike me. All my sisters were crying. And the crowd was shouting and dancing.
A spontaneous party came together in our yard. The neighbors brought what they could: peanuts, corn. The old women hugged me. The girls and children danced. I danced with them. It wasn’t just my success they were celebrating, it was the whole village’s! A little later, my godmother Angelina came to confirm the good news. She lived far away, in Gitwe. Her husband was a teacher, and he had a radio. As soon as she heard my name, she set off running, and all along the road, she was shouting, “Mukasonga! Mukasonga! Yatsinze!”
We had a great deal of trouble coming up with the six hundred francs of the minerval, the tuition fees, and putting together the supplies required of boarders at the school: a blanket, a pair of sheets, a bath towel, a piece of soap, a little bucket. The village tailor sewed me a nightshirt and two pairs of panties, as long as boxer shorts – the first I ever had. My father sold our bunches of ripe bananas and set aside what little money we’d earned from the coffee harvest. But even with all that, he could still only buy me one sheet: it was the start of my third year before we managed to buy the other. Everyone in Gitagata contributed, making up more than half the cost of the supplies. I was no longer the daughter of Cosma and Stefania; I was the daughter of the whole little community of Gitagata and Gitwe.
Finally the great day came, the first day of school. We had to set off early in the morning if we wanted to reach Kigali before nightfall. Even for a good walker like me, forty-five kilometers was a serious hike. My father came with me. But first we had to say goodbye to the neighbors. This took a long time: so many greetings, so much advice to be given. Finally the women untied the knots on their pagnes, which they used as purses, and gave me a few coins or a crumpled little bill. And then we were off, we crossed the big bridge over the Nyabarongo. I was on my way to another world.
1968-1971: A humiliated student
Arriving at the Lycée Notre-Dame-de-Cîteaux with the little cardboard suitcase once used by my brother André, and then by Alexia, I was filled with hope and apprehension at the same time. My apprehensions were more than justified, but I never lost hope.
I’d seen violent and even deadly persecution in Nyamata, but the solidarity of the ghetto gave us the strength to endure it. At school, I would know the solitude of humiliation and rejection.
I hadn’t shed my Tutsi status when I crossed the Nyabarongo – anything but. And in any case, there was no way to hide it. Every student was issued an ID card marked with their so-called ethnic group, like a brand on a cow. When I was forced to show it to one of the sisters, her look and her attitude changed immediately: wariness, disdain, or hatred? I didn’t want to know. They also discovered that I came from Nyamata. I wasn’t only a Tutsi: I was an Inyenzi, one of those cockroaches they’d expelled from the livable part of Rwanda, and perhaps from the human race. Among my schoolmates, too, I soon came to feel different. Or rather, it was they who made that difference cruelly clear to me. They made me ashamed of the color of my skin (not dark enough for their tastes), of my nose (too straight, they said), and of my hair (too much of it). It was my hair that caused me the most trouble. Evidently it was Ethiopian hair, irende, the supposed mark of the Inyenzi. I spent my time putting water on that Inyenzi hair so it would shrink down to a little ball, tight as a sponge. Most often, I resigned myself to shaving it off. That hurt me: in spite of the mockery, I was fond of my hair.
They divided us up into teams, and we took turns doing the dishes, cleaning the refectory or the dormitories. The team leader was always a third-year girl. My leader was named Pascasie. I was the only Tutsi on the team. Pascasie and the rest took an immediate dislike to me. The hardest chores always fell to me. In fact, I soon realized it wasn’t my place to wait for orders. I always volunteered. As the mayor of Nyamata had said, the Tutsis had lost the right to be proud.
The teams all ate at the same table. Mealtimes were the hardest part of the day for me. A thousand times, I wished I didn’t have to eat. My throat went tight with terror whenever a meal was near. We walked into the refectory in silence. We prayed, and then sat down in silence. A bell signaled that it was time to begin eating, and we had permission to talk. The room filled with the sound of conversation, but no one ever spoke to me. I could feel them staring at me, telling me I wasn’t supposed to be there, that my presence disgusted them, that it wasn’t by choice that they were living – and, even worse, eating – with an Inyenzi, a cockroach. I grew used to serving myself after all the others. When there were bananas or sweet potatoes, there was nothing left in the dish by the time it came to me, and I had to make do with the maggot-ridden beans no one would touch. And I grew used to peeling the sweet potatoes in the others’ place, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets. I never rebelled, even if I wept when no one was looking. I found all this almost normal. A strange curse hung over me. I was a Tutsi. Worse yet, I was from Nyamata, I was an Inyenzi. I wasn’t supposed to be there at the Lycée Notre-Dame-de-Cîteaux. It was a mistake, an oversight on the part of those who’d expelled us from the Rwandan community, the people of the majority. For that reason, I made myself a paragon of zeal. I was always on the front bench at Mass, I was first in line for confession. I wanted to be beyond reproach. I was convinced that good grades alone could protect me.
Sometimes I think I never slept in all those three years at the school. At home the nights were short, but at school there was no such thing as night. The few other Tutsi students knew as well as I did that they had to be among the best, and so they worked night and day, particularly night. When dinner was done, a bell rang. We headed off to the dormitories. We washed our feet as we entered, then took our places by the bunk beds. A bell rang. We knelt. We prayed. A bell rang. We turned back our bedspreads. We got into bed. I slipped very carefully under the covers, letting no one see that I had only one sheet. The monitor made a few more rounds to silence the chatter, and then the lights were turned out.
But we Tutsis were waiting for our moment. We waited until everyone was sound asleep, until no one was getting up to go to the bathroom, until the sisters had gone off for the night. Then Agnès, who was in her third year, shook the piece of green canvas that was our standard-issue bedspread: this was the signal. We quietly got out of bed, wrapped ourselves in our bedspreads to ward off the nighttime cold, and followed after Agnès. She was a tiny girl, and her bedspread dragged behind her on the ground: we called her Monseigneur. The silent parade ended in the bathroom, the only place where a nigh
tlight stayed on all through the night. We gently closed the door, and one of us sat down with her back pressed against it, in case someone came along. We had our study room for the night. Often we studied our lessons and did our homework until morning. Everything I learned at Notre-Dame-de-Cîteaux I learned in the toilet.
The teachers seemed to be completely faithful to the regime and the system. Most of them were Belgian, except the French teacher, who was French, and the English teacher, who was English. The only Rwandan was the Kinyarwanda teacher, Victoria, a Tutsi. In any case, we had to beware of the teachers. The older girls had warned us of that as soon as we got there by telling us the story of Sylvia. Sylvia was from Nyamata. In a composition – I never found out what the subject was – she made the mistake of alluding to the displaced people of Nyamata and calling for fairer treatment. They said the paper was immediately sent on to the Mother Superior, Sister Béatrice. And Sylvia was expelled. You were supposed to say that Rwanda was a country blessed by God, as the priests claimed. That Kayibanda had created a little paradise in the heart of Africa. A waiting room for heaven. Before he came along, there was only darkness and barbarity. I memorized the islands and the cities of Japan: Hokkaido, Nagasaki, Yokohama … It sounded like Kinyarwanda.
The first year was the worst, but in time my quarantine turned a little less harsh. A third-year girl, Immaculée Nyirabyago, who later married a minister in the Habyarimana government, took me under her wing. She was from Kigali, a real city girl! They said her father was a Tutsi (her mother was Hutu), but she was, if I can put it like this, a “fashionable girl.” Everyone was drawn to her, her schoolmates and teachers alike. A little clique had formed around her, made up of all the daughters of ministers, company directors, important people. There was also Assumpta, President Kayibanda’s daughter.
It must be said that I spared no effort to gain Immaculée’s protection, if not her friendship. I offered her my services: risking expulsion, I used to sneak out of the school to go and buy sugar for her at the market.
At breakfast, the very watery milk furnished by the WFP was not sugared. If you wanted sugar, you had to get it for yourself, so anyone who had money used the free time between a meal and the next class to slip out to the market and buy some. Immaculée promised she’d give me a little if I went in her place. Off I went, then, not so much to buy sugar as to safeguard her “friendship.”
At that time, which must have been 1971, there was major road-work being done between the school and the market. There were huge piles of dirt everywhere. All you had to do was climb up a pile and slide down the other side, and you were in the middle of the market. Just like a playground slide! I brought back the sugar, terrified that sister Kisito, the pitiless monitor, might catch me, but also proud of my exploit, which strengthened my bonds with my protectress.
Having found a place under Immaculée’s wing, I was sometimes allowed into the little clique of privileged girls. I wasn’t really a part of it, of course, and I never felt at ease in their midst. We all wore the same uniform, but still there was no bridging the distance between us. They left the school whenever they pleased, they were never in a hurry to get back to the classroom, they never hesitated to challenge the teachers. No one ever rebuked them. But above all, they had shoes – some of them with high heels! I myself went barefoot. It wasn’t until the end of my third year, by cheating on the minerval, that I was able to buy a pair of kambambili, what I believe are called flip-flops in English, my first shoes!
Immaculée’s friends’ attitude toward me was deeply ambiguous. Many of them had Tutsi mothers, women forced to marry men in power. The girls were Hutu, of course, since their fathers were. But it seemed as if they felt a need to shake off the hereditary stain of having a Tutsi for a mother. And so they often tried to top each other in their scorn and cruelty toward their Tutsi schoolmates. Sometimes, on the other hand, they seemed to want to befriend them, and to forge mysteriously cordial bonds. That was how I went one day to eat manioc paste at the Kayibanda house.
On Sunday afternoons, we were allowed to leave the school. I generally didn’t take advantage of that freedom, and stayed behind to work. But sometimes, at Immaculée’s urging, I went with the little clique to one of the girls’ houses for a meal of manioc paste. Manioc paste was considered the “civilized” dish par excellence, something reserved for city-dwellers, a little like champagne in France. Like all the others, Assumpta sometimes invited her friends to her house – the President’s house! I still wonder why Immaculée and her friends brought me along. Did they think it would be funny? Was it a dare? Were they trying to humiliate me? I had a knot in my stomach when we came to the military checkpoints around the presidential residence. There was no way to distinguish me from the others by my size or my face, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my hair. I was sure it would give me away, that the soldiers would seize me because of my hair. Nevertheless, I walked straight through the checkpoint with the other girls, to whom the soldiers gave a friendly greeting, and found myself in the kitchen of the President of the Republic. “Stay right here,” my schoolmates said, “and whatever you do, don’t go into the living room. The President mustn’t see you.” I ate my manioc paste in the kitchen. If the President’s wife Viridiana happened to come in, there was nothing to worry about: she was a Tutsi.
And then there were the vacations, the joy of going back home to my family, the party Gitagata would throw for the return of its “intellectuals.” I would dance with the girls who’d stayed in the village—how I loved to dance! Laughing, they would tell me all the village gossip, and I would tell them the news from the city. I would pick up the mattock again, alongside my mother. I wouldn’t miss the sorghum harvest. But before all that, there was a terrible ordeal to endure: crossing the big bridge over the Nyabarongo.
And so, on the first day of vacation, the three or four girls from Nyamata all set off together. We ran, we had to be there before dark. Sometimes we weren’t let out of school until after lunch, so instead of the main road home, through Kicukiro, we took a short cut that went straight to Gahanga. But for that we had to walk past the camp. We didn’t know what might happen if the soldiers asked for our ID cards. We took a thousand precautions to get by without being seen. Then we plunged into the valley, we climbed up Mburabuturo hill, we ran, we ran, we barreled down the slopes of the Gahanga sector toward the valley of the Nyabarongo, and we saw the big iron bridge, the reddish water, the papyrus plants in the swamps. We also saw the barricade at the bridge’s entrance, and the soldiers slumped in their chairs, the rifles between their legs, the beer bottles scattered at their feet.
They’d seen us coming. They knew who we were: we were Inyenzi from Nyamata. There was no point trying to hide our hair, trying to make ourselves inconspicuous: they were waiting for us. We scarcely dared to go on, but we had to cross the bridge. The soldiers were already snickering as they saw us timidly inching toward them. They shouted at us, “Inyenzis, lower your heads, don’t show your faces, don’t show your noses, we don’t want to see that, whatever you do don’t look us in the eye, come forward but keep your heads down, never forget, you’re Inyenzi.” We held out our papers, and the humiliations began. Depending on their mood or their fancies, they might spit in our faces, or kick us with their heavy boots, or strike us with their rifle butts. They dragged us to the bank of the Nyabarongo and forced us to look down into the muddy water, as red as if it had been tainted with blood: “Look closely,” they cried, “that’s where you’re going to end up, all you cockroaches, you Inyenzi, one day you’ll all be thrown into that water.”
1971-1973: The School of Social Work in Butare, the illusion of a normal life
At the end of the first two years, there was a competitive exam for admission to the humanities program, which is to say the second half of university study, or to the professional schools. Every candidate had to state three choices, in order of preference: one of them would be granted, depending on the test results and the ranking. A
s my first choice, I put down the School of Social Work in Butare, with a note that I meant not the two-year auxiliary course, but the four-year course for full-fledged social workers. All my friends laughed at me, telling me I’d never be admitted, even with my good grades: the Butare School of Social Work was not for the Inyenzi of Nyamata.
Nevertheless, I was admitted to the full four-year program, starting in the fall of 1971. There were some thirty of us in my entering class. There were six Tutsis: Aimable, Perpétue, Thérèse, Brigitte, Anasthasie, and me. But very soon I found that, unlike at school in Kigali, “ethnic” differences were of no concern at Butare, not to the nuns who ran the school, and not to the teachers, most of whom were Canadian. The atmosphere was relaxed, and the freedoms and comfort the students enjoyed were a revelation for me. So, in the midst of the pious, racist ghetto that was Rwanda, one little island had been spared, a place where you could find a normal life by your work alone! Needless to say, some of my Hutu classmates didn’t appreciate having Tutsis in the school. Some of them watched us like hawks. Everything we did or said was reported to a third-year student, a certain Immaculée, nicknamed the Mastodon because of her imposing size, who had appointed herself political komissar and liked to boast of her closeness to the député Mukakayange Angela, an alumna of our school. But their spying didn’t worry me. Inside the school I felt safe, as if my grades had erased the word “Tutsi” from my ID card. I was convinced that this school was my long awaited lucky break, that the curse hanging over me had finally been lifted.
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