It must be said that the School of Social Work strove to play a pioneering role in the promotion of women. The few women who had become députés or ministers (there were always one or two female ministers in the government) had studied there. Now and then one of those great ladies would pay us a visit, and no doubt some of us were already picturing ourselves in the presidential box on Independence Day.
But our curriculum didn’t set out to prepare us for politics or social life. The goal was to make us a real force for Rwanda’s development, able to adapt to any milieu, especially the countryside, so there were many practical courses in addition to French, math, and English. There was carpentry: starting from a block of wood, we had to put together a bench, making more or less skillful use of a saw and a hammer. In animal sciences, we didn’t limit ourselves to theory: we had to build a rabbit hutch, and we had to go and feed the pigs in their sties. We had hands-on training in agriculture: every student was responsible for the plot assigned to her in the school’s huge gardens. We took a personal interest in the success of our plantings, since those were the vegetables we ate at meals. We were better equipped than the peasants in the hills, it’s true. We had a mattock, of course, but also a hoe, a Dutch hoe, a harrow … And then there was the wheelbarrow, an infernal device that insisted on zigzagging every which way with its load of manure, no matter how I struggled. Nor was hygiene forgotten: there was a Belgian teacher who specialized in latrines. Under his direction, we dug the trench, laid the foundation. But the latrines were never finished. That teacher spent too long on theory. Needless to say, we called him Monsieur Musarane – Monsieur Latrines.
Mademoiselle Barbe, a Frenchwoman, introduced us to civilized cuisine, which was based on mayonnaise. I became an expert in beating it with a fork in the bowl. I still haven’t lost my touch. Mademoiselle Barbe undertook to initiate us into the mysteries of sauerkraut. We scrupulously followed her instructions, taking care not to seem too surprised: cut up the cabbage, put it in a bucket, set a rock on the top to keep it tamped down. But I rebelled when we had to empty a bottle of beer into the bucket, a bottle of Primus, that precious potion we could never afford, not even with the earnings from the coffee harvest, a drink given only to the gravely ill in the direst of circumstances. I had to hold back my tears as I poured out the beer: how I wished I could filch it to give to my father! But that was impossible. Mademoiselle Barbe followed her recipe to the letter. Then we had to watch over the fermentation, taste the cabbage. Mademoiselle Barbe swallowed it; we spat it out. Finally the great day came. The sauerkraut was ready. None of the girls would touch it. Leading by example, Mademoiselle Barbe served herself a plateful and enthusiastically ate it down. She then disappeared for a week. Some of us wanted to go and pay her a visit in her little room. Out of the question, they told us: she wasn’t well. We didn’t dare burst out laughing.
I’ve always thought that Butare was the best part of my education – the part that made me able to adapt wherever I later went, as much among the Hutu peasantwomen of Burundi as in France, in my trade as a social worker.
An unfamiliar atmosphere of freedom reigned in the school, thanks largely to one single nun, Sister Capito. She was old, but overflowing with energy and ideas. Her innovations caused a scandal in a Rwanda where the regime and the Church imposed the most narrow-minded conservatism. For instance, we had loudspeakers in the refectory and the dormitories, but they broadcast neither hymns to the Virgin nor anthems to the glory of Kayibanda; all day long, we heard songs by Claude François, Adamo, Nana Mouskouri. We were awakened by If I Had a Hammer. The beds in the dormitory were separated by screens, and for the first time in my life, like most of my schoolmates, I discovered the advantages of a certain amount of privacy.
Every morning a delegation of students went to draw up the day’s menu, with the aid of the head cook. There was no maggoty porridge like we had at Kigali; there were bananas, vegetables, and fruit from our garden. At breakfast we had lard, standing in as butter: we eagerly waited for morning so we could wolf down pieces of bread dripping with oily fat.
For national holidays and our days out, we wore a special uniform that brought us a good deal of attention in the parades. It was tight at the waist, with chevrons underscoring the bold décolleté. There was no mistaking it, we girls from the School of Social Work were the feminine elite of our nation!
Thanks to one of Sister Capito’s most daring initiatives, Butare’s high-minded set – or were they simply jealous? – took to calling us ihene, goats, the goat being the animal emblem of wanton licentiousness. On Sunday afternoons, from two to four, the boys from the nearby secondary school were allowed to come calling on us. Oh! those visits were well chaperoned, of course. They took place in the garden: benches were put out under the bougainvillea trees, and two girls sat on each bench. Those two girls were allowed to receive only one boy. They sat waiting under the bougainvillea. The boys stood at the gate, not daring to come any further. There they stayed behind the gate, looking at us as we sat under the bougainvillea. The fourth-year girls showed a little more initiative: they went to bring the boys in themselves. But we first-year girls never moved. We never managed to get a boy to come see us. We just sat there under the bougainvillea.
My Tutsi schoolmates and I had another destination for our days off. We went to visit Queen Gicanda, the widow of King Mutara Rudahigwa, who died mysteriously in Bujumbura in 1959. We had to make very sure we weren’t being followed. We took a thousand precautions. At first, we went purely out of curiosity. I had a pretext: two of her aunts were in Nyamata. I gave her news of them. Like us, Nyirakigwene and Nyiramasuka had been deported to Nyamata. They’d lost none of their regal dignity. They sat majestically face-to-face in front of their shabby sheet-metal hut, both of them crowned with diadems of white pearls and draped in immaculate pagnes. They received their visitors – who sat on mats laid out just like at the royal court – with noble beneficence. We scarcely said a word. It was enough just to look at them. They never went to fetch water or wood for themselves. We fought for the honor of serving them. Even the Hutus. As for Gicanda, she welcomed us like a good-hearted mother. She gave us milk to drink. It was like being transported to another world. The world we’d never known.
In 1994, the old woman was viciously attacked. I won’t describe how she was humiliated, raped, tortured. I want to remember only the woman who gave us milk, Gicanda, the queen with the beautiful face.
1973: Driven from school, driven from Rwanda
At the beginning of the 1972 school year, I quickly realized things weren’t the same. Our principal, Béatrice, whom we nicknamed Nyiramusambi, the “black-crowned crane,” because of her long neck, had been replaced by a new principal. He was violently opposed to Sister Capito’s bold ideas, and intended to impose the moral order that was the grim, hypocritical norm of a very Christian Rwanda: no more music, no more meetings with boys. One day he caught me humming a song by Nana Mouskouri, and he forced me to sing it in front of all my classmates. I nearly died of shame.
Among the new teachers there were refugees from Burundi, driven out by the bloody events of May 1972: they only heightened the mounting tension, as if there were any need. We Tutsis had developed particularly sensitive antennae to detect the early signs of a threat, and its inexorable buildup. We soon observed that the Mastodon and her political cell never came to class anymore. We saw them going back and forth in the hallways, having long whispered conversations, giving themselves important airs. They flocked around Immaculée, one of the Burundian refugees, and often they went to the beautiful yellow house she’d been lodged in, behind the post office. They had meetings well into the night in the big vacant lot separating the school from the eucalyptus woods. We knew something was coming, we knew it wouldn’t be long, and we knew the Tutsi students would be in the crosshairs.
One afternoon, during math class I think, we heard a loud crash. It was the gate of the main entry being beaten down, and at almost the same moment two Tuts
is in their last year opened the classroom door, shouting “Mukasonga! Mukasonga! Hurry!” Without a moment’s thought, we raced into the hallway. Behind us was the same angry-mob sound I’d heard thirteen years earlier, at Magi, the same roar rushing toward me I still hear today, pursuing me in my nightmares.
We ran across the vacant lot. I don’t know how, but we managed to get through the school’s barbed wire fence and hide in the eucalyptus woods between the school and the Gikongoro road. From our hiding place, we saw our classmates go by, showing the boys from the secondary school the way, shouting “This time they’re done for! We’re going to get those Inyenzi!”
When night fell we went our separate ways to look for safer places to hide. In my case this was with Gasana, my godmother Angelina’s brother, who lived in Butare. He worked and lived at the National Pedagogical Institute with his sister Margot, a university employee. I often went there to eat manioc paste. They welcomed me in and somehow got word to my sister Alexia, who was a teacher at the school of the Anglican Kigeme mission in Gikongoro. There was no question of going to Nyamata, it seemed far too dangerous. There would probably be checkpoints on the roads, and we had no idea what was going on there. Alexia came to get me. I don’t remember how we reached Kigeme. But there, too, the situation was explosive. Alexia had already been threatened, and couldn’t take me in. One of my sister’s colleagues, I think her name was Angèle, agreed to hide me. She was a Tutsi married to a Hutu député. Needless to say, the master of the house wasn’t told of my presence: the Tutsi wives of high-placed Hutus often protected their family members this way, by discreetly integrating them into their households. I tried to blend in with the many serving girls who worked in the back courtyard, as they did at most big Rwandan houses. One servant more or less, who would notice? When I sensed pressing danger, I slipped under a bed. Sometimes I stayed there all day. I lived like a rat.
I’ve always wondered how Angèle talked her husband into driving me to Kigali. Had he taken pity on me? Was the député afraid he might face trouble for hiding an Inyenzi under his roof, even if he didn’t know it? In any case, it was in the trunk of the Hutu député’s car that I made the trip to Kigali. They dropped me off at the bursar’s office of the Mission, where I found a priest from Nyamata who took me on to the parish.
On the road to Gitagata, everyone ran toward me, in tears. There was one name on everyone’s lips: “Régis! Régis!” That was the name of a neighbor, a son of Kagango, the sculptor who carved beautiful female heads on canes. Régis and I had been in the same classes at primary school, and then he left for the little seminary in Kabgayi. As I walked on, I learned in bits and pieces of his horrible death. There too, the Hutu students had launched a sudden attack on their Tutsi schoolmates, before the eyes of the missionaries who taught them. Régis managed to get away, but then he carelessly set out on the main road to Kigali. The Hutu seminarians caught up with him and brought him back to Kabgayi. There they shaved him with pieces of glass and stoned him to death. An unending lament accompanied me all along the road: “Régis! Régis!”
As soon as I was home, my parents forbade me to go out again. They were more silent than ever. It was as if the walls had eyes and ears. We avoided talking to even the closest neighbors, people we shared everything with. As my mother said again and again, we mustn’t have “meetings.” We closed up the sheet-metal door well before nightfall. We talked in low tones.
André was teaching at the Shyogwe secondary school, and somehow he got back to the house, followed by Alexia a few days later. The whole family was safe and sound. Now the parents could tell us their plan.
Alexia, André, and I were unlucky enough to be enrolled in school. We had to leave for Burundi. Rwanda had become too dangerous for us. We escaped this time, but we would be killed in the end. Maybe tomorrow.
André was particularly unwelcome in Nyamata. Unfortunately for him, when he was at middle school in Zaza he was a classmate of Fidèle Rwambuka, an Umugesera who would later be mayor of Nyamata. Together they used to walk the long road to Zaza, far away in the Gisaka province, near the border with Tanzania. Fidèle was the bigger of the two, and so took André under his wing: he helped him with his little suitcase, and sometimes he even carried him on his back. When vacation time came around again, he went out of his way to see him back home. My mother never tired of praising Fidèle: such a nice boy, so thoughtful! But now Fidèle Rwambuka was the mayor of the Kanzenze municipality, as Nyamata was officially known, and it was best that he let his childhood friendship with a Tutsi be forgotten.
There was nothing for us to do but leave. In Burundi we could probably continue our studies and find work. And above all – my parents weren’t quite sure how to say it – at least some of us had to survive, to keep the memory alive, so the family would go on, somewhere else.
We’d been chosen to survive.
We spent hours trying to decide who would go. Julienne wanted to come with us. She was too little, it was too dangerous. She’d join us later. But we couldn’t leave our parents alone. They’d placed all their hopes in their children’s studies as a solution to the family’s misfortunes, they saw success in school as a way around the ethnic curse. Our big brother Antoine had given up on school so he could stay with our parents in the first years at Nyamata. André and Alexia decided that one of them would now stay and help out our parents in turn. It was Alexia who chose to stay. André and I were going to Burundi.
We were counting on Antoine to lead us to the border. He was working at the Karama Agricultural Institute as a gardener. He only came back to the house on Saturday evenings, riding his bicycle. That Saturday, we gathered around the jug of sorghum beer my mother always saved for her eldest son’s return. Antoine told us he didn’t know much about the bush, he always kept to the dirt roads on his bike, but his friend Froduald, whom I’ve already mentioned – he worked for the campaign to eradicate the tsetse fly – would make an ideal guide across the border into Burundi. Froduald was like a brother to him, and he was sure he wouldn’t refuse. And indeed, Froduald agreed at once.
The day set for our departure came all too soon. The plan was to leave in the very middle of the night, once we were sure all the neighbors were sound asleep – not because we were afraid of being reported, but because if the neighbors saw us leaving, they might want to come with us. There was no way to leave in a large group, we’d soon be spotted by the patrolling soldiers from Gako, and we had every reason to fear that those who stayed behind would face reprisals.
With his first paycheck, my brother had bought a little cassette player. It was his pride and joy. All the neighbors came running when he played cassettes, everyone sang and danced. I remember one song that came back again and again. I can still recall a few lines of the chorus: “For the end of the world, take your suitcase, in your suitcase take just a shirt …” That song was for us: for us too, it was the end of the world in a way, only we were leaving without suitcases.
As soon as the neighbors were all in their houses, we closed the door and pretended to sleep. Froduald came along. My father said the rosary, walking around the banana grove behind the house, counting off the Hail Marys. My mother usually refused to join in these processions, but just this once she followed him. I think I did too.
The time came to leave. We had to be over the border before dawn; Froduald said we’d need to walk quickly. We certainly wouldn’t be weighed down by luggage. In addition to his little canvas bag with his shirt and his pair of shorts, André kept his two treasures pressed close to his chest: his diploma, carefully rolled into a plastic tube, and his cassette player. I myself had only the clothes on my back. I’d abandoned my cardboard suitcase while I was fleeing Butare. All I could save were the old high-heeled shoes Immaculée had given me at school. They meant so much to me that I’d foolishly run away in them, to be sure they wouldn’t be lost. My father entrusted me with his most precious possession, the jewel of the house, the bottle of Benedictine: the royal flask, somewhat
fallen from its lofty rank, would be our canteen for the trip.
Antoine accompanied us to the far end of the field, and then, in the pouring rain, we set off into the night. The rain was actually a blessing: the soldiers from Gako wouldn’t want to be out patrolling in such a downpour. Froduald never hesitated, the bush had no secrets for him. Around us we heard the usual clamor of the savannah: howls, birds taking flight, pounding hooves … A form darker than the darkness around us, a huge mass I’d taken for a hill, began to move all at once: it was a couple of elephants, majestically strolling along. “Hurry, hurry,” Froduald said again and again. I limped along as quickly as I could behind my two companions. The heel of one of my shoes had broken. With great difficulty, we forced our way through the dense thickets. The thorns tore my hands, face, and feet. Day was breaking. For a moment the sun broke through the enormous clouds. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but brambles. “This is it,” said Froduald, “you’re here. We’re in Burundi. Keep going straight ahead and you’ll end up in Kirundo.” We embraced. We were all weeping. Froduald turned and went back the way he came. He wouldn’t be killed that morning. He would be killed twenty years later.
1973: A refugee in Burundi
We hoped we’d soon be in Kirundo, the first town in Burundi past the border. But between the border and Kirundo lies an uninhabited wilderness, exactly like in Rwanda, not easy to find your way through. We were afraid we might be walking in circles, or retracing our steps and not knowing it. After wandering on for a long time – we were exhausted, and I was limping ever more slowly behind my brother – we joined up with a group of refugees who said they’d come from Butare, and then we finally ran into some Burundians who told us to follow them when they saw who we were. They led us to a vast camp. In a chopped-down banana grove stood a huge shelter, covered with leaves, refugees huddled beneath it. They were young, like us. They were numb with cold and soaked to the bone, because the roof of fronds offered little protection from the rain. Among them was Gasana, my godmother’s brother, who’d given me shelter in Butare. He made room for us beside him, and I collapsed exhausted onto the leaves they were using as mattresses.
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