We stayed there for several days. The rain never stopped. We were covered with mud. There was nothing to eat but green bananas. A nauseating odor streamed from the nearby bushes. Nonetheless, we were happy. At least no one would kill us here in the mud and the stench. It was as if we’d just won a battle: we’d survived. And it was true: we didn’t yet quite know it, but we were already survivors.
The Burundian authorities finally directed us to Kirundo. Functionaries and students were housed in the town’s one hotel. The Auberge du Nord, run by Murara. He was Rwandan. He and his daughters did all they could to offer their poor compatriots the best possible welcome. There were some ten of us to a room. The food was good. The Murara family was very attentive to our needs. It felt almost like being on vacation. This went on for something like two weeks. Then trucks came to take us to Bujumbura. They dropped us off at a camp set up at the entrance to the Bwiza neighborhood. Now we were real refugees.
The camp seemed to be more or less run by Rukeba, the ultimate Inyenzi, a Hutu who remained faithful to the king. He strode through the camp, taking notes on the big registers he always had with him: he claimed he could tell a genuine Tutsi from an imposter. He would unmask any traitor who’d slipped into our midst. He wanted to enlist all the others, the real Tutsis, and organize them so he could lead them back home. The new exiles were unimpressed by his activist talk. Only in our studies, we thought, could we find refuge and perhaps later revenge: no matter what, it was vital that we stay in school.
The refugees were housed in big hangars, probably disused warehouses. The hygienic conditions were deplorable. Dysentery was rife, and there was even talk of cholera. And so, with five of his colleagues, André decided to rent a room in the Bwiza neighborhood. We all contributed the little money we’d managed to bring with us. My mother had given us the money she’d saved up selling bananas and peanuts. She always had a little cash hidden away in the house, for unforeseen events. She hid coins and sometimes crumpled bills in a little hole she’d made under her bed. In 1994, after they’d killed her, the murderers must have got hold of that meager nest-egg as they were destroying the house, unless she’d tried to use that pittance to buy the life of her grandchildren, Antoine’s children, who lived close by.
There were twelve of us in that little rented room: six boys, six girls. André’s friends had each brought one sister. In any case, the money soon ran out, and we had to give up our room. Fortunately for us, the Burundian authorities proved welcoming and generous with the Rwandan refugees. They gave jobs to any teacher who asked, and the students were enrolled in the Burundian educational system without too many formalities. Some of us took advantage of that to go back to studies we’d been forced to interrupt. André took the necessary steps and was named a teacher at the little seminary in Muyinga, in the east of the country. I enrolled in the School of Social Work in Gitega. After taking a test, I was admitted to the third year.
André and I were alone. We had no family in Burundi, and almost no one we knew. The Rwandans who’d moved there in the sixties gave us a lukewarm welcome; for them, we were showing up very late. With no one to count on, we had to look after ourselves, so we came up with a plan. My brother had decided to continue his studies. He’d always dreamt of becoming a doctor. What was impossible in Rwanda might well be feasible in Burundi. But first I had to get my degree as a social worker and find a job. As long as I was in school, André would work to support us and pay for my studies; once I finished and found a job, once I was self-sufficient, he’d go back to school. Then it would be my turn to support him.
We followed our plan to the letter. I thought only of working hard and succeeding in school, so André could go back to his studies. There were five girls from Rwanda at the school; needless to say, we were inseparable. But my Hutu schoolmates whose families had been hit by the 1972 massacres soon sought me out. We considered ourselves victims of the same “ethnic” madness. That brought us together. It was the same with the peasants I did rural outreach for. The widows welcomed me warmly, they saw me as just one more unlucky exile hounded by the implacable fate that had pursued both our peoples, in Rwanda as in Burundi, and that was now leading them into the depths of horror while we women helplessly looked on.
I earned my social work degree in June 1975. In October, my brother enrolled in medical school in Bujumbura. The school had just opened. The students did their first two years there, and then, after a very selective competition, the best students went to finish their coursework in Dakar. André was among those who earned a ticket to Senegal. He finished his medical studies there, with many specializations. For those lucky enough to have a place in school, study was the great refuge.
I was hired to a UNICEF rural development program in Gitega province, whose goal was to fight childhood malnutrition. The idea was to teach women how to grow vegetables, as well as soybeans, which are rich in proteins. I trained rural outreach leaders, who brought together all the local women who wanted to improve their own lot and their children’s. I liked that work in the hills. I chose a big tree, which I pompously dubbed the “outreach center,” and the women gathered around it with their babies. I unrolled my pagne, printed with Zairean designs. I knotted it over my jeans. Sister Mariette, the head of the school in Gitega, had taught me that I had to be as close as possible to the audience. As custom dictated, I greeted the little circle of women three times, repeating the words, “Tugire amahoro – let us have peace.” I propped up my visual aids on the grass: big posters lent by the Health Center of Gitega, showing, for example, a stunted child gnawing on a sweet potato, while another, chubby faced and plump, smiled over a dish of beans in soy broth. Then we went on to practical applications. We gathered up the products and utensils the women had brought, to which I added my own: soybean flour, soybean oil, powdered milk. We made dishes according to the methods I’d carefully explained, illustrated by the pictures, which fascinated my audience. The teaching session soon turned into a big picnic, which took on the air of a village festival. Even some men came to join us, especially widowers. It’s true that no effort was spared to whip up the curiosity of the village women: the pictures, the meal on the grass, the Land Rover and its driver. Sometimes I brought along a vaccination team from the WHO. The mothers had to be convinced to have their children vaccinated. We talked about that for a long time. Sometimes people made fun of my Rwandan way of talking, but they liked me, and they trusted me.
It was in the hills of Giheta that I met Claude, my husband, a Frenchman. With a team of Burundian researchers, he was cataloguing the traditions preserved in the memories of the elders. We went to visit the drummers together, we sought out the circles of old fig trees that, in Burundi as in Rwanda, are living vestiges of the great enclosures of the past.
The UNICEF program was only planned to last three years, and it wasn’t renewed. That’s how it goes with international aid programs. I then worked for a program run by the World Bank, which opened schools to educate the young people rejected by the school system. I got married. I had two sons. My brother was head doctor at the hospital of Thiès, in Senegal. My husband was appointed to Djibouti. Life seemed to be pulling me away from Rwanda. Nothing of Rwanda was left in me but a wound that could never be healed.
Rwanda: A forbidden land
For a long time I had no news of my parents, my brother, my sisters who’d stayed behind in Nyamata. Writing them was out of the question. Letters from Burundi were considered suspicious and could cause their addressees serious trouble. I kept an ear out for rumors and news from Rwanda. I urgently questioned anyone who’d dared to go there. Not until André was in Senegal could he get a letter through to our parents to tell them of our new lives. Evidently mail from West Africa wasn’t thought to be dangerous.
It must have been after they got that letter that my parents allowed Julienne to come join me. After 1973, the young people of Nyamata had no access to secondary education. Those who insisted on continuing their studies were sent to what
were called “complementary” schools. There the girls learned sewing, cooking, and a few rudimentary notions of French. Obviously, that didn’t do much for them, and especially didn’t get them a job. Julienne wanted a chance to make something of herself. In the end, my parents realized there was no other way, and so I saw Julienne arrive in Gitega. Jeanne came to join us a little later. I don’t know how, but she’d got a permit to cross the border. In her case, though, she was only coming for a visit.
I’d never given up on my plan to see my parents again. As soon as I’d arrived in Bujumbura, I’d tried to get back to Rwanda. With three friends, newly exiled like me, I went to a border post by the Kanyaru River, on the main road from Bujumbura to Butare. We thought girls might be allowed back in without too much trouble. The Burundian police were willing to let us through, but they strongly advised us against it. What was going on beyond the Kanyaru was not good news for us, they said. Resigned, we started back for Bujumbura.
Julienne and I decided to accompany Jeanne back to Rwanda. Obviously, we wouldn’t go by way of a border post. Once we were in Rwanda my sisters would have no problems, or at least no more than were usually caused by the word “Tutsi” on your papers. I, on the other hand, had left the country before I turned eighteen, and so I didn’t have the all-important national and “ethnic” identity card that every Rwandan was obliged to carry at all times. Still, I was hoping I could go unnoticed between my sisters, and that was more or less what happened.
We’d crossed the border on a little path outside of Kirundo and before long came to a dirt road and a sizeable crowd walking to the big market in Ruhuha. Using a big mud-spattered pagne to hide anything that might give us away as city people, we fell in with the women carrying bananas or baskets of beans on their heads. In Ruhuha, we found seats in the back of one of the Toyota pickup trucks that took people to and from Nyamata. But no matter how inconspicuous and discreet we tried to be, there among the other passengers’ bundles and baskets, we knew we’d have to face the soldiers from Gako, and we’d have to show them our papers.
The truck stopped at the Gako checkpoint, and all the passengers held out their ID cards to the two soldiers. Our turn comes. I pretend to be looking for my card. After a long search, growing ever more frantic, I say to Jeanne, “Jeanne, you’ve got my card, let me have it.” Jeanne hands me her card. “No, that’s not mine. I may not know how to read, but I still know my own picture.” I get angry, then furious, and soon I’m on the verge of physically attacking my sister. At first amused by all this to-do, the soldiers grow bored, and in the end tell us, “OK, enough, go on.” To our great relief, the Gako roadblock finally opens.
The truck let us off at the junction with the dirt road to Gitagata. I’m back on the road lined with houses and coffee plants. I know everyone who lives here. I want to push open every door and say, “It’s me, Mukasonga, I’m back!” and throw myself into their arms in accordance with the long, heartfelt ritual that governs greetings in Rwanda. But I can’t. I keep my distance from my sisters as I walk. I try to hide my face. I speed up when I come to my godmother’s house. No one must recognize me. It would be dangerous for everyone in Gitagata.
When we get home, my mother bursts into tears, my father can’t hide his emotion. But very soon I sense a sort of unease. The door is closed well before nightfall. They listen anxiously for the footsteps of anyone who might be coming to see them. They advise me not to move from the back bedroom. My father speaks in low tones, trying to get something through to me. It’s no easy thing to tell a daughter she can’t stay with her parents, that she has to be off as soon as she can. This very night. The councilman will end up hearing I’ve come back, and then Mayor Rwambuka. So … They go and fetch Antoine. He will lead Julienne and me back to the border. My joy turns to deep sadness. My mother and I had so much to say to each other, and now we can only weep as we wait for the moment when I have to go. In the middle of the night, we start back to Burundi.
I paid my parents one final visit in May 1986. I didn’t know it would be the last, of course. This time I wasn’t going to Rwanda by secret back ways. I was going with my husband and two children. I was French. The Rwandan embassy at Bujumbura had put a visa in my passport, all according to the rules. I was going home, as a foreigner perhaps, but at least on the main road. And this time I wouldn’t be showing up out of the blue. From Butare, my sister Alexia had let my parents know: Mukasonga would be coming to see them, with her husband, with her children, two boys!
On the dirt road to Gitagata, where a vehicle is a rarity, the children ran along behind the car, and when it stopped before the Cosma house, all the neighbors cried, “It’s Mukasonga!”
My parents had forgotten their fear for a while. They’d prepared everything needed to celebrate the visit of their daughter, who was bringing them two boys: ikigage, sorghum beer, urwarwa, banana beer. To add to the splendor of the festivities, they went to buy some Primus from the village shop. I explained to my mother that my husband had been appointed to Djibouti, that I would be going far away, that we might not see each other again for a long time. She was sorry, of course, but at the same time relieved, as if some danger were fading – for them? for me?
Things had changed at my parents’: they’d built a new house behind the old hut we’d moved into in 1963. That house was a dream that André, Alexia, and I had sworn to bring about back when we were students: we’d spend our first paychecks as functionaries – because clearly we could be nothing but functionaries – on having a house built for my parents, “a house like the white people’s.” Oh! not exactly “like the white people’s,” of course: there was no running water, no electricity, and obviously no bathroom, but there were bedrooms with walls and doors. The whole family had contributed to its construction, with money or labor. For my part, I’d saved up all I could from my modest salary, and I sent them that little sum by way of a Rwandan priest, Father Fulgence, who was an accountant at Caritas Burundi. He forwarded it to Caritas Rwanda, who sent it to the Nyamata parish. I’d done what I could.
But my father had something still more extraordinary to show me. There were cattle in the new yard! My father had managed to put together a new herd. A very meager herd, it’s true: three cows and three calves. But my father proudly showed me the bull calf he’d set aside for his grandson, Aurélien, which he would present to him with all the solemnity the occasion requires.
The big party was held the next day. All of Gitagata was there: the men in the yard, the women inside. My father took the floor and, as tradition dictates, sang the praises of his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandsons, Aurélien and Joël, as well as the little bull he’d reserved for the elder son, Aurélien. One by one, every guest took the floor and was heard out in devout silence as the jugs of beer were handed around, everyone plunging their straws into them. My husband Claude had to make a speech of his own. No one understood it, but they all gravely cheered and applauded.
Among the women, the atmosphere was less solemn. The chatter was interrupted by songs, and we all began to dance. I danced just as I used to at weddings. And in a way my wedding was exactly what my parents wanted to celebrate. The women said, “No one can dance like Mukasonga. There’s one who never plays the intellectual, at least.” And we reminisced about going to fetch water together, gathering wood, chasing off the monkeys that had come to pillage our sorghum.
Nonetheless, a shadow hung over our joy. A family of strangers appeared at the party, a family my mother had sent someone to go and get. Slightly uncomfortable, my mother quietly explained to me that they were our new neighbors, Hutus from the north of the country. They’d been given a place at the far end of our field. They weren’t the only ones. The authorities had assigned lands to families from Ruhengeri and Gisenyi. Those provinces were overcrowded, it’s true, but above all the Habyarimana regime was depending on their support. Nyamata was now teeming with faithful supporters of the president. “You understand,” my mother explained, “there was nothin
g else I could do. We had to invite them. For one thing, they’re our neighbors. And they would have found out anyway.”
I shared the beer with them. In the yard, their children ate alongside the others. They were still living at the end of our field in 1994. What did they see? What did they do?
Our plan was to spend several days in Nyamata. But the next day my mother came to tell me discreetly that it would be best if we left: “It’s better for the children,” she said as a pretext, “they’re not used to our food.” I understood: my children and I might be in danger, but above all our presence was a menace for my parents, and for the whole family.
The next day we set off on the road to Burundi again. I can still see my mother, on the edge of the dirt road, her slight form wrapped in her pagne. That’s the last image I have of her, a little silhouette disappearing at the bend in the road.
1994: The genocide, the long-awaited horror
Anguish overcomes me when I think of that spring of 1994. I still find myself wondering how I could have gone on tending to my house and children, taking courses for certification as a social worker in France, admiring the flowering trees of that French springtime. I sleepwalked my way through those months of April, May, and June. I knew there was no hope for Nyamata. As early as March 1992, there’d been a dress rehearsal in Bugesera: houses were burned, Tutsis were thrown into the latrines. Antonia Locatelli, an Italian volunteer, was murdered for trying to alert the international press. My family escaped the slaughter that time, but for how long? My father sent me a letter. Strangely emphatic, he wrote that it was raining as he’d never seen it rain before. The message wasn’t hard to decode. The Tutsis of Nyamata were waiting for the holocaust. How could they have escaped it?
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