It was Habyarimana’s death that set off what everyone in Nyamata knew was coming, something that would be named by a word I’d never heard before: genocide. In Kinyarwanda, we would call it gutsembatsemba, a verb that means something like “to eradicate,” formerly used to talk about rabid dogs or destructive animals. When I learned of the first massacres, immediately after Habyarimana’s death, it was like a brief moment of deliverance: at last! Now we could stop living our lives waiting for death to come. It was there. There was no way to escape it. The Tutsis’ fated destiny would be fulfilled. A morbid satisfaction flashed through my mind: we in Nyamata had so long expected this! But how could I have conceived the depth of the horror that would overtake Rwanda? An entire people engaged in the most unthinkable crimes, against old people, women, children, babies, with a cruelty and a ferocity so inhuman that even today the killers feel no remorse.
I was not with my family when they were being hacked up with machetes. How could I have simply gone on living my life, as they were all dying? Survival! That was the mission our parents had assigned André and me, it’s true. We were supposed to survive, and now I knew what the sorrow of survival meant. It was an enormous weight landing on my shoulders, a very real weight that kept me from climbing the little staircase to the classroom, that paralyzed me at my apartment’s front door, unable to open it and step through. I was burdened with the memory of all those dead: they would be with me for as long as I lived.
We in Nyamata had long since accepted that death would be our only deliverance. We waited for it, watched for it, inventing and reinventing ways to escape it all the same – until the next time, when it would come even closer, when it would carry off neighbors, schoolmates, brothers, a son. And mothers trembled with horror when they gave birth to a boy, because he would be an Inyenzi, and anyone who pleased could humiliate him, hunt him down, murder him, and they’d never be punished. We were tired; sometimes we gave in to the longing to die. Yes, we were prepared to face death, but not a death that was forced on us. We were Inyenzi, fit only to be crushed like cockroaches, with one stomp. But they preferred to watch us die slowly. They drew out the death throes with unspeakable tortures, purely for their own pleasure. They liked to cut up their victims while they were still living, they liked to disembowel the women and rip out their fetuses. And that pleasure I cannot forgive. It will be with me forever, like a vile heartless laugh.
André and I could only call the roll of our dead:
my father Cosma, 79 years old;
my mother Stefania, maybe 74;
my older sister Judith, her four children, and I’m no longer sure how many grandchildren;
my brother Antoine and his wife, with nine children, the oldest twenty, the youngest five;
Alexia and her husband Pierre Ntereye, and four of their children, between two and ten years of age;
Jeanne, my younger sister, her four children, Douce, eight, Nella, seven, Christian, five, Nénette, one, and the baby she was eight months pregnant with.
I counted them up over and over again. There were thirty-seven.
I already knew their remains would never be found. Now there’s no doubt. Were they picked up by the schoolchildren who spent and still spend their vacations gathering bones on the hills and in the fields, to be deposited in the crypt beneath the church of Nyamata? Bones and skulls that will be nameless forever, piled behind the glass walls of the ossuary. Or were their corpses devoured and scattered by the packs of masterless dogs that roamed Bugesera in the months after the genocide? Are they still buried deep in one of those mass graves that are forever being discovered?
Where are they? Somewhere deep in the anonymous crowd of the genocide’s victims. A million of them, their lives stolen, their names lost. What’s the point of counting up our dead again and again? From the thousand hills of Rwanda, a million shades answer my call.
There were survivors, of course. No genocide is perfect. In May, I began trying to locate people who might have been spared. I harassed the Rwandan diaspora, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and many other NGOs with desperate phone calls. I even wrote Bernard Kouchner. I wasn’t thinking anymore. I was acting, like a robot. I wrote a long letter to Danielle Mitterand. I was advised not to send it.
Everyone was talking about unaccompanied minors. It was a fashionable phrase. Some of our children might have been among them. Even in Nyamata, there might still have been a few orphans left. They were my children too. It was for their sake that I joined with the other students from the social work school, my professors, and many friends, to found an association. We did our best to collect money so we could come to their aid once contact was restored.
It wasn’t until November that I learned Alexia and Pierre Ntereye’s two daughters, Jeanne-Françoise, fourteen, and Rita, six, had been found. My brother had come from Senegal to get them. He was the oldest, and now he was the head of the family; it was his duty to take them in, just as if they were his own children. I did what I could to help him pay for the trip. Later still, I heard that Jeanne’s husband Emmanuel had also been spared. He’d found one of his daughters, Emmanuella, three years old, whom we all called Nana. Finally there was Jocelyne, one of Judith’s daughters. Her husband and child had been killed. She’d been raped. She was pregnant by one of her killers. They’d forgotten to kill her, unless they had a slower death in mind: they’d given her AIDS.
All I have of my loved ones’ deaths are black holes and fragments of horror. What hurts the worst? Not knowing how they died or knowing how they were killed? The fear they felt, the cruelty they endured, sometimes it seems I now have to endure it in turn, flee it in turn. All I have left is the terrible guilt of living on amid so many dead. But what is my pain next to everything they suffered before their tormentors granted them the death that was their only escape?
In February 1995 I went to Thiès, in Senegal, to see my brother André, who’d just brought our nieces home with him. I hadn’t come to hear their story, I only wanted to be by their side, to hold them close, as if that could still mean anything to them, to weep with them, if they could weep. I’m not sure if it was someone who’d lived through the Shoah or the Tutsi massacres who said that a genocide survivor is in reality a “sub-vivor”. That’s exactly how it was. Jeanne-Françoise and her little sister were sub-vivors. They survived, but they weren’t alive, they were outside of themselves, oblivious to their own existence, without family in the midst of their relatives, of cousins their own age, in a becalmed, frozen present, an unspeakable past that came back only in their nightmares, a future with no future. How long did that last? It took my brother’s courage, his wife Clotilde’s endless patience, the cousins’ happy, thoughtful kindness, it took all that for Jeanne-Françoise and Rita to recover a little of their taste for a life they’d been driven out of. Now, back in Rwanda, they are beautiful, vital young girls. That makes me proud. And it would be a victory without bitterness if their parents and their brothers could share in their laughter. But often I have doubts: could that will to survive be only a remission? Neither André nor I nor anyone else can claim to be sure that scars are all that remains of their wounds. Can we hope that their future will be a kinder one?
On the other hand, I did end up hearing the story of the cruel deaths of my brother-in-law Pierre Ntereye, my sister Alexia, and their sons. Pierre was a university professor. No doubt entirely against his wishes, he’d been helped along in his career – one of the few Tutsis the government favored to show naïve or complicit Europeans that ethnic discrimination was unknown in Hutu-run Rwanda. He must have seemed a perfect fit for the part: he had what was considered a Tutsi physique, his clan always held the highest ranks back in the days of the monarchy. They’d allowed him to study in Belgium and the United States. Jeanne-Françoise, his oldest daughter, was born in Mons. Of course, he was forbidden the political career his Hutu fellow students had already charted out for themselves, but he would still be a university professor, in Butare and then in Ruhe
ngeri. Pierre was no dupe, he knew perfectly well they were using him, but did he have any choice? He would pay dearly for the ambiguous favors the regime had done him.
Sensing a threat, Pierre had taken his family to Taba, in the Gitarama province, his homeland, convinced they’d be safer there. The mayor of Taba was Jean-Paul Akayesu, later tried and found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha. He was a friend of the Ntereye family. He’d promised to protect Pierre. The fury of the genocide soon swept away that friendship and those promises.
They came to arrest him, and Pierre gravely injured himself as he was trying to flee. Rather than let him die, his tormentors gave him medical treatment so they could torture him at their leisure. They kept him prisoner in the town hall. For the next several days, they cut pieces off of him one by one with a machete.
Jeanne-Françoise saw her father being slowly dismembered. She didn’t make a moving story out of it. I heard her speak only a few sentences, as if ripped from an incurable sorrow. I never tried to bring them out. She comes to me: “Auntie, I have something to tell you.” In a detached tone, she begins to tell. But suddenly the story breaks off. Her head hurts. Everything’s gone blurry. She feels dizzy. She wants to be left alone. She closes herself up in a pain that can never be soothed.
In Rwanda, it’s the families who bring prisoners their food. That was what Jeanne-Françoise did. It must have been pure sadism on the part of the jailors. Every day, then, Jeanne-Françoise had to bring her father his meal, and every day she saw him with another piece gone: fingers, a hand, an arm, a leg. She had to stand before the blood-spattered shreds that were once the father she was so proud of, the father she describes as so handsome, so strong, so intelligent. It was that very idea of her father they’d set out to destroy, replacing it with the unspeakable image of a rag of bleeding flesh, forcing that image upon her, forcing her to accept that this was her father.
Her four little brothers were also killed in the town hall. Alexia was executed not long before the arrival of the Rwandan Patriotic Army. All the witnesses regret that the liberation came just a little too late for her. They also say the killers had Alexia choose her own burial place. There were three left: perhaps reserved for her and her daughters. That was what they did with high-status victims.
After the death of their mother and four brothers, Jeanne-Françoise and Rita were taken in by an aunt who was married to a Hutu. A very precarious sanctuary, because some of the cousins were against having them there, while others wanted to protect them. In the end, with the complicity of the aunt, one of the cousins took them to a safer hiding place, far from Taba, on his bicycle. I tried to learn more about that hiding place, but whenever Jeanne-Françoise speaks of that time, she breaks off, says she has a bad headache, walls herself up in an impregnable silence. The two sisters later went back to their aunt’s house in Taba, and for several months those two pampered city girls lived the hard life so well-known to peasant women. Then my brother André came to take them to Senegal, awaiting the day when his family, which now included the two orphans, would return to Rwanda for good.
Now I have to talk about Jeanne. I’ve been dreading this moment for a long time. There were five girls and two boys in my family; Jeanne was the youngest, maybe the one I was closest to. I was her “little mother,” as we say. I carried her on my back. She followed me everywhere. We tried to look like each other. People said she might almost be my twin. When she was born, the whole family greeted her like a gift fallen from heaven: a very black, very happy little baby. I want to keep Jeanne’s smile in my memory like the most precious of all treasures.
Her husband Emmanuel told me how she died. He said he owed it to me. He’d never spoken of it to anyone before. I recorded his words. What he wanted to tell me he would probably never say again. It was very hard for both of us. I thought of telling him to stop, to put an end to the pain his story was reawakening. He wanted to go on to the end. But he didn’t tell me everything. The most unthinkable horror he couldn’t bring himself to say, or perhaps he was trying to spare me. But that part I already knew: my niece Jocelyne had sent me a strange letter, almost illegible, but readable enough to tell me what I never should have known.
I wish I could write this page with my tears.
Emmanuel’s roots were in Ruhengeri. His family was among the deportees in Gitagata, where he was a teacher. But the young couple and their children retreated to the village of Nyamata after the 1992 massacres. On April 6th, at around 8:30 pm, Habyarimana’s plane is shot down. On the 7th, a curfew is imposed in Nyamata and throughout Rwanda, but, even closed up in their house all day long, Emmanuel and Jeanne sense a great agitation, which is encouraged by the subprefect Hassan Djuma and the mayor Bernard Gatanazi. On Friday the 8th, the first escapees reach Nyamata from the neighboring Kibungo and Kanzenze sectors, where the genocide began on the 7th. At 7:30 in the evening, a grenade is thrown at the house. The windows shatter, but no one is hurt. The family seeks refuge at a neighbor’s. The locals organize night patrols to sound the alert in case of danger, but soldiers quickly intervene and order everyone back in their houses. As they disperse, two men are shot and left for dead. Toward 1:30 in the morning, a second grenade is thrown at Emmanuel and Jeanne’s now-empty house, slightly damaging the roof.
On the 9th, the people are summoned to what is announced as a “pacification meeting.” Artillery fire can be heard in the distance, toward Kigali. The subprefect seizes on that sound to stir up the Hutu population: “Do you hear that? They want to kill us all.”
The situation is growing more critical by the minute, so Emmanuel and his neighbor decide to take their families to Kayumba Hill, overlooking Nyamata. Many Tutsis have already taken shelter there, trying to organize resistance. Emmanuel comes back to Nyamata and hides. On Sunday he climbs back up to Kayumba. “And that,” he says, “was the last I ever saw of Jeanne and my children.”
On Monday the 11th, the soldiers and a mob of volunteer killers launch an assault on Kayumba. The Tutsi families flee for the church in Nyamata. There they will be massacred on the 14th, five to six thousand of them. The day before, soldiers from the UN peacekeeping force, the UNAMIR, had come to evacuate the white nuns and missionaries.
Jeanne is eight months pregnant and in no condition to flee with the terrified crowd. She entrusts her three oldest children to her neighbors as they set off for Nyamata with the rest. She’s been wounded by a machete. She hides in a bush and stays there with Nana, her youngest child. How long does she go on hiding there? No one can tell me. Unable to bear staying there any longer, knowing nothing of her children’s fate, she decides to start back down for Nyamata. She will be killed in front of the town hall. How? By whom? Jocelyn’s letter is as precise and as incoherent as a nightmare. Wounded, Jeanne falls to the ground. Her belly is sliced open. The fetus is ripped out. They beat her with the fetus. Nana is at her side. The killers go on their way, leaving Nana there with her. And then someone, and I will never know who that someone is, asks a dying Jeanne, as she lies in a pool of her own blood, what he can do for her. “You can’t do anything for me, but if you can do something, take Nana with you.”
I don’t need to unfold the sheet of notebook paper lying before me. Jocelyne’s words parade through my head. The words are emotionless, made cold by death. They come from the land of the dead.
Emmanuel is among the last of the survivors hiding in the swamps. For forty days, he manages to elude the killers’ daily hunts. On the 14th of May, the Rwandan Patriotic Army liberates Nyamata. Of the sixty thousand Tutsis recorded in the municipality of Nyamata in January 1994, there remain only five thousand survivors – 5,348, to be precise. The Rwandan Patriotic Front sets up a temporary administration. Serving as mayor is a woman, a Hutu, whose Tutsi husband has been killed. The survivors struggle to find their way back to some kind of life.
Toward the end of May, he’s no longer sure of the date, Emmanuel was in Kibari, not far from the Rwakibirizi spring, to help the so
n of Gitagata’s tailor Berkimasse pull his father’s body from the latrines where the killers had thrown it. “There,” he says, “someone came to tell me he’d heard a man from Musenyi saying all sorts of things, and one of them was that he’d found a little girl on the road, a girl named Nana. They took me to see him, and he confirmed that the little girl had said again and again that her mother was called Jeanne and her father Emmanuel. The RPF soldiers had taken her away, he didn’t know where. The RPF soldiers were gathering lost children in a camp they’d established in a former orphanage in Nyamata. They were looking for teachers among the survivors, to look after the children until the schools reopened. I went to the camp and Nana was there. A captain of the Patriotic Army had found her and grown fond of her. But, since the liberation offensive was still advancing, he had to leave her at the improvised orphanage. I was so physically and mentally exhausted, and Nana was so little and fragile, that for the moment I thought it was best to leave her with a friend, Marie-Louise, who’d lost her whole family too. Nana would have a little motherly warmth again, and Marie-Louise would have a child to give some sense to her survival. I took Nana back when her school reopened. Nana learned to smile again, and her smile fills me with joy and sadness: isn’t that Jeanne’s smile, and the smile of all our lost children?”
2004: On the trail of the land of the dead
Cockroaches Page 9