Emmanuel, my children, my husband, and I sit crammed inside a pickup truck from the school as it slowly drives down Nyamata’s main street, dodging the potholes. Under the few shops’ corrugated metal awnings I see piled-up sacks of rice and beans, cases of beer, Fanta … The market is set up at the side of the street, on a huge rectangular lot. Further on, minibuses are waiting for travelers going to Kigali; others are lined up at the only gas pump, run by a solidly-built old man. I try in vain to recognize some face in the crowd, as if I were hoping those who are no more might suddenly appear before me. Like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a broken mast, I keep my eyes fixed on the comforting sight of the old colonial houses that were once home to Gatashya, the veterinarian, and Bitega, who ran the infirmary. I’m glad to see that the little woods of Gatigisimu, where we used to relieve ourselves before class, is still there. Slowly we drive out of the village. A few last houses, surrounded by neatly trimmed euphorbia hedges, and then the dusty road goes on toward a vast, flat horizon: this isn’t the land of a thousand hills, this is Bugesera!
The truck drives by little groups of women with baskets of beans or sweet potatoes on their heads. It slows down to pass zigzagging bicycles loaded with green bananas. I wish it would slow down still more. I know that, a few kilometers further on, we’ll reach the spot where a little dirt road forks off to the right. For ten years I’ve been dreading this moment, doing everything I could to put it off. The truck will turn right onto the little dirt road no one ever takes anymore, the road to Gitwe, to Gitagata, to Cyohoha, the road that leads to those who are no more.
It was a long time before I could bring myself to go back to Rwanda after the genocide. A very long time. I couldn’t find the strength. Rwandan refugees in France were going home. That was their duty. Rwanda had to be rebuilt. Rwandan women married to French men, as I was, were hurrying back to hold a surviving father, mother, brother, or sister in their arms. But what reason did I have for going back to Nyamata? There was no father, no mother, no brother, no sister. André couldn’t find so much as a trace of their houses. There was nothing in Gitagata but overgrown cassava bushes and dying banana trees, slowly being smothered by brambles. Where would I go to reflect and remember? Who would share my grief? I was afraid I might show my nieces not the power of hope but only the pain that inhabited me. Would my tears not revive their sobs? And mixed up with their faces, was it not the faces of my parents, of my brother and sisters, that I wanted to hold in my hands? I had to wait, recover the strength I’d never lacked until then. This was why I threw all my energy into the association I’d founded. Helping the resettled orphans. Supporting the reopening of the schools, equipping the junior high school created in 1986 by the parents’ association of Nyamata so their children could go on with their studies in spite of the discrimination. I continually put off my departure. The tickets were too expensive, I told myself, that money was better spent on the orphans. Then I went right back to planning a trip: again and again, I set a date, then put it off for one more year. Ten years went by that way. A bad feeling was growing inside me, and I knew that one day I’d have to go back to Nyamata, that I was being called there by the living and the dead alike.
For the past few days, I’ve been in a Rwanda I thought I’d never know. It’s my country, as it is every other Rwandan’s. I don’t have to walk with my head down, I don’t jump at the sight of a uniform. There are no roadblocks where my “ethnic group” will be checked. I won’t be humiliated by the militia. I’m not an Inyenzi anymore. My nose isn’t too long, my hair isn’t Ethiopian: I’m a Rwandan. I’m eager to discover the Rwanda forbidden to me before. I want to see everything: Gikongoro, where I was born, on the banks of the river Rukarara, and Lake Kivu, Kibuye, Ruhengeri, Gisenyi, the volcanoes … I wish the minibus would stop at every bend in the road to let the hills and mountaintops all the way to the horizon come and fill my eyes. Again and again – the others gently poke fun at me for it – I say, “Rwanda nziza, Rwanda nziza: My country is beautiful.”
But Rwanda is also the land of tears, and the roads we travel take us on a long journey through horror and grief.
Here are the classrooms in Murambi, where hundreds of skeletons remain frozen in their last terrified pose, or broken by the torture they endured. The guard lost his entire family. He hoists up the huge pounder used to crush babies’ skulls. He points out the circle of stones where a flagpole once stood. The French soldiers raised their flag on that pole; it fluttered over the mass graves, hastily covered up. The school sits on a plateau, and beyond it we can see a vast circle of hills. Night is falling. Smoke rises peacefully from huts half hidden in the banana groves. Who could ever believe it in this gentle twilight? The killers are still there.
From Magi, the place my family was expelled from in 1960, we follow the mountaintops overlooking the Kanyaru. The churches are places of worship again, but the scars left by bullets and grenades bear witness to what happened there. The survivor friend who’s guiding us explains that in this riverside region the Tutsis weren’t actually killed in the churches; they were hunted down and herded into them, then driven along by dogs and machine-gun fire to the Kanyaru, to drown.
Our friend takes us to his parents’ house. He was lucky. His parents were too old; they weren’t driven to the river but killed in their yard. He was able to locate their bodies. He buried them by the front door to the church in Kirarambogo, where his father had been a teacher for twenty-five years. His former students, who are also the killers, pass by his grave when they go to Sunday Mass like good Christians.
In Mbazi, near Butare, we stop at a large rectangle of cement. No inscription. No name. At the bottom of a nearby valley, our friend explains, Tutsis were massacred with machine guns: sixty-five thousand of them. Dried bouquets lie strewn in the dirt all around the slab. We ask the children attracted by the car what happened, why the flowers are no longer on the grave. “It was a crazy woman,” they answer after a moment’s hesitation. “It was a crazy woman who did that.” Since we take our time about leaving, they put the bouquets back on the concrete.
Rare are the survivors who could find their loved ones’ remains and bury them in a grave. And in any case, however others may envy it, that privilege isn’t necessarily helpful for the “grief work” psychologists talk about. A friend tells me how she found her parents’ corpses:
“Long after the genocide, I went back to my parents’ yard, in Gahanga. I was with a young man my parents had adopted, who’d somehow escaped the massacre. He’d seen everything. He guided me through the scene of the slaughter. All I could think of was finding my parents’ bodies. We questioned a Hutu who was living there. Needless to say, he didn’t know anything, he hadn’t seen anything, he hadn’t done anything, he wasn’t there … I carefully explained that I wasn’t accusing him, I was looking for my parents’ bodies, not their killer. That wasn’t enough to earn his trust. But I refused to be discouraged: I kept at it for the next several days. In the end, I offered him money. That he couldn’t resist. He gave in and took me a few kilometers away, where he showed me a ditch my parents had been thrown into.
“There were many formalities to go through for permission to bury my parents in their yard. In the end, I got it. I was proud of my victory: I was bringing my parents back, now they could rest in their yard. I had my parents all to myself, I could weep over their grave, put flowers on it. I told myself again and again, ‘Now they’re home, thanks to me.’ And I’d found a reason for surviving: so I could go to Gahanga and my parents’ grave.
“But it didn’t last. As time went by, I dreaded going to their grave more and more. I came up with excuse after excuse to put off my self-imposed pilgrimage. I didn’t like being alone at their grave. I couldn’t bear mourning for them on my own. That feeling paralyzed me, and for a long time I tried to fight it off, but in the end I didn’t want to abandon my parents, I was afraid they’d be left all alone in their yard in Gahanga. I had them exhumed and taken to Rebero, in Kigali, to
be put in the Memorial, with all the others. Now I can weep with the childless mothers, the widows, the widowers, the orphans. It’s as if I were sharing their suffering, as if they were all helping me bear my pain. I might have found my place on the long road of mourning we have to follow. I’m not sure yet …”
But many survivors have no choice but to wander aimlessly on death’s shores. There are fewer than ten of them left in Murambi. They had to leave their enclosures in the hills, and they gathered in the makeshift village around the market. They couldn’t go on living among their killers, amid the stares that said all too clearly that they weren’t supposed to be there. They expect nothing from the Gacaca courts, the justice handed down by the wise men of the hills. In Murambi, they say that the “wise men” named to the court will unavoidably have blood on their hands. They hope it won’t be their children’s, at least. “I myself,” one told me, “I tried to make a new life. I remarried. I had a son. When he was old enough for school they took him from me and killed him. That’s what the Hutus are telling us: there’s no place for the Tutsis on this earth. So I became a guard at the Memorial. This is the only place I can feel at home, with the bones. I feel safe in the company of the dead. Here with the skeletons, this is where I belong. It’s hard for me to leave them when the Memorial closes for the day, hard to go back to the living, to people pretending to be living. So we survivors stick close together, in silence. Everywhere around us, on the hills, our killers are lighting their lamps, and we’re alone in the darkness. You’re a Tutsi like me, but still, you live abroad, you can’t really understand us – not even people from Kigali can understand everything. You can’t feel the fear that comes over us, that chills us to the bone. No night is darker and longer than night in Murambi.”
Now we’ve reached the junction with the dirt road to Gitagata. The dry-season landscape feels like a barren steppe, dry and dusty. And yet people once lived here. On the right, just where the dirt road meets the highway to Gako, that was Rwabashi’s house. He was a privileged one, Rwabashi. No one knows why, but two of his sons were allowed to stay “in Rwanda.” They must have had good jobs there, because their parents didn’t have to farm. They hired people to work in their fields. All day long Rwabashi sat in front of his house, draped in his white pagne, with his tall silvery hair, holding his stick very straight. He greeted people as they passed. His wife Isabelle waited for callers. Everyone admired and envied her. She seemed to live far above the misery and fear felt by the rest of us. Women visited her in hopes her insouciance would rub off on them. Being with her, they could take heart: there was at least one person who seemed utterly unaware of the torment that had come to us.
Candida and I often stopped by Rwabashi’s on the way home from school. His daughter Tatiana would give us something to drink, and sometimes to eat. That helped us on our way up the big hill to Gitwe, and often it was our only meal of the day.
Ex-sub-chief Ruvebana’s hut was across the road. He didn’t stay long. He couldn’t come home after the events of Christmas 1963. He was a wanted man, and his life was in danger. He hid in the bush, on Rebero Hill, behind his house. My father secretly brought him food. Then he left for Burundi, and we never saw him again. Separated from her son for the first time, his mother Suzanne slowly died of grief. That separation also deeply affected my father, even if he never let it show. His boss was also his friend and confidant, and writing him was out of the question, since any correspondence with an Inyenzi in Burundi was considered a crime.
A little past the junction, the driver turns off the road and into the bush. We stop at the foot of a hill. This is Rebero. The slope isn’t particularly steep on this side. The ground is strewn with loose stones, white and rust-red, and the half-buried boulders fall into thin, sharp-edged shards. There’s a little eucalyptus grove at the top. From there, you can see all of Bugesera. Nyamata and the valley of the Nyabarongo are behind us, hidden between two mountain ridges. In front of us, the very straight road leading to Gako and the Burundi border. On the right, the lake where I used to fetch water is now only a papyrus swamp. Gakindo and Rukindo hills lie beyond it, and behind them is Lake Cyohoha South, gleaming in the sun. The municipalities – today the districts – of Gashora and Ngenda are laid out at our feet like a relief map. I recognize the tile roofs of the Mayange market shops in Gashora, and the Ruhuha market in Ngenda. Not far away are the colonial buildings of the Karama Agricultural Institute. Well before the horizon, the hills just visible in the haze are already Burundi.
It was on Rebero Hill that most of the inhabitants of Gitwe, Gitagata, and Cyohoha gathered to defend themselves from the murderous mob. That came on the 11th, 12th, and 13th of April. Philibert, one of Froduald’s sons, told me the story. He was ten years old at the time. The massacres began in the villages on the 11th, and everyone saw at once that these weren’t the usual revenge killings. This was an outright extermination, and no one would be spared, not women, not children, not the elderly. Everyone who was healthy and mobile fled to Rebero. The rest – old or ill or too weak to struggle for survival – stayed and waited for the killers to come. They didn’t have to wait long … For two days, the people who’d got to Rebero held off their attackers. Once they’d built the women and children a shelter among the eucalyptus trees, the men took up sharp Rebero stones to fight back their killers’ machetes. Unable to manage on their own, the Interahamwe militia and Hutu mobs from Gashora and Ngenda asked the soldiers from Gako for help; the soldiers sprayed the hill with fragmentation grenades, and then the hordes of ordinary killers finished the job with machetes. That was on the 13th of April. Froduald and his family were killed, but Philibert and one of his brothers escaped the slaughter, buried beneath a pile of corpses. Philibert assures me that Antoine was there, with his entire family. That’s where they were killed, all eleven of them. My older sister Judith’s whole extended family was there too, and most of her children. But not my parents. Philibert knew them well. We were neighbors, and since Froduald was Antoine’s best friend and had risked his life for us, he was considered one of the family. My parents were too old to seek shelter on Rebero; it was hard for them to get around. And I think, too, that after more than thirty years they were tired of being persecuted and pursued: why bother struggling to survive once again? I imagine, but I will never know, that they waited in their house, waiting for death to come.
No memorial has been built on Rebero. Nothing to commemorate the fallen but boulders and white and rust-red stones. I look for signs from the hill, I dig at the ground. The sun is straight overhead. This is the hour of mirages. I push away the little rocks, I scratch at the ground. I find a shred of tattered cloth half-buried in the dirt. I try to convince myself that it comes from Antoine’s shirt. I hesitate, then leave that false relic where it lies. I pick up a stone with a sharp edge. In remembrance.
We’ve gone back to the dirt road. The truck is climbing the hillside toward Gitwe. Between the erosion and the creeping undergrowth, the road is hard to make out. But our driver Paulin is a survivor from Gitagata, and he knows the way.
Now we’re crossing through what was once Gitwe – what we called the Abafundo neighborhood, to be precise. The Abafundo were families with roots in Gikongoro. They were proud people. Their sons would only marry Abafundo women, whom they looked for among the refugees deported to the Rubago camp, in Gisaka. There were ten houses, lined up on either side of the dirt road.
The first one, on the left, belonged to the schoolteacher Birota. He wasn’t an Umufundo. He came later, and moved into a house left empty by a family who’d fled to Burundi. He, the intellectual, was critized for marrying his daughter Uwamariya into a family of pagans who couldn’t read or write, but who owned cows, the only ones left who did. People said he’d traded his daughter for milk.
A little further on lived Gahutu. His name, “the little Hutu,” made everyone laugh, because his size and his ways were straight from a caricature of a Tutsi. And, people joked, that name hadn’t even done him a
ny good! His wife Karuyonga was tall and heavy and always in a sunny mood. Everyone agreed that she was made to have a big family, so she was pitied for having brought only four children into the world: Rugema, Rubare, Maria, and the oldest sister, who’d stayed behind “in Rwanda.” Everyone wished her courage, because for us a real family began with seven children. Rubare was admired for his bowed legs, an unmistakable sign of nobility! I sometimes spent nights at Maria’s. There was also her aunt, Mukarurangwa. The two girls were more or less the same age, and I was still little. As custom dictates, the family had built them a straw hut in the yard. We sang, we danced around a jug of sorghum beer. I liked sleeping at Maria’s.
There was also my godmother Angelina’s house. Her husband Nyagatare was a teacher. He’d opened the first school in Gitwe. They had just one daughter, Clotilde, who was killed in Butare, but their house was always full of children. The children of the poorest families were always welcome there, and she’d adopted several orphans from her own family, massacred at Gikongoro. Angelina seemed to me the epitome of progress and elegance. Even the food we ate at her house had the taste of modernity: there was sauce!
Bihara lived across the road from my godmother with his wife Steria and his six children. One of the daughters, Bernadette, was with me at Notre-Dame-de-Cîteaux. She was a great friend of my sister Alexia. Their husbands became university professors, colleagues, and friends. I found two surviving brothers from that family in Nyamata. Twenty years after, we recognized each other without a moment’s hesitation. They said they’d been lucky. At least they weren’t alone: “There are two of us sharing our sorrow,” says Rutayisire, holding his brother in his arms, his eyes damp with tears. “That’s all we have left to share.”
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