Today, Alphonse works himself body and soul as part of two farming cooperatives—one of sugarcane growers, the other of farmers of foodstuffs—for which he organizes the mutual-aid raffles. Consolée is active in a number of community associations. During the gaçaça trials, she was named an inyangamugayo, a person of integrity, and in that capacity presided over her sector’s jury and pushed stubbornly to allow survivors and killers the opportunity to speak.
Alphonse, alerted by the car engine and dripping with sweat, doesn’t take long to join us. We exchange news about our common acquaintances. Adalbert Munzigura, who disappeared for several years in a seedy part of Kigali, has resurfaced, and not in any old way—he has finally gotten married. They see him from time to time en route to his sister’s place. After three years of marriage, Pancrace Hakizamungili’s third child was born. He is jubilant, although he recently mourned the death of his mother. In the evenings, he devotes himself to community volunteering, especially door-to-door work for the national census. Alphonse and Consolée refrain from sharing their thoughts about Fulgence’s situation. Alphonse claims to know nothing about the latter’s involvement in Ernestine’s murder. He hasn’t gone to visit him or Joseph-Désiré in Rilima, but he receives news from Fulgence’s wife, Jacqueline, whom they run into most often in Nyarunazi. Jean-Baptiste Murangira has resigned himself to struggling along in farming, which leaves him little more than the skin on his bones. He would never have accepted such a life were his Tutsi wife, Spéciose, not setting the example in the fields. Consolée and Alphonse can’t help making fun of him. They laugh when I recount the afternoon of endless argument and Primus beers with Ignace and Jeanne after Ignace’s return from the reeducation camp.
Then we speak about the children.
ALPHONSE HITIYAREMYE AND CONSOLÉE MUREKATETE
HUTU FARMERS
Parents of Jean-Pierre
ALPHONSE: When I was three, a mysterious illness killed my father; when I was ten, a fever carried off my mother. A relative gave me shelter in exchange for odd jobs. In my fourteenth year, the hoe held out its handle for me to find food. I didn’t finish primary school. That’s a drawback that persists to this day. A prosperous farmer adopted me as his son for my strength in the field. He gave me my chance in farming. I raised crops, I bought land, and I was happily wed to Consolée.
Before the genocide, we were somewhat well-to-do. We farmed two fertile parcels near the water. The banana plantation gave in abundance. It wasn’t every Hutu who owned cows like mine. The genocide drove us back into poverty. I spent seven years in Rilima. Consolée didn’t give up farming. She put her admirable energy into the harvests and the schoolwork for the children’s education. Porridge for meals, gathering wood, cleaning—it was difficult, but it wasn’t miserable. Which is why I say now, today, that if the children were knocked off course because of me, they still experienced a childhood with less suffering than mine.
CONSOLÉE: When we returned from Congo, everything set the children trembling. They were always on the alert. They stopped listening to instructions, and their minds deserted their lessons. When they were harassed with vengeful taunts on the way to school, they obviously asked me why. They reasoned as little ones do; they had lived in exile in the camps. It was risky explaining the actual causes to them. They might become discouraged at school or stand up to the survivor children to fight. So I sidestepped. I answered, “Be brave. The attacks won’t last. It’s just a bunch of derelict kids.” They heard the gossip on the hill, they learned the lessons about the genocide at school, and they seemed afraid. They grew bolder. They insisted on knowing why their papa remained in prison. They weren’t worried about the machetes or the reasons for the battles. The killings didn’t kindle their curiosity. They wanted to know what their papa had done wrong, his character, when he would be released. First I tried to protect them. I told them, “Be careful. The survivors have suffered to their very bones. They might want to do us harm. Thoughts of vengeance inflame them. Watch that you behave humbly.” Then I explained how we had been contaminated by the war. I explained the killings, the defeat, and our escape to Congo. Back then, we spoke of war. Over the years, we had gotten used to the word “war,” intambara, or “killing,” ubwicanyi. Basically, we didn’t really understand what the word “genocide” meant. We didn’t want to risk understanding. In our family, the children brought the word home from school.
ALPHONSE: One day, my eldest boy came to visit me. I handed him a piece of paper for my wife. In the message, I wrote, “I confess. It’s no use denying anymore.” Consolée wasn’t ignorant of my misdeeds. How could she be? In the morning, she saw me leave with the expeditions, in the front line ahead of my colleagues. And at night, I came home with my clothes stinking of blood and mud. She understood what I had confessed. She could speak to the children with honest words. Basically, the explanations the mamas gave their children depended on the conduct of the prisoners: If they denied all involvement in the killings, the mamas withheld every truth from their children. If they confessed a little to the judges, the mamas told the children a little—in other words, what the papas had agreed upon with the authorities. In our family, it was a big thing, thanks to Consolée.
CONSOLÉE: It’s different for the Tutsis. The people who experienced the machetes suffer from sadness, and from anger, too. They have no trouble giving details to back up their explanations. The parents speak forcefully of their sorrows to their children. Their memories don’t distort things much. The more you suffer injustice in life, the more you ask yourself the right questions, and the more you dig around for answers.
For the wrongdoers, the release from prison gives you the courage to speak. In Rilima, waiting in line with the other wives, we didn’t talk about our children. Each guilty family zigzagged in its own way. Today still, many wrongdoers fine-tune the lies about their time in Congo; they grumble, their fingers pointed at the survivors. Their children sulk. The children, like their parents, beat around the bush, claim they don’t know anything because there is nothing to know. But the truth lurks about. They bump against it because they listen to their classmates. They hear the gossip. During the gaçaças, so many children crawled through the grass like little bandits trying to slip their ears in among the public.
ALPHONSE: When I left, I was mended. Today, I help my wife with the children’s education, since it is above all their mama they listen to. I tell them bit by bit, at night after the meal or in the fields. No child has ever called me bad. But they feel blameworthy for what they hear. They get hung up and keep to the side if they come across young people their age. It upsets them deep down inside. It obviously troubles me to leave them that to inherit. Wouldn’t someone who doesn’t feel this way be dangerous?
CONSOLÉE: Do children in other families get angry with their parents? Who knows. I have seen some who ask forgiveness in their parents’ place. In our family, anyway, the children carry the burden of the genocide. The children learn about brutality from a young age. They hear stories of machetes drenched in blood. Gossip eats away at them, and poverty pens them in. They endure the work in the fields. We adults have ruined their innocence. Basically, they were denied a happy childhood. Young people from both ethnicities are connected in this way. I mean, the lack of innocence connects them.
We combined our strength to encourage them. Our children don’t smoke cannabis. When they go to the market to sell crops, they buy something for the family. They don’t waste; they put the money in their pocket. They don’t drink much Primus. You don’t see them rebelling. They sit with their family at church. You see them good-natured. They still seem timid, though. We can see they have been affected. They have been hindered at school. The best grades have eluded them. Jean-Pierre, for example, studied too hastily. He sacrificed the end-of-year prizes and the compliments they give the best students. Over time, we have learned to live with that. That’s how I raise them.
SYLVIE’S TEMPLE
The Temple of Zion is housed unde
r a shed roof propped between tall acacias. On this crude frame fabrics hang, providing decoration but doing little to insulate the faithful from the scorching heat or the sudden showers that pour down during the rainy season. The structure also fails to shield the congregants from the powerful PA system that blares the pastors’ sermons at top volume. This explains why, after several locations in town, the temple was obliged to move beyond the local cabaret courtyards to the edge of the bush.
Pastors founded the Zion Temple Celebration Center in Kigali in 1999, establishing themselves at the same time as a vast number of other congregations in what had become the troubled territory of the Catholic Church. Five years after the genocide, the temple’s theology of spiritual awakening and miracles reassured believers whose faith had been shaken with doubt. Even without understanding a word of Kinyarwanda, visitors can’t help being impressed by the show the feverish preachers put on and, in particular, by the furious beauty of the congregation’s spirituals.
On this Sunday, at the entrance to the makeshift church, a woman wearing a magnificent red priestess’s dress welcomes her flock. The woman is Sylvie. She encourages a newcomer, hugs a lady friend, caresses a child, and lavishes her well-wishes on the new arrivals, never once losing the joyful good cheer I observed in her the very first day we met. A wonder to behold is the procession of families in their Sunday best, taking their places on the rustic benches as the electric organ fills the air. Exceedingly beautiful ladies linger near the altar, their loving eyes riveted on the preachers who warm themselves up with syncopated hallelujahs, as sure of their charisma as of their faith. The chorus begins its breathtaking hymns. The synthesizers are now going full bore. It’s a big day for Sylvie, the deaconess, who climbs on stage.
* * *
IN A WORLD without machetes, Sylvie Umubyeyi’s fate would have followed the favor of her youth: her immense family in Butare, her vocation, her energy and passion, her kindness, her colorful sense of humor. But her family was wiped out near the National University campus in Butare, and humiliation awaited her in exile in Bujumbura. In Nyamata, in the harsh Bugesera where she chose to resume her life as a social worker, she discovered the devastation of the human soul. Later, the mistake of a humanitarian organization forced her into exile in Tanzania. When she returned, she faced family turmoil, not to mention health problems, which would have crushed others in the same situation. Because of this, her presence amid the mystic pandemonium of the Temple of Zion is hardly surprising. Judging by her perpetually playful smile, there isn’t much to worry about.
It was in a bar in Kigali that a journalist first told me her story. Four years after the genocide in a marshy area deep in the Bugesera hills, he had met a social worker crisscrossing the bush in her van on the lookout for stray children. The small town was Nyamata, which I reached at the end of a rocky path the next day. The story was true. The social worker’s name was Sylvie Umubyeyi. Accompanying her into the bush opened up an initial path for me to follow into the heart of my book Life Laid Bare.
We got into her Toyota. At the top of the hill, we continued the rest of the way on foot until we reached a small adobe house within a well-tended banana plantation. Jeannette and Chantal lived there, two orphans surrounded by a pack of little kids rescued after years of brutal existence in the bush, where they had taken refuge from the machetes. We spent the afternoon talking with Jeannette. Sylvie also spoke about her work, which, according to her, she made up as she went along.
As Sylvie explained to me at the time: “To weave a bond with a child battered about by the genocide, the first thing you have to do is encourage him to open up a little bit and to unload some of his thoughts—that’s where the knots of his trouble come through. Me, I follow a simple strategy. I approach the child, I keep silent for a brief moment, then I say to him: ‘Just like you, I am a survivor. Just like you, I saw them do all they could to end my life. Just like you, I know that my entire family is dead. I saw the interahamwe only a few feet in front of me stabbing people with their spears. The two of us are going to have to live with these truths from now on’ … Sharing the genocide in words with someone who lived through it is different from sharing it with someone who learned about it somewhere else. After a genocide, a wound remains buried deep in the survivor’s spirit, a wound that can never be brought into the full light of day. We survivors, we may not know the exact nature of this hidden wound, but at least we know that it exists … Those who escaped the machetes will never be free of their experiences, but they can find the way back to life because they can speak the truth. They fear many dangers but not the danger of lies. The children who survived the Nyamwiza marshes have peered into the darkest of evil, but only for a short time. If you take hold of them and gently guide them along, things come more easily … For Hutu children who went to Congo, the burden remains, because they haven’t faced the past directly. Silence paralyzes them with fear. Time is against them. Some of their parents are in prison, but if you ask them if they know the reason, they dodge your questions … They are afraid of being mistreated … As the years pass, they feel more and more guilty for their parents’ bad actions. Nothing changes from visit to visit. You notice that their anxieties are constantly chasing away other thoughts. You do your best to encourage them to speak, but they won’t be able to regain their footing in life if they never say a word about the turmoil within them. So you have to be very gentle and patient with them, trusting to time the birth of a new friendship …
“Children often fall into a deep distress or panic, especially when they sleep. They reproduce in dream what they experienced in life. They cry out, they sob, sometimes they take off running into the night or ask to be forgiven.”
* * *
WE MEET UP after mass at the Savana cabaret. Sylvie seems happy with her performance as deaconess. She laughs at having imposed it on me. She is the first to mention the good memories from fifteen years ago, when we met on a sweltering afternoon. Nothing moved on the main street, crushed by heat and sadness, except for the rare pedestrians in search of a bottle and some herdsmen urging along their scraggy cows. The humanitarian organization where she worked had its offices in the former house of a town notable. Sylvie had come out into the yard. Her flowery dress accentuated her pregnancy. She held a notebook and a pen in her hand. She was beaming. Her eyes sparkled with mischief, and her smile intrigued me. Something was making her laugh, but what was it? Was it the sight of a bewildered journalist amid the desolation of this little town?
SYLVIE UMUBYEYI
TUTSI SOCIAL WORKER
You remember the first time we met? It was in 1997 in the yard outside the World Vision offices. I was working with the stray children of the genocide at the time. They were turning up everywhere. Some lived in families that weren’t their own; others no longer had families because they had seen their parents die. There were children scattered in the bush and forest, and we went looking for them with the van. The work interested me because I was holding as close as I could to the genocide. I managed to do something worthwhile. I united families of children with adolescent heads of family to care for them. They’ve grown up and returned to the school bench. They’ve led good lives, first as children, then as adolescents. Those that have gotten married are raising their own children now. A small number have gone to university, and the others have picked up a trade.
You saw Jeannette yesterday? How’s she doing these days? Is she still sewing in the market? I know she married a bike-taxi driver named Sylvestre. Did they go through with their adventure in the Mutara?… Oh dear, them, too? And they lasted just two dreadful years? They’re up to three children, I’ve been told. You know, when I run into them or hear about them, I can see that life has slipped back into their everyday experiences. I’m proud of that.
Why was I willing to help you in your work? Because that’s my job as a social worker. A French journalist all alone on Nyamata’s main street, four years after the killings—it seemed like either someone in dire need
of assistance or someone inexplicably trying to rile people up. You might have lost your way, too, without anyone to stand beside you. The folks around here talked—so many rumors mixed with mean words. As usual, people carried on for as long as they remained suspicious. Things weren’t going to be easy. People said, “That Tutsi woman walking around with a Frenchman—is she really Tutsi?” There were some who tattled, who called my husband: “She just passed down the main street with the muzungu. They’re sharing a bottle at the parish. We saw them in her truck over in Ntarama…”
I had to work inside my own head, I mean, without listening, and speaking as little as possible. It wasn’t so risky, though. I was coming from Butare myself, so I seemed a foreigner, too. I had the reputation of folks from Butare and didn’t have the bullheaded mentality of people from the Bugesera. I thought, all right, let’s give it a try. I listened; your words weren’t intended to hurt people. You didn’t set traps. You hesitated. A man who hesitates, you can put him right. You showed yourself steady. I realized that you wouldn’t be stingy with your time, that you would hear them out. In those days, survivors were so afraid that no one would listen to their sometimes chaotic words. It was painful not to be really heard. They lost the courage; they grew used to staying silent. Like me, you tried to get closer to the genocide.
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