In April the nocturnal rains often leave in their wake black clouds that mask the first rays of the sun. Rose Kubwimana knows how dawn comes late on the marshes at this time of year. That faint gray glow is not what is puzzling her.
Rose is crouching barefoot near a brownish pond, her skirt hiked up across her thighs, her calloused hands resting on her knees. She is wearing a woolen sweater. Next to her lie two plastic five-liter jerry cans. She comes every morning to this pool, where the water is less muddy and the edge, thick with palm trees, is less spongy than at other ponds.
This one is hidden by fronds of umunyeganyege, a kind of dwarf palm; beyond lies an infinity of other ponds, puddles, and quagmires scattered among thickets of papyrus. Rose inhales the fetid and familiar odor of the marshes, a smell that seems particularly musty this morning. She also recognizes the fragrance of the white water lilies. Since her arrival, she has sensed something strange in the air, and finally she understands: it is the sounds. The sighing of the marshes does not sound normal this morning.
She hears the usual racket of the ibises, the short explosive whistles of the long-tailed talapoin monkeys, but only in the distance. In her immediate vicinity, the marshes have fallen silent. There is no furtive rustling of sitatungas, the antelopes that live in the marshes and feed on papyrus; there is no grumpy grunting of pigs to startle her; the big, green, white-crested turacos, usually such early risers in the fig trees, are not uttering their piercing
and punctual ko ko ko; perhaps they have slipped away like the other denizens of the dawn.
Rose Kubwimana is a rather elderly lady, lean, tall, and strong. Her hair is turning gray. Her house is an hour’s walk away in the forest. In the more than twenty years that she has been coming to fetch the family’s water, she has never noticed this silence before, neither during the great droughts that dry up the mire nor when torrential rains flood the boggy earth. It is not heaven sent, she knows that. She is apprehensive but not really surprised.
The previous day, going down to the truck stop at the crossroads, she passed by the church in Ntarama and saw the encampment. She knows that for three days now, local Tutsi families have been gathering there. She also knows, because she has seen some of them, that many Tutsis have taken refuge down in the school at Cyugaro, or have gone all the way down to the river to hide around there, probably not far from her pond.
Later, of that morning in limbo, she will say simply: “Up in the hills, I thought terrible cuttings were brewing and life would be all torn apart. But as for the marshes, truly, I did not think the blades and chaos would come down that far. I did not think it, but I felt it.” She will merely add, “From the first day time has wanted to be most secretive about these things. Me, I stand behind time’s wishes for now.”
That first day was April 11, 1994. On April 6, late in the evening, the President of the Republic of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, had been assassinated upon his return from a visit to Burundi when his plane exploded over the airport at Kigali, the capital. The massacres of the genocide began that same night in Kigali, then spread to Rwanda’s provincial towns and
cities, and a few days later reached the hills, as they did here, in the region of Bugesera.
Rose fills the jerry cans, settles the first one on her head, steadies it with one hand as she picks up the second can, then climbs back up the hill through tangles of brush and vines. In her courtyard of beaten earth, ocher like the fields and the walls of her house, she sees Adalbert. He has awakened earlier than usual and is smoking a cigarette, sitting on a tiny stool.
Adalbert is the brawniest of her twelve children. His impressively broad shoulders seem to send a feverish energy coursing through his arms. He is a stout worker, talkative and full of fun in the local cabarets. He has not yet chosen a wife for himself. A dictatorial man, he makes all the decisions in the household. This morning he is wearing flip-flops, Bermuda shorts, a shirt, and a curious pouch at his waist, all signs that he will not be going to the fields.
Adalbert runs water over his hands, rubs his face, rinses his mouth, and spits. Last night he went to bed late, and drunk. He eats neither the sorghum porridge nor the beans heating on the embers, hardly speaks to anyone except his brother, and takes off. “He left fired up,” Rose will later say.
The path hugs the hill: above rises the eucalyptus forest, while below, to the left, lies the marshy valley of the Nyabarongo River, where his mother drew water earlier. Adalbert doesn’t notice any unusual silence—he’s in too much of a hurry. When he reaches Pancrace’s house, all the women and girls in the family are already at work, some in the courtyard, others in the planting fields. He exchanges a few words of welcome and friendly banter with them. Emerging bare-chested from his house, Pancrace hastens to join Adalbert.
The next stop on this path overlooking the banana groves is the home of Fulgence, who comes out in his white leather sandals. He wears them everywhere, probably because he is a part-time clergyman. Fulgence is thin, and so is his voice. He speaks briefly with Adalbert. About what? Later he will recall: “I’d found a running sore on a goat’s hoof, but Adalbert told me it would just have to wait till evening.”
Next comes the house of Pio, who is hardly more than a boy. Like Adalbert, he is bursting with energy, but his character is gentler. Soccer is his passion. His mother offers the youths a big can of banana beer, urwagwa, and they drink it in long swallows interrupted by their thanks. When the friends set out this time, they leave the river path, turning their backs on the valley to climb among the perfumed ramparts of yellow-flowering kimbazi trees, making for the summit. This morning the path is not only much busier than on market days in Nyamata, but also crowded only with men.
Even more excitement awaits our group up in Kibungo. The school playground is as packed as on the first day of classes, but with adults. Farther along people are strolling around the flat area where the shops are clustered, with their ochre adobe walls and corrugated metal roofs. Everyone is talking about the events of the previous day, shouting and cracking lots of jokes.
The group heads for a cabaret, finding seats on the low wall of the veranda. In the backyard, women hover over a fire from which rises the savory smell of grilled meat. Pancrace waves over one of the women and orders brochettes, which arrive immediately on a tin plate along with salt, peppers, and slices of banana. The group fetches bottles of Primus beer, which they uncap one against the other, eating and drinking with hearty appetites. Alphonse happens by and joins them on the wall, slapping palms with everyone and snatching up a brochette.
At the same moment, on the slope of the hill across the valley, in the village of Ntarama, Jean-Baptiste, a civil servant, steps out his front door in the pale green suit he wears to work. He gives instructions to someone through the door, which he padlocks, strangely enough, as though he were imprisoning the other person. He calls over a boy leaning against a tree in the garden, slips him a rolled-up bill, whispers more instructions, then goes off in the direction of Kibungo.
Meanwhile, thirty kilometers away, Léopord and old Élie clamber into the back of a truck driving through Nyamata. Soldiers are crisscrossing the main street, and there’s a corpse lying in the marketplace. All along the unpaved road to Kibungo, the truck honks its way past an endless stream of men on foot or on bicycles.
And honking his way through Kibungo, the burgomaster’s driver gives everyone the official signal to assemble on the soccer
field. Adalbert and his pals finish their grilled meat, grab themselves each a bottle of beer from a case, and join the throng. On the ridge between Kibungo and Ntarama, goal posts made of eucalyptus trunks mark a clearing as the soccer field, one of the rare flat places in this landscape. Buses, army trucks, and vans pour in and park all around the field, which slowly fills with men. In the center of the field is the striking figure of Joseph-Désiré Bitero, in a khaki uniform, surrounded by thugs armed with guns.
Off to one side, Adalbert’s group can’t hear the ranting speeches through all the noise; they can barely recognize the orators who climb, each in turn, onto the hood of a van. As they drain their beer bottles, which they toss into the grass, the friends call greetings to this or that acquaintance, chatting in particular with Ignace, who has been looking for them. When the crowd surges forward, Adalbert signals to everyone to stay together and follow him as they move off on a path leading through the forest toward the hamlet of Nyarunazi.
Most of the houses seem already abandoned. The group finds Célestin, a well-known local healer, on his front porch. He brings them a fresh plate of brochettes and a big can of banana beer with one straw, which they all pass around, but he begs off going with them because he has business to attend to. His age and the can of urwagwa argue in his favor, and the group sets out again.
Whistles and gunshots ring out in the distance. The friends don’t join the main body of men, who are already searching fields and the surrounding bush. Pancrace will later say, “We knew that it was wasted effort, that our chief task probably waited for us lower down.” Familiar with the marshes, and suspecting that Tutsis have already gone to ground deep in the swamps, they are the first Hutus to arrive there. A pounding cloudburst sweeps the mist from the horizon, suddenly revealing papyrus bogs that
stretch as far as the eye can see. Without the slightest hesitation, the young men leave dry land and plunge up to their knees in the muck, pushing the foliage aside with one hand, gripping their machetes in the other.
In April 2000 I wrote a book presenting narratives by survivors of the Rwandan genocide in this very commune of Nyamata, Dans le nu de la vie: Récits des marais rwandais (Into the Quick of Life: Stories from the Rwandan Marshes). It opened with this sentence: “In 1994, between eleven in the morning on Monday April 11 and two in the afternoon on Saturday May 14, about fifty thousand Tutsis, out of a population of around fifty-nine thousand, were massacred by machete, murdered every day of the week, from nine-thirty in the morning until four in the afternoon, by Hutu neighbors and militiamen, on the hills of the commune of Nyamata, in Rwanda. That is the point of departure of this book.”
It is the point of departure of this book as well, except that this one deals with the men from whom those survivors escaped, the killers who murdered their Tutsi neighbors. I focus in particular on killers who lived on the three hills—Kibungo, Ntarama, and Kanzenze—bordering the Nyamwiza marshes.