IGNACE: At the beginning we were too fired up to think. Later on we were too used to it. In our condition, it meant nothing to us to think we were busy cutting our neighbors down to the last one. It became a goes-without-saying. They had already stopped being good neighbors of long standing, the ones who handed around the urwagwa can at the cabaret, since they wouldn’t be there anymore. They had become people to throw away, so to speak. They no longer were what they had been, and neither were we. They did not bother us, and the past did not bother us, because nothing bothered us.
ÉLIE: We had to put off our good manners at the edge of the muck until we heard the whistle to quit working. Kindness, too, was forbidden in the marshes. The marshes left no room for exceptions. To forget doubt, we had meanness and ruthlessness in killing, and a job to do and do well, that’s all.
Some changed color from hunting. Their limbs were muddy, their clothes were splattered, even their faces were not black in the same way. They became grayish from everything they had done. A little layer of stink covered us, but we didn’t care.
PIO: We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi in the swamps. I mean a person like us, sharing similar thoughts and feelings. The hunt was savage, the hunters were savage, the prey was savage—savagery took over the mind.
Not only had we become criminals, we had become a ferocious species in a barbarous world. This truth is not believable to someone who has not lived it in his muscles. Our daily life was unnatural and bloody, and that suited us.
For my part, I offer you an explanation: it is as if I had let another individual take on my own living appearance, and the habits of my heart, without a single pang in my soul. This killer was indeed me, as to the offense he committed and the blood he shed, but he is a stranger to me in his ferocity. I admit and recognize my obedience at that time, my victims, my fault, but I fail to recognize the wickedness of the one who raced through the marshes on my legs, carrying my machete. That wickedness seems to belong to another self with a heavy heart. The most serious changes in my body were my invisible parts, such as the soul or the feelings that go with it. Therefore I alone do not recognize myself in that man. But perhaps someone outside this situation, like you, cannot have an inkling of that strangeness of mind.
PANCRACE: Some began the hunts with nerve and finished them with nerve, while others never showed nerve and killed from obligation. For others, in time, nerve replaced fear.
Many displayed nerve while they were working, and fear as soon as the killing stopped. They simply fired themselves up during the melee.
Some avoided the corpses, and others did not give a spit. The sight of those corpses spreading through the marshes, it could put courage into you or weigh on you and slow you down. But most often it hardened you.
Killing is very discouraging if you yourself must decide to do it, even to an animal. But if you must obey the orders of the authorities,
if you have been properly prepared, if you feel yourself pushed and pulled, if you see that the killing will be total and without disastrous consequences for yourself, you feel soothed and reassured. You go off to it with no more worry.
JEAN-BAPTISTE: The more we killed, the more greediness urged us on. Greediness—if left unpunished, it never lets you go. You could see it in our eyes bugged out by the killings. It was even dangersome. There were those who came back in bloodstained shirts, brandishing their machetes, shrieking like madmen, saying they wanted to grab everything. We had to calm them with drinks and soothing words. Because they could turn ugly for those around them.
ALPHONSE: Man can get used to killing, if he kills on and on. He can even become a beast without noticing it. Some threatened one another when they had no more Tutsis under the machete. In their faces, you could see the need to kill.
But for others, on the contrary, killing a person drove a share of fear into their hearts. They did not feel it at first, but later it tormented them. They felt frightened or sickened. Some felt cowardly for not killing enough, some felt cowardly for being forced to kill, so some drank overmuch to stop thinking about their cowardice. Later on they got used to the drink and the cowardice.
Me, I was not scared of death. In a way, I forgot I was killing live people. I no longer thought about either life or death. But the blood struck terror into me. It stank and dripped. At night I’d tell myself, After all, I am a man full of blood; all this spurting blood will bring catastrophe, a curse. Death did not alarm me, but that overflow of blood, that—yes, a lot.
JEAN: “A boy with enough strength in his arms to hold the machete firmly, if his brother or his father brought him along in the group, he imitated and grew used to killing. Youth no longer hampered him. He became accustomed to blood. Killing became an ordinary activity, since our elders and everyone did it.
“Or a young boy might even prove more at ease with it than an experienced oldster, because death touched him from farther away. Given the novelty of the circumstances and his young age, death seemed less important to him. He saw it as belonging to an older generation. He shrugged off its perils and considered it a distraction.”
JOSEPH-DÉSIRÉ: It became a madness that went on all by itself. You raced ahead or you got out of the way to escape being run over, but you followed the crowd.
The one who rushed off machete in hand, he listened to nothing anymore. He forgot everything, first of all his level of intelligence. Doing the same thing every day meant we didn’t have to think about what we were doing. We went out and came back without having a single thought. We hunted because it was the order of the day, until the day was over. Our arms ruled our heads; in any case our heads no longer had their say.
FULGENCE: We became more and more cruel, more and more calm, more and more bloody. But we did not see that we were becoming more and more killers. The more we cut, the more cutting became child’s play to us. For a few, it turned into a treat, if I may say so. In the evening you might meet a colleague who would call out, “You, my friend, buy me a Primus or I’ll cut open your skull, because I have a taste for that now!” But for many, it was simply that a long day had just come to an end.
We stopped thinking about obligations or advantages—we
thought only about continuing what we had started. In any case, it held us so tight, we could not think about its effect on us.
ADALBERT: At the start of the killings, we worked fast and skimmed along because we were eager. In the middle of the killings, we killed casually. Time and triumph encouraged us to loaf around. At first we could feel more patriotic or more deserving when we managed to catch some fugitives. Later on, those kinds of feelings deserted us. We stopped listening to the fine words on the radio and from the authorities. We killed to keep the job going. Some were tired of these blood assignments. Others amused themselves by torturing Tutsis, who had made them sweat day after day.
At the end of the killings, the instructions were to speed things up before the inkotanyi arrived. Flight beckoned us, but we had to continue the massacres before leaving. Reinforcements and scoldings put the last touch on the matter; the organizers talked about a final sweep through the marshes. Fear kept telling us to run away, but we were finishing what we had started.
Later, we fled our way through hunger and want on the roads to Congo, but we kept hunting in the ruined houses for forgotten Tutsis. We still had the heart for that.
LÉOPORD: Since I was killing often, I began to feel it did not mean anything to me. It gave me no pleasure, I knew I would not be punished, I was killing without consequences, I adapted without a problem. I left every morning free and easy, in a hurry to get going. I saw that the work and the results were good for me, that’s all.
During the killings I no longer considered anything in particular in the Tutsi except that the person had to be done away with. I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one.