A Chicken Dinner in Kigali 1998
I listened to a young boy who told me that he had been mutilated, that the militia had cut him all over his body. He managed to escape and found a hiding place in the bushes where while he was hiding he saw militia members and soldiers rape his mother until she died. When he saw dogs come to eat his mother’s body, he could not chase them away because he was afraid that the militia would then see where he was hiding.
John A. Berry and Carol Pott Berry, witness testimony of Lazare Ndazaro, Ministry of Rehabilitation
Genocide in Rwanda: A Collected Memory
Kigali is lovely.
It sits in the center of Rwanda, among rolling hills. The crest of each hill looks out over a green landscape dotted with the red-tiled European-style chalets of the middle class and the silver-tin roofs of the working classes. A brilliant blue sky overarches it all.
Unlike other cities I have visited in Africa, the main roads here are in excellent shape. Drivers pay attention to driving regulations. There is little litter on the streets. The city has a low crime rate. Although there is poverty, as in any urban center, it is not as apparent in this capital. The citizens take meticulous care of their land. Driving to work, you can see legions of people cutting the grass with long machetes.
The Rwandans I met during my short visit were polite, self-determined, and extremely friendly. The sky, the landscape and the people all project an image of tranquility. Rarely have I felt so at ease in a new place. And yet this is where the unthinkable happened.
Rwanda, and Kigali in particular, is where a nation ran amok and devoured itself. Neighbor turned against neighbor, teacher against student, priests and ministers against their own parishioners. Those who so meticulously cut their lawns with machetes used these same tools as instruments of terror—and before they finished cutting, a million people were mowed down in the landscaped grass72.
Today, one can only wonder how the people and the government survived this catastrophe. In my talks with officials, I was impressed with their honesty. I was even more impressed with the “can-do” attitude that the government and its citizens seem to share. Rwanda received international donor assistance but did everything it could to become less dependent on outsiders. I had come there to discuss emergency assistance and preparedness, and in most cases I was politely told that they would “handle the problems ourselves.”
Such a response is unusual. Most governments do not miss an opportunity to collect the food, equipment and money that might flow into a country from outside operations after a disaster.
When I visited, Rwanda was working on an ambitious social restructuring. The compassion and determination applied to solving the many internal and external challenges they faced was impressive. I was in Kigali too briefly to say how this approach came to be. Was Rwanda assuaging its guilt over the tragedy that had blackened its standing in the international community? Or, as in Israel, were Rwandans trying simply never to let such a tragedy happen again?
A major target of the social restructuring was Rwanda’s rural area. Traditionally, there were few villages outside the capital. Families liked to live on their own homesteads, separated by great distances. Their cultural pattern was akin to that in the early American West, where the nearest neighbor was somewhere over the horizon. But the Rwandan government initiated a system of what it called “village-ization,” which encouraged people to move into small communities.
The number one rationale for such a drastic move was security. During the 1994 genocide, people living in isolation were easy targets for their killers. Today, with rebel forces crossing borders, this kind of isolation still makes for a poor defense.
The other rationale was more realistic and forward-thinking. The government realized that it was nearly impossible to provide much-needed social services—such as health care, basic education, water and electricity—to an isolated population. With villages come social services, and with the provision of such social services comes development.
Certainly, there are downsides to bunching people together in communities—the spread of disease and crime are two potential drawbacks — but the government clearly believed that the positives outweighed the negatives. It was hard to join a gathering of people at the time I was there and not discuss the events that had occurred four years earlier. Still, present and future problems facing the Rwandan people were equally popular topics for discussion.
Especially difficult for me was trying to be sensitive to the survivors with my desire to find out how this worst of human horrors impacted them and how they survived. The massacre in Rwanda was a subject that could not be mentioned casually, and I learned much of what I could through observation.
One night during my week’s stay there I attended a dinner party. I had known our hostess, Julia, for several years. Every time we met we greeted each other with a knowing smile of acceptance of two people who once had walked over death. It was an acceptance that we—two, clear-thinking, college-educated adults—had once walked into a minefield together in Angola.
At that time, Julia was a senior manager for the CARE Angola Country Office. I had been visiting Angola, a nation of 10 million people and 10 million land mines, in order to train our staff in mine detection and avoidance, as well as to develop proposals for the U.S. government on land mine removal projects.
Each time I saw Julia, we laughed about our foolishness. I would automatically flash back to the event that could have drastically altered, if not ended, our lives.
At the time of my visit to Angola, land mines were suspected everywhere—bridges, schools, wells, farmlands and former battlefields—and we were visiting a village encircled by mines on three sides. A retired British military explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) expert traveled with us.
Map of mine fields (circled) in a province of Angola.
We had been sitting in a community building with the village chief and village elders trying to determine the scope of the land mine infestation. We were also curious about the types of mines that had been laid in the fields surrounding the village to determine how lethal and sensitive they were, and how to remove and neutralize them.
During our discussion, the chief verified that they were surrounded on three sides by landmines. He said that the village had a water point nearby but that it could not be used because of the mines, forcing village women and children to travel a long and circuitous route to another location.
We talked about the war. We talked about those in the village who had been maimed and killed by mines and warfare. In my public health mind, land mines should be treated like a socially-spread disease. To fight a disease you locate it, define it, isolate it and remove it. And I felt that this is what we should be doing with land mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Angola and other countries.
The village chief suddenly asked if we might like to “see” some mines. The EOD man was quick to say, “Yes.” Our little patrol began at the side of the village. There was the village chief, one of the elders, myself, Julia and the EOD man. The EOD man showed the most sense by going last. Four others walked the path before him. I should have known better. In Vietnam, I learned, because of mines, never to be the lead vehicle in a convoy, especially if I was heading out first thing in the morning.
I knew the area could be lethal when we passed the village trash dump and the EOD man pointed out a loaded surface-to-air rocket launcher sitting in the trash. We walked down a well-worn path and veered onto another less traveled. Then that path disappeared and the column stepped into a field. We were quite a way into the field when I started to get nervous, but I foolishly assumed the village chief knew what he was doing. My Vietnam self-preservation survival experience clicked in and all my senses heightened. My eyes picked up an anomaly in the field.
Then I got scared. What scared me were two things I saw in front of us. Just off the path about 20 yards ahead was a rusting grenade booby trap. This was a grenade attached to a stick with a rusting trip wire crossing a stretch of land. The second was about 50 yards further ahead. I could see remnants of trench lines and pillboxes, signaling this had been a defensive position. Such areas were always mined in Angola.
I immediately stopped the column. As calmly as possible, I asked the village chief where the mines he planned to show us were. He stretched out his arm pointing and turned, completing a 360-degree circle. We were surrounded by land mines. I looked hard and, sure enough, I could see the telltale humps in the soil that land mines leave over time. I had experienced this before in Sudan, Cambodia and Vietnam where the locals have become so accustomed to the death that surrounds them that they no longer regard them as threats.
I caught Julia’s eye, seeing shock, fear and the thought of, “Gee, aren’t we unusually stupid today.” In the back of my mind, I kept assuming that the village chief knew what he was doing, knew where the mines were and had not put us in danger. I knew too that we had to get out of the field. I got the column turned around and started retracing our steps.
Can you see the mine?
That day we had broken every rule in the land mine removal book I was helping to write as we slowly, carefully—make that, very slowly and very carefully—retraced our steps back to the main trail. To this day, if only for my sanity, I like to tell myself that the village chief did know exactly what he was doing and that we were not in any real danger.
This is how I met our hostess and probably why she invited me to dinner. The other two guests were a German and his Rwandan wife. The conversation was light, mostly about work and office life. But the oddest thing happened at the start of dinner. Our hostess went into the kitchen and returned with the first course of our meal. First came soup and potatoes. The next course was a large platter of barbecued chicken.
As we began to pass around the dishes, I noticed that one plate remained empty. It was that of the Rwandan woman, to whom I passed the chicken. As the platter was set down in front of her, she shuddered, as if she had seen a ghost. She quickly raised her hand to her mouth, as if she were about to vomit. In a casual way, her husband explained that “she did not like to eat or see chicken bones.”
Naively, I commented that I did not like to eat chicken bones either. After an uncomfortable pause, the German politely corrected me, explaining that it was really just the sight of the bones that disturbed his wife; and to ease the tension, he told of a similar instance when something like this had happened in a restaurant.
When I finally realized the implications of what had just occurred, my heart sank. How could I have been so unthinking? This woman had seen bones, lots of them, thousands of them, and they were not chicken bones. They were the bones of her countrymen who were being buried or reburied, having been removed from mass graves so that their souls could have dignified burials. Without making an embarrassing issue of it, our hostess graciously moved the platter to the other side of the table, and the dinner continued.
I saw the strength and the suffering of the Rwandan people during that meal. It gave me a glimpse into how deeply the cut had penetrated the soul of the country. I wondered how others, especially children, who had seen the killings and the bones, reacted when they saw food that reminded them of human remains.
It took me back to a scene aboard the refugee rescue ship, Cap Anamur73, in Singapore harbor in 1980. The refugee children were given chalk to play with, and five years after the fall of Saigon, they still drew tanks and war planes. I then realized how deeply war cuts into the mind of everyone who witnesses it. How long would it take the Rwandans to recover? Could this generation possibly cope at all?
That night I lay on my bed in my hotel room, unable to sleep, and thought about that dinner. The strangest saying kept coming into my mind: “It is not only the food, but how the meal is presented.”
There are many real and imagined bones throughout Rwanda. Its government was trying to present a meal that would satisfy everyone. It can be done, and I think the government is on the right track, but needs to be careful about its presentation.
Leaving Kigali for Nairobi, Kenya, my mind drifted to what had happened in Kosovo and Bosnia. The Balkans was another example of genocide that not only the Americans, but the entire world, had promised would never happen again. Instead, “chicken dinners” were served from Kigali to Kosovo. And the bitter taste of genocide taste hangs on the palate forever.
72 The Rwandan genocide, also known as the genocide against the Tutsi, was a mass slaughter of Tutsi in Rwanda by members of the Hutu majority government. An estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 Rwandans were killed. Additionally, 30% of the Pygmy Batwa were killed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide.
73 Cap Anamur is a German humanitarian organization and a ship with the goal of helping refugees and displaced people. The journeys of Cap Anamur (and her sister ships afterwards) were a huge success: 10,375 boat people were rescued on the open sea and an additional 35,000 were medically treated. But were they also a “pull” factor encouraging refugee departures?