With my sister Laetitia, I take care of eight children left on their own. It just happened naturally. In the marshes, when parents would go off into death without taking along their little ones, those who had none, like us, offered to take them on in the pinch. Later, time entrusted them to us for good.
Before the war, I studied hard, because I wanted to pass the national exam in Kigali and snag myself a fine career. Boys had a good eye for me, life seemed worthwhile. In school, I had mixed friends, Tutsi and Hutu. The latter never said bad things. I felt the first fears when people began leaving the Bugesera after the clashes in 1992. Our paths then grew loud with more and more evil words. That’s another reason why I wanted to turn toward the capital.
Three days after the plane crash, a small group of us—my family and our neighbors, with bundles of belongings—moved into the church at N’tarama. During the day, the brave among us would venture into the nearby fields to bring back food. At night we slept inside or outdoors, depending on our strength. When the interahamwe surrounded the fences, some men began throwing small rocks to slow down their advance. The women gathered the stones, because they did not want to die just any old way, but this resistance was too weak. Grenades exploded against the front door. I myself was in the back: for an hour I ran so hard down the slope I don’t remember breathing, until I plunged into the urunfunzo of the marshes, which I had heard about but never seen before. Urunfunzo are the papyrus plants. At the time, of course, I had no idea that for an entire month I would spend my days in the mud from head to toe, at the mercy of mosquitoes.
The killers worked in the marshes from nine to four, four-thirty, while the daylight lasted. Sometimes, if it was raining too heavily, they would come later in the morning. They arrived in columns, announcing themselves with whistles and songs. They would beat drums, seeming quite delighted to kill all day long. One morning, they would take one path, and another the next day. When we heard the first whistles, we’d dash in the opposite direction. One morning they cheated, coming from all sides to set traps and ambushes, and that day it was most disheartening, because we knew that come evening there would be so many more dead than usual.
In the afternoon they no longer sang, because they were tired, and they would set out for home, chatting as they went. They fortified themselves with drinks and ate the cattle, because they were slaughtering them along with the Tutsis. Truly, these killings were quite coolly done, and well-planned. If the liberators of the RPF had taken another week to arrive, not one Tutsi in the Bugesera would still be alive, to stand up to the lies—for example, about the supposed drunkenness of the criminals.
In the evening, after the killing, we would scatter into the night to dig in the fields, collecting manioc and beans. It was also banana season. We ate raw stuff for a month, with both hands—dirty hands, like human trash. It was the same fate for adults and little children, who no longer had a chance to drink their mother’s milk or eat nourishing things. So, many people spared the machetes were overtaken by mortal weaknesses. In the morning, we would awaken and find them next to us, stiffened in their sleep. Without one word of farewell, without a last gift of time allowing us to cover them over with proper humanity.
On rainy nights, we seized the chance to rub ourselves with palm leaves, scraping off the thickest of our waste and the muddy filth. Then we would lie down on the ground. We talked over our day, wondering who had died this time, and who would die tomorrow. We spoke of the grim fate bowing us down. We could rarely find happy words to say, amid all our crushing sorrows.
In the morning, we could not even take a moment to dry off in the rising sun. Soaking wet, we’d set out to hide the children in small groups under the papyrus. We used to tell them to be as good as fish in ponds. In other words, to stay underwater up to their necks, and not to cry. We gave them the foul swamp water to drink, even if it was sometimes tinged with blood. And then we smeared ourselves with mud, too. Once in a while, we could just make one another out through the surrounding foliage. We asked ourselves why God was abandoning us there, among the snakes, which luckily did not bite anyone.
One night, my heart was struck a bloody wound that can never heal. Leaving my hiding place that evening, I saw that they had caught Mama. She lay floating in the mud. Her name was Marthe Nyirababji. Papa, and Godmother, and the whole family were killed not long afterward, on that terrible April 30. Papa’s name was Ferdinand Mudelevu. He was pierced through by a Hutu neighbor who danced and sang over him. After that, I had to team up with other survivors from the hill. Through the papyrus branches, my eyes have looked into those of the interahamwe killing close by. I saw many people cut down beside me. That whole time I battled a devouring fear, a truly overpowering terror. I overcame it, but I am not saying that I have beaten it forever.
At the end of the genocide, I was placed for three months in an abandoned hut on a lower slope of Nyamata Hill. I should have been content, but I was still too anxious and exhausted. We felt like strangers in our own skins, if I may put it that way; we had been brought low, and were disturbed by what we had become. I think we didn’t believe we would ever be truly safe again.
Deep down, we thought we would never be free of our past danger, and we waited weeks before allowing ourselves to taste happiness. I would walk an hour every day to get to our family property. I wielded the hoe to feed the children. I molded mud bricks to build a new house, with the help of a mason sent over by the district.
At present, while waiting for our roof to be laid on, I live in the house of a Hutu who has not returned from Congo. I base my hopes on a plan for a small business of rice, sugar, or salt on the main street near a pharmacy. You get used to work, but not regrets.
Before the war, I was too fond of school, and had decided to turn away from village life. If the genocide had not overrun us, I might have passed the national exam, I would have gotten my law degree and worn a lawyer’s robes in a private practice in Kigali. But now I am twenty-five. I see only obstacles in my life, marshlands around my memories, and the hoe reaching its handle out to me. I no longer know where to turn to find a husband. I cannot put myself in the care of a Hutu man. I’m not necessarily hoping for a survivor. I have forgotten the fantasy of love. I’m waiting simply for the gentle eyes of an everyday man seeing me for who I am. I hear plenty of candidates knocking at the door and introducing themselves in brushed-up shoes, but I see no one anymore, no matter where I look, who could provide me with tenderness.
Many Hutu families came back to the hills, even when their men were in prison. The authorities hold the doors of their homes wide open to them. Some people did not agree at all with what was happening, while others supported it completely. These families farm their fields among themselves, they return nothing that they looted, they hardly speak to us, they seek no forgiveness. Their silence upsets me deeply. I’m certain that I have recognized the faces of a few criminals among these families, when they are out on their land. Their arms are still well-muscled for farmwork. My sister and I have only thin arms to feed the children left on their own. I do not find it fitting to entrust the difficult task of reconciliation simply to time and silence.
In N’tarama, some survivors go bad or give up hope. They say, “I had a strong husband, I had a house with stout walls, I had lovely children, I had big cows, I worked every day and every tomorrow, and all that for nothing.” There are many men and women who no longer make an effort. Once they get their hands on some small change, they drink Primus, and they don’t give spit for anything. They get drunk on alcohol and bad memories. Some take pleasure in always talking about the same deadly moments they once lived through. As if they could not do without that anymore.
Me, when I listen to them, I understand that as time goes by, people do not remember the genocide in the same way. For example, a neighbor woman tells how her mama died in the church; then, two years later, she explains that her mama died in the marsh. To me, there is no lie. The daughter had an acceptable reason to first want her mama’s death at the church. Maybe because she had abandoned her while running through the marsh and felt bad about that. Maybe because it was a comfort to her in unbearable distress, to convince herself that her mama had suffered less that way, from one mortal blow on the first day. Afterward, time offered a little tranquility to that daughter, so that she could remember the truth, and she accepted it.
Another girl denies that she was wounded, even though her arms show obvious scars. But one day she will hear someone talk about an episode involving a trap for sex, and she, in turn, she will dare to talk about her own ambush and to what she owes the miracle of her life. She hasn’t lied either: she has waited for a sympathetic audience familiar with misfortune before revealing a painful truth.
There are also people who constantly change the details of a fateful moment because they believe that on that day, their lives snatched away the luck of another life that was just as deserving. But in spite of these zigzags, a person’s memories do not fade away, thanks to talking with others, in small gatherings. People choose certain memories, depending on their characters, and they relive them as if they had happened last year, and will go on for another hundred years.
Some people claim that the difference between Hutus and Tutsis is an invention. I cannot understand nonsense like that, because after the slaughter began in the Bugesera, no Tutsi could draw breath for a single hour standing out in the open among Hutus. But I don’t want to go into anything about this difference and the so-called misunderstanding between the ethnic groups. I believe that we must be given an appropriate justice, but I don’t want to say whether the prisoners ought to be shot. Neither do I wish to express what I think about why the Whites watched all these massacres with their arms crossed. I believe that Whites take advantage of quarrels among Blacks to sow their own ideas afterward, and that’s all. I don’t wish to say anything about what I glimpse in the hearts of Hutus.
I’m simply saying that Hutu compatriots agreed to exterminate Tutsi compatriots in the marshes so that they could loot their houses, ride on their bicycles, eat their cows.
From now on, I consider this desolate time that passes before me as an enemy. I suffer from being tied to this present life, which is not the one I was supposed to have. Among neighbors, when we ask ourselves why the genocide chose the little spot of Rwanda on the map of Africa, we get lost in discussions that tangle up and never lead to any answers that can fit together.