A thin cord stretched between two acacias, watched over by a guard straddling a chair, marks the entrance to the penitentiary at Rilima. Do not be fooled by this nonchalance, for no would-be escapee has ever gone beyond the neighboring forest, or nearby Lake Kidogo.
Formerly a district prison, the penitentiary today houses more than eight thousand inmates, accused or convicted of participation in the genocide in the Bugesera region, chiefly in the district of Nyamata. Living quarters for the guards and the administration are lined up in the shade. A constant back-and-forth of detainees in pink uniforms fetches cans of water on a path leading down to the lake; by the shore, inmates with privileges bathe or do laundry.
Without barbed wire or watchtowers, the outside wall of the prison sits atop a small hill. A half-open orange iron gate lets authorized prisoners slip in and out. From fifty yards away, one is struck both by the orchestral din of competing rhythms and songs and by a suffocating stench of sweat, backed up by the reek of cooking and garbage. One look through the opening in the gate gives an idea of the indescribable promiscuity of life within those walls.
Three buildings house the male prisoners; a fourth is for the female inmates. Since the population of Rilima has increased tenfold with this new influx of detainees, however, the prisoners find shelter wherever they can. Some are packed into huts and cells; most have settled into the courtyard, crowded shoulder to shoulder, some out in the sun, others under sheets of corrugated metal or plastic. It’s amid this mob that the prisoners, all in pink uniforms, prepare their meals in huge cauldrons, hang out laundry, beat drums, and organize prayer meetings sponsored by priests or political meetings under the auspices of former leaders and political big shots. In this jostling throng, men compete stubbornly for space in which to weave, shape metal, play cards or checkers, gamble, pick the occasional fight, sleep, or be bored to death. Some faces are solemn, sad, perhaps despairing or full of hatred; others are resigned, cordial, even jovial.
Although they are all trapped in this overcrowding, which is often aggravated by downpours and oppressive heat, the prisoners are variously subject to different disciplinary regimes. Those who have already confessed—more than two thousand—as well as those accused of minor offenses are housed in a separate building and may circulate more freely. They tend gardens near the administration offices, repair cars, play soccer on an outdoor field, talk out under the trees. Most of those awaiting trial languish in the crowded courtyard. Others leave at dawn in a truck to work in the penitentiary’s one hundred and eighty acres of fields. The men sentenced to death or to long prison terms, however, wait behind bars, and they describe this confinement, as one of them put it, as “Hell on earth.”
Like all prisons housing the killers of the genocide, the one at Rilima is subject to two authorities: that of the guards, who patrol not the inner courtyard but the outside of the penitentiary, and that of the local mafia, run by former interahamwe leaders or unrepentant ideologues of the genocide, who have re-created within Rilima the hierarchy of the Hutu militias and extremist political parties. They are the ones who manage the buildings, organize fitness exercises and festivities, supervise donations, settle disputes, and offer legal advice to those awaiting trial.
Without prior permission from the court or prison administration, relatives have the right to visit the prisoners—for two or three minutes: they enter in surges of two to three hundred, set down the food or clothing they’ve brought, exchange a few words, and leave. The International Red Cross may inspect the entire area of the penitentiary; in return it provides, for a limited period, most of the supplies (jerry cans, basins, mattresses), medicines, and food, without which Rilima would become a “Hell on earth” for all its prisoners.
Strangely enough, the Hutus—be they villagers or townspeople, whether they admit or deny committing crimes, feel guilty or innocent—would almost seem to speak more freely about the killings while in prison than at home, doubtless because they no longer feel safe on the hills, where they might be denounced or face arbitrary arrest. In the district of Nyamata, two out of three Hutu inhabitants have come home to their lands. The others, chiefly men, were killed during the war, or haven’t returned from Congo, or preferred to go back to their native villages, far from the watching eyes of their surviving neighbors. Unless those missing are in prison in Rilima.
Aside from the schools, where the children share the benches, and the marketplace, which is a necessity, and the church on Sunday, or a wake before a funeral, Hutus and Tutsis now avoid one another. On the hills, Hutu families welcome strangers with hospitality that is quite courteous, but timid and uneasy. And any reference to the genocide will drop a veil of silence over their memories, even when these families have been cleared of all suspicion by the testimony of their Tutsi neighbors.
One day, on the hill of Maranyundo, on a slope populated by Hutu families, a young woman encountered by chance becomes the exception to that code of silence. From the first moment she proves confident and talkative. She agrees to speak of her family, her Hutu village, her youth, her life as a farmer. Then, surprisingly, she does not wince and try to change the subject when the genocide is mentioned. On the contrary, without hesitation she recalls events with the perspective of an onlooker still shocked by what she has seen, describing the reactions of her neighbors, her terror of the interahamwe, and then her hasty flight, the mass exodus of the Hutu throngs on that long journey across a country at war to the camps in Congo, and finally her return, and her future.
Her name is Christine Nyiransabimana. With her mother and two brothers, she farms the family land. She is the unmarried mother of a boy, unwanted but cherished, as she herself explains, and of two very much wanted twin girls. Her constant smile is open and most appealing. She seems perceptive about her people. During the first visit, she alludes only in passing to the murder of her father, without any explanation. Only on the second visit does she reveal, with enigmatic reticence, why her father was killed.