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 district of Nyamata, in Rwanda. That is the point of departure of this book.
A few days earlier, on the evening of April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Juvénal Habyarimana, the president of the Republic of Rwanda, had exploded on its approach to the airport in Kigali. This attack was the signal to begin killing the Tutsi population, a slaughter that had been planned for months and started at dawn in the streets of the capital, spreading quickly throughout the land.
Four days later, amid the hills and marshes of the Bugesera region, the killing began on the main street of the little town of Nyamata. Throngs of Tutsis immediately sought refuge in churches or fled into banana groves, swamps, and forests of eucalyptus. On April 14, 15, and 16, five thousand people in the church at Nyamata and as many again in the church at N’tarama, a hamlet twelve miles away, were murdered by militiamen, soldiers, and the vast majority of their Hutu neighbors. Those two massacres unleashed the genocide in this arid region of red clay laterite, where the killing went on until mid-May. For a month, singing as they went, disciplined gangs of dedicated killers armed with machetes, spears, and clubs tracked down and surrounded those fleeing through the papyrus swamps of Nyamwiza and the eucalyptus forests of Kayumba. These diligent hunters killed five out of six Tutsis, the same percentage that perished throughout the rest of the Rwandan countryside, and a much higher proportion than died in the cities.
For several years the survivors of the Nyamata hills, like their fellows throughout Rwanda, have lived in a muteness as enigmatic as the silence of those who survived the Nazi concentration camps. Today, some Tutsis explain that “life has broken down,” whereas for others, it has “stopped,” and still others say that it “absolutely must go on.” They all admit, however, that among themselves they talk of nothing but the genocide. That was what convinced me to return to Rwanda and speak with them, to drink Primus beer in Marie-Louise’s shop or banana beer at the bar in Kibungo, to keep visiting the adobe houses and cabaret2 terraces, to chat in the shade of the acacias, hesitantly at first, then with increasing confidence and familiarity, meeting Cassius, Francine, Angélique, Berthe, and the others, to persuade them to tell their stories. Some of them seemed doubtful about why they should talk to a foreigner, or why a foreigner might listen to them, but no one turned me down.
To explain such a long silence on their part, they also said, for example, that they had found themselves “shouldered aside,” as if they were now “in the way.” Or that they “distrusted people,” that they were too discouraged, isolated, “undone.” That they felt “uneasy” or sometimes “at fault” as well, for having taken the place of someone they’d known, or for rejoining the daily world of the living.
Herders, farmwomen, teachers, tradeswomen, a social worker, a mason’s helper: day after day, in Nyamata or up in the surrounding hills, they told their stories, at the mercy of their misgivings or their difficulties in evoking certain memories, and led on by new questions inspired by their testimony. Most of them, skeptical or indifferent before the lessons of history, are tempted in spite of everything to share with others how incomprehensible, distressing, and lonely their lives have become.
A genocide is not a particularly cruel and murderous war. It is a project of extermination. In the aftermath of a war, civilian survivors feel a strong need to bear witness; in the wake of a genocide, on the other hand, the survivors yearn strangely for silence. Their withdrawal is disturbing.
The history of the Rwandan genocide will take a long time to write. The object of this book is not, however, to join the stack of documents, inquiries, and novels (some of them excellent) already published. It is solely to bring readers the astonishing stories of these survivors.
A genocide is—to summarize one survivor’s own definition—an inhuman undertaking conceived by human beings, a project too methodical and insane to be fathomed. And yet, the accounts of headlong flight through the marshes by Claudine, Odette, Jean-Baptiste, Christine, and their neighbors; the descriptions—often bluntly and magnificently expressed—of their crude encampments, their increasing degradation, humiliation, and finally their marginalization by Rwandan society; their apprehensions regarding the way other people see them, their obsessions, complicities, their explorations and interrogations of their own memories, and their reflections as survivors, but also as Africans and villagers, allow us to draw as close as we can get to the Rwandan genocide.