When I invite her for our first meeting, at a restaurant at the bus station, Jacqueline Mukamana orders a chicken served with fried bananas and one or two Primus beers. With her elegant fingers, she meticulously savors the meal, especially since she also feeds little bites of it to her baby, leaving behind only a licked-clean carcass on her plate. When we meet a second time, at the Coin des amis in Kanzenze, she makes do with half a chicken, taking the other half home in a doggy bag, having coaxed the last drop of beer from the bottles left on the table. This is because, since her husband’s return to Rilima, the Bunani family has had to go without meat and beer. Although destitution has yet to befall them, it is knocking at their door.
Jacqueline lives in Kiganwa, near Kibungo. We take the route from Kanzenze, then turn right onto a road so rocky and broken that not a single bicycle ventures the climb. The road follows a ridge overlooking two deep valleys to the right and the left, each the paradise of myriads of songbirds. One valley rushes steeply down to the motionless river below; the second slopes gently toward other, smaller valleys, graced with the colors of the bush and the banana groves, through which shepherds lead their herds. Kiganwa includes about fifty earth-and-sheet-metal houses, among which are a grocery store and a cabaret. The latter belongs to Jacqueline.
Every morning at dawn, as the drowsy family emerges into the courtyard, as women begin to bustle around the stove, as young girls wash up with the hose before donning their school uniforms, Jacqueline leaves the house. Wearing a muddy pagne, a T-shirt donated by an NGO, and a scarf wrapped tightly around her hair, she carries her tools over her shoulder. Her son Jean-Damascène picks up his tools and catches up with her. Joining a stream of neighbors, they take the river path that snakes toward the field. Their land, a bright ocher in the fresh morning light, is plowed, cleared of scrub, and carefully lined with furrows. It seems a huge expanse for only two pairs of arms, which, none too brawny to begin with, are away at the market on Wednesdays, at church on Sundays, and in Rilima on visiting days. Because of their absences, the mother and son have fallen behind, as can be seen with a quick glance at the neighboring fields, where rows of seedlings are already staked. In the banana grove, broken branches dangle, exhausted trees still need to be replaced, and a layer of gray leaves suffocates the soil.
Jacqueline attacks the earth with a hoe. If all goes well, they will have planted the beans a few days ahead of the first rains. Jean-Damascène looks up at the sky, whose pale-blue hue can only mean a scorching heat to come. He hesitates, then reaches for the hoe again. A hole, three seeds, a hole, three seeds, along a hundred-yard furrow at the end of which they stop just long enough to mop their brows before setting off in the other direction. No words are exchanged between them, no breath wasted under the burning sun. At morning’s end, they walk one after the other back up the hill. With barely time to tidy up, they prepare the noon meal, the fodder for the pigs, and, of course, the jerry can of urwagwa to sell. Jacqueline doesn’t always find a few minutes to doze off in her hot bedroom; more often than not, she is back at work on the parcel by early afternoon.
The evening sun has already reddened the mountain ridge when she appears on the veranda to serve her drink. She wears a magnificent multicolor dress. She undoubtedly likes the flashy colors. The drinkers squeeze together on the benches. Candles are lit and jerry cans unstopped. The bottles are emptied and refilled; the chalumeau is passed around until late into the night. The men chat heartily as the family eats its evening meal in the courtyard behind them.
Of the twenty years since the genocide, Jacqueline has spent seven with her husband on their parcel and the others in the Kivu camp or at their home as a prisoner’s wife. In Rilima, Fulgence cheers her with his advice, but it comes at the price of exhausting journeys to the penitentiary, expensive visits to the prison commissary, and attorney’s fees for filing appeals. Unlike Marie-Chantal, Joseph-Désiré’s wife, Jacqueline, never complains. She will never be seen asking for aid or charity. Apart from the feeling of injustice that has haunted her since Fulgence’s last indictment, she never shows anger or resentment over these trouble-filled years. Unlike Consolée, she neither blames nor criticizes her husband for what he has subjected them to. Does she lack the nerve? Deep down, what does she really think? How complicit was she, if she was complicit? Ever welcoming, cheerful, and discreet, she is impossible to read. She is a strangely courageous mother, resistant to hardship, stalwart in raising her family, loyal, mute, and stubborn through adversity. The dignity with which she accepts her fate is nothing short of moving.
Following their return from Congo to Kiganwa, an area mainly populated by Hutus, at least one man in every family ended up in prison. The years passed, the men were released and found their way back to the fields and the cabarets. Ernestine’s murder hit Jacqueline like a whirlwind that seems only to have devastated her parcel of land. Not a single customer has deserted her veranda, not a single insulting remark is made, but this time there is no one around to lend her a hand in the field or in the offices of the court authorities. The two boys are in the throes of adolescence, the little girl is at the age of persistent unanswered questions. It is a lonely time.