What lovelier advertisement for fabrics than a beautiful woman dozing atop piles of multicolored cut cloth, dressed head to toe in matching hues. In the suffocating heat of the Nyamata market, Angélique slumbers in her boutique at the entry to the fabric aisle. She awakes, makes a contrite wave of the hand, then smiles. The smile is a pleasure to behold because the last time I saw her she was wandering the street, her face slightly swollen, her mood dark, and her head aching with nasty migraines.
Angélique Mukamanzi, still just a teenager at the time, told me shortly after the killings: “In Ntarama, survivors turn bad or desperate … There are plenty of men and women who no longer bother. As soon as they scrape together a little money, they drink Primus and let everything drop. They get drunk on alcohol and bad memories. There are some who get a kick out of retelling the same fateful moments … Nowadays, I see this wretched time that stretches out before me as an enemy. I suffer from being bound to the past and from a life that wasn’t meant for me.” She gazed bitterly at her palms hardened by the hoe.
In this new covered market, one is plunged into a crowd more hurried now than in the past, between concrete stalls and protective fences. Walking the long hall, one might lament the loss of the old soccer field, the sunlit strolls in the company of cows, the exotic parasols, or the crowd’s giddy dashes to escape sudden downpours. Yet one still finds the familiar aisle of tomatoes raised into small pre-weighed piles, the tall pyramids of flour, the scent of saffron, the buzzing aisle of fish protected from the dust by a blanket of flies, and the fine jokes of the women vendors.
I meet Pio and Josiane, hand in hand. They laugh because they immediately sense my urge to pose still more questions about their marriage, to finally penetrate the mystery of the mutual promise they made each other in the marshes, a promise between a tall Tutsi cutter and a Hutu high school girl huddled beneath the papyrus, both of them pupils from the same class. Instead, we exchange the latest news. They tell me that the war Pio’s mother has been waging against them—for she can’t stand the idea of seeing her descendants contaminated by Tutsi blood—is now heading to court. At the end of their rope, they are leaving to the Mutara region, in the north of the country, to try their luck there.
The Mutara, an El Dorado of virgin prairies much discussed up on the hills, is the same region from which Jeannette returned at once utterly disillusioned and ruined. We find her farther on, in the tailors’ row, hunched over her Singer. She recounts the dream she and her young husband shared of a sprawling parcel surmounted by wild pastures, the euphoria they felt as they embarked on their new adventure, taking their three children and the bundles in which they had wrapped the bounty from the sale of their land. Then the three hellish years in a windowless house, on arid land, the closest water supply at least two kilometers away, near a hamlet lacking both a school and a clinic.
And yet Jeannette had seen worse. In Life Laid Bare, she spoke of her mother’s death as we talked in her small house in Kanazi. Then she added this: “I know for myself that when you’ve seen your mama cut so savagely and suffer so slowly, you forever lose a certain amount of trust in others, and not only in the interahamwe.1 I mean, a person who has peered for so long into such terrible pain can never live among others like before. You are always wary. You distrust others even when they haven’t done a thing. What I’m getting at is that Mama’s death grieved me the most, but that her drawn-out suffering did me the most damage—and that can never be undone.”
She was seventeen years old at the time, working the land to feed a family of orphaned children who had been brought together around her and her sister. Years later, during the drought of 2000, she gave up agriculture on a whim, tried her hand at business within a cooperative, took flight from her empty cashbox, and joined the local police force, from which she was expelled because of her slight build. Then she was given the gift of a sewing machine and married the father of her children, a pleasant young man, about whom she says: “His name is Sylvestre Bizimana. He’s a bike-taxi driver. He brought me home in the evening several times after my sewing work at the market. We came to an understanding. Pregnancy followed. He showed affection … Now, debts come rolling in and money troubles pile up, but we have sorghum porridge aplenty … Heaven chose me to be a mother, and I gave birth—it’s a big thing.” The Bugesera air and her return to the tailors’ shop have fortified her enthusiasm for her work, which isn’t in short supply.
A market day begins before the pink streaks of daybreak, when columns of people walk down from the dark hills surrounding Nyamata. The route sometimes takes more than four hours. Women carry sacks, baskets of beans, bound hens, bins filled with fruit, and sorghum—indeed everything the land has to offer. The lucky ones transport baskets of charcoal, the unlucky heavy sacks of flour. Rucksacks top off the load if no toddler is wrapped to the women’s backs. Men push bicycles weighed down with more cumbersome sacks and sometimes with a goat, if it isn’t trailing behind on a leash. They often tote bookbags containing the papers they plan to present at the clinic, the insurance office, or the district office. Because it is a market day, it is also the day for medical visits and administrative appointments.
Théophile carries nothing on his bike except, on the back-wheel rack, his beautiful wife, Francine, whose white shawl shields her from the dust, and atop the front bar, their daughter Aimée. He wears a herder’s hat and carries a Tutsi staff. He drops the ladies at the market entrance, then pedals off contentedly to the first of several small cabarets, where he and other former breeders will swap stories about their herds. On the return trip, the men will bring the women home on their bicycles if their rounds of drinks haven’t made them too wobbly to steer.
For some market-goers, the departure starts the night before instead of in the morning; cyclists transport their cargo of pineapples bound in nets from as far as Uganda, more than 150 kilometers away. From Kigali come moto-taxis loaded with secondhand clothes: jeans, shirts, and European-style dresses at cut-rate prices. The latter arouse less excitement than the mountain of ladies’ shoes toward which the women gravitate, delighted. Eugénie loves sliding her feet into all kinds of pumps. She laughs as she takes a few steps in high heels. She says she was “a bit plump with plenty” after the birth of her seventh child. Francine picks out sandals for Aimée, who is taking school exams at the end of the week and could see herself in a pair of ballet flats. A shopkeeper sporting a broad-brimmed hat spreads out his tobacco leaves. Englebert comes here to smoke his pipe after bawdy chats with the merchant women.
Leaving at the other end of the covered market, we come upon bicycle mechanics and a scrapyard of machine parts and radio equipment. Deliverymen race past, their torsos shiny with sweat behind their wheelbarrows or their backs bent at right angles under sacks. The animal market resounds with restive groans, bleats, and cackles. Rabbits, newcomers to the Bugesera, are stupefied to find themselves rolled up like crepes at the bottom of baskets.
In the poultry section, we meet up with Immaculée as she selects a chicken for Sunday lunch. She likes to inspect their feet, to grope their hackles, then to play the crafty haggler as she wiggles in place. Immaculée is a teenager in perpetual motion. She bounds more than she walks; she jumps up and down as she talks. Everyone calls her Feza, her Rwandan name, except for me, who can’t resist her Christian name, Immaculée. She delights in everything. Her curiosity is active from morning to night. She looks with smiling eyes on the world around her, giving the impression that her laughter and her gazelle-like skipping about stave off her timid nature.