NOTES

The Marshes

0.   Gaçaça means “soft grass,” the name for the people’s courts held in the open air under the trees. Inspired by ancestral traditions, they were established to relieve a judicial system so weakened by the genocide that it was unable to handle the massive number of criminals standing trial.

0.   A mudugudu is a development of homes built as a collective. They emerged in the aftermath of the genocide as part of a government project designed to address the destruction of housing and to ensure greater security by bringing together communities otherwise isolated on the hills.

0.   Primus is Rwanda’s most popular beer. A Belgian brand brewed in Gisenyi, a town in the western part of the country, the inexpensive and slightly bitter beer is drunk unchilled (ishyushye) or, more rarely, cold (ikonge) straight from its 25-ounce bottles. It has increasingly been supplanted in Rwandan cities by other brands, such as Mützig or Amstel, which are more to contemporary tastes.

Jean-Pierre Habimana

0.   A term deriving from Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, intelligence, and industry, minerval refers to the tuition for high schools and universities in Belgium, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. In Rwanda in the 1990s, tuition was very expensive for the children of farmers, who often had to interrupt their schooling because of poor harvests. Tuition has now decreased considerably or been eliminated in primary and secondary schools.

At the Market

0.   Meaning “those who fight as a group,” interahamwe refers to extremist Hutu militias created on the initiative of the Habyarimana clan, although it is impossible to gauge precisely the influence the clan exerted over them. They were trained by the Rwandan army, in some cases by French military advisers. The militias, whose active members numbered several tens of thousands, enlisted the hundreds of thousands of killers involved in the genocide. During the Tutsi-led RPF offensive in Congo in autumn 1996, many either dispersed or were killed, while others returned to Rwanda with the Hutu refugee population to turn themselves in.

Immaculée Feza

0.   April 7, a national holiday since 1995, marks the beginning of a week of national mourning, which includes presidential speeches, processions, radio and television programs, and local ceremonies, in particular at memorial sites. Certain regions postpone the commemorations because of specific events; in Butare, for example, they begin on April 19, and in Bisesero, on June 27.

Fishing on the Akagera

0.   Urwagwa, or banana beer, is four times less expensive and three times stronger than ordinary beer; it can also be quite delicious—hence its popularity on the hills. It varies in tartness depending on the brewer’s expertise and may even be sweet to suit the drinker’s taste. Hutus are said to be more skilled at brewing urwagwa than Tutsis, although that doesn’t make them any more fervent devotees.

0.   Chalumeau is the reed straw placed in a bottle of urwagwa. Cabaret regulars buy a bottle at a time and pass it around to their companions.

Nadine Umutesi

0.   Etymologically, the term muzungu means “one who takes the place of others.” It popularly refers to a white person.

In Rilima

0.   Ankole is a cattle breed of medium size, thin and sinewy, known for its splendid lyre-shaped horns and small cervical hump. Its coat is often the color of mahogany or pied gray, black, and white. Tutsis long held the exclusive privilege of breeding Ankoles, which they used more as symbols of wealth and as offerings than for consumption. Almost entirely wiped out during the genocide, the breed now exceeds its pre-1994 numbers. Land reforms designed to modernize rearing practices have aimed to crossbreed Ankole herds, to distribute them more evenly, and, above all, to allocate the cattle to individual families in line with the government’s slogan “one family, one cow.”

Fabiola Mukayishimire

0.   Since its creation in 1998, the Genocide Survivors Support and Assistance Fund (Fonds d’aide aux rescapés du génocide), which represents approximately 5 percent of Rwanda’s annual budget, has, among other things, financed the education of around fifty thousand high school students and seven thousand university student survivors.

Sandra Isimbi

0.   Inkotanyi, meaning “invincibles,” is the name given to the Tutsi-led RPF rebels.

Ernestine’s Murder

0.   The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) is a Tutsi organization formed in 1987 in Uganda; it carried out its first military operations in 1990, which led to the death of its founder, Fred Rwigema. On the first day of the genocide, the RPF launched a major offensive into Rwanda, taking control of the country on July 4, 1994, under the command of Paul Kagame, the strong man of the Republic.