“MY STORY FROM birth?” Odette Nyiramilimo said. “Do you really have time for that?”
I said I had time.
She said, “I was born in Kinunu, Gisenyi, in 1956. So I was three when this history of the genocide began. I can’t remember it exactly, but I did see a group of men on the facing hill descending with machetes, and I can still see houses burning. We ran into the bush with our cows and stayed there for two months. So there was milk, but nothing else. Our house was burned to nothing.”
Odette sat straight, perched forward on a white plastic lawn chair with her hands folded on the bare white plastic table between us. Her husband was playing tennis; some of her children were paddling around in the pool. It was Sunday at the Cercle Sportif in Kigali—the smell of chicken on the grill, the sounds of swimmers splashing and the pock of tennis balls, the gaudy brilliance of bougainvilleas spilling down the garden wall. We sat in the shade of a tall tree. Odette wore jeans and a white blouse, and a thin gold chain with a pendant charm at her throat. She spoke quickly and directly for several hours.
“I don’t remember when we rebuilt the house,” she said, “but in ‘sixty-three, when I was in the second year of primary school, I remember seeing my father, well dressed, as if for a festival, in
a white cloth wrap. He was out on the road, and I was with the other children, and he said, ‘Goodbye, my children, I’m going to die.’ We cried out, ‘No, no.’ He said, ‘Didn’t you see a jeep go by on the road? It had all your maternal uncles on board, and I won’t wait for them to hunt me down. I’ll wait here to die with them.’ We cried and cried and convinced him not to die then, but the others were all killed.”
This is how Rwandan Tutsis count the years of their lives: in a hopscotch fashion—’fifty-nine, ’sixty, ’sixty-one, ’sixty-three, and so on, through ’ninety-four—sometimes skipping several years, when they knew no terror, sometimes slowing down to name the months and the days.
President Kayibanda was, at best, a dull leader, and by his habit of reclusiveness he suggested that he knew it. Stirring up the Hutu masses to kill Tutsis was the only way he seemed able to keep the spirit of the revolution alive. The pretext for this popular violence was found in the fact that from time to time armed bands of monarchist Tutsis who had fled into exile would stage raids on Rwanda. These guerrillas were the first to be called “cockroaches,” and they used the word themselves to describe their stealth and their belief that they were uncrushable. Their attacks were fitful and feeble, but Hutu retaliation against civilian Tutsis was invariably swift and extensive. It was a rare season in the early years of the republic when Tutsis were not displaced from their homes by arson and murder.
The most dramatic “cockroach” invasion occurred a few days before Christmas in 1963. A band of several hundred Tutsi guerrillas swept into southern Rwanda from a base in Burundi, and advanced to within twelve miles of Kigali before being wiped out by Rwandan forces under Belgian command. Not content with this victory, the government declared a national state of emergency to combat “counterrevolutionaries,” and designated a minister to organize Hutu “self-defense” units, tasked with the “work” of “clearing the bush.” That meant murdering Tutsis and destroying
their homes. Writing in Le Monde, a schoolteacher named Vuillemin, employed by the United Nations in Butare, described the massacres in December of 1963 and January of 1964 as “a veritable genocide,” and he accused European aid workers and church leaders in the country of an indifference that amounted to complicity in the state-sponsored slaughter. Between December 24 and 28, 1963, Vuillemin reported, well-organized massacres left as many as fourteen thousand Tutsis dead in the southern province of Gikongoro alone. Although educated Tutsi men were the primary victims, he wrote, “In most cases, women and children were also felled by masu blows or spearing. The victims were most often thrown in the river after being stripped of their clothes.” Many of the Tutsis who survived followed the earlier swarms of refugees into exile; by mid-1964 as many as a quarter million Tutsis had fled the country. The British philosopher Sir Bertrand Russell described the scene in Rwanda that year as “the most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.”
After Odette’s uncles were carted off to their deaths, her father hired a truck to take the family to the Congo. But it was a large family—Odette’s father had two wives; she was the seventeenth of his eighteen children; with her grandparents, in-laws, aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces, the extended family numbered thirty-three people—and the truck was too small. One of her grandmothers just wouldn’t fit. So her father said, “Let’s stay here and die here,” and they stayed.
Odette’s family made up pretty much the entire remaining Tutsi population of Kinunu. They lived in poverty in the mountains with their cows, and they feared for their lives. Protection came to them in the form of a village councillor, who approached Odette’s father and said, “We like you, and we don’t want you to die, so we’ll make you a Hutu.” Odette didn’t recall just how this had worked. “My parents never spoke of it for the rest of their lives,” she told me. “It was a bit humiliating. But my father took
the identity card, and for two years he was a Hutu. Then he was called in for having a fraudulent identity card.”
By 1966 the “cockroaches” in exile disbanded their hapless army, weary of seeing Tutsis slaughtered every time they attacked. Kayibanda, confident of his status as the Hutu Mwami, realized that the old colonial model of official discrimination, thwarting the disempowered tribe’s access to education, public employment, and the military, might be a sufficient method of pest control to keep Tutsis in their place. To bolster the proportional power of the majority, census figures were edited so that Tutsis counted for just nine percent of the population, and their opportunities were restricted accordingly. Despite the Hutu monopoly on power, the Hamitic myth remained the basis of the state ideology. So a deep, almost mystical sense of inferiority persisted among Rwanda’s new Hutu elite, and to give extra teeth to the quota system a reverse meritocracy was imposed on Tutsis competing for the few positions available: those with the lowest scores were favored over those who performed best. “I had a sister who was always first in our class and I was more like tenth,” Odette recalled. “But when they read off the names of those who were accepted to secondary school, my name was read and my sister’s wasn’t—because I was less brilliant, less of a threat.”
“THEN IT WAS ’seventy-three,” Odette said. “I had left home, for a teachers college in Cyangugu”—in the southwest—“and one morning, while we were eating before going to mass, they closed the windows and the gates. Then some boys from another school came in the dining hall and circled the tables. I was trembling. I remember I had a piece of bread in my mouth, and I couldn’t swallow it. The boys shouted, ‘Get up, Tutsis. All the Tutsis stand up.’ There was a boy from my hill at home. We went to primary school together, and he said, ‘You, Odette, you sit down, we know you’ve been a Hutu forever.’ Then some other boy came and
pulled my hair and said, ‘With this hair we know you’re a Tutsi.’”
Hair was one of the great signifiers for John Hanning Speke. When he identified a king as a member of the Hamitic master race, Speke pronounced him a descendant “from Abyssinia and King David, whose hair was as straight as my own,” and the king, flattered, said, yes, there was a story that his ancestors had “once been half white and half black, with hair on the white side straight, and on the black side frizzly.” Odette was neither tall nor especially skinny, and on the “nasal index” she was probably about average for a Rwandan. But such was Speke’s legacy that a hundred years after he shot himself in a “hunting accident,” a schoolboy in Rwanda tormented Odette because she liked to wear her hair combed back in soft waves. “And,” she went on, “the director of the school, a Belgian woman, said of me, ‘Yes, her, she’s a Tutsi of the first category, take her.’ So we were expelled. Nobody was killed there. Some girls were spat at in the face, and made to walk on their knees, and some were beaten. Then we left on foot.”
All across Rwanda, Tutsi students were being beaten and expelled, and many of them walked home to find their houses burning. The trouble this time had been inspired by events in Burundi, where the political landscape appeared very much like Rwanda’s through a bloody looking glass: in Burundi, a Tutsi military regime held power and Hutus feared for their lives. In the spring of 1972 some Burundian Hutus had attempted a rebellion, which was quickly put down. Then, in the name of restoring “peace and order,” the army conducted a nationwide campaign of extermination against educated Hutus, in which a lot of unschooled Hutus were murdered as well. The genocidal frenzy in Burundi exceeded anything that had preceded it in Rwanda. At least a hundred thousand Burundian Hutus were killed in the spring of 1972, and at least two hundred thousand fled as refugees—many of them to Rwanda.
The influx of Burundian refugees reminded President Kayibanda of the power of ethnic antagonism to galvanize the civic spirit. Rwanda was stagnating in poverty and isolation, and it needed a boost. So Kayibanda asked his army chief, Major General Juvénal Habyarimana, to organize Committees of Public Safety, and Tutsis were once again reminded what majority rule meant in Rwanda. The death toll this time was relatively low—“only,” as Rwandans count these things, in the hundreds—but at least a hundred thousand more Tutsis fled Rwanda as refugees.
When Odette spoke of 1973, she didn’t mention Burundi, or Kayibanda’s political fortunes, or the mass exodus. These circumstances did not figure in her memory. She stuck to her story, which was enough: One morning, while she had her mouth full of bread, her world had once again collapsed because she was Tutsi. “We were six girls, chased out of my school,” she told me. “I had my sack, and we walked.” After three days they had covered fifty miles, and arrived in Kibuye. Odette had relatives there—“a sister of my brother-in-law who had married a Hutu”—and she figured she would stay with them.
“This man had a sharpening business,” she said. “I found him in front of his house at his grinding stone. At first, he ignored me. I thought, Is he drunk? Doesn’t he see who is here? I said, ‘It’s me, Odette.’ He said, ‘Why are you here? It’s school season.’ I said, ‘But we’ve been expelled.’ Then he said, ‘I don’t give shelter to cockroaches.’ That’s what he said. My sister-in-law came along and she embraced me, and”—Odette clapped her hands together over her head and chopped them down in front of her chest—“he separated us roughly.” She looked at her outstretched arms and let them fall. Then she laughed, and said, “In ‘eighty-two, when I first became a doctor, my first job was at the Kibuye hospital, and the first patient I had was this same man, this brother-in-law. I couldn’t face him. I was trembling, and I had to leave the room. My husband was the director of the hospital and I told
him, ‘I can’t treat this man.’ He was very sick and I had taken my oath, but—”
IN RWANDA, THE story of a girl who is sent away as a cockroach and comes back as a medicine woman must be, at least in part, a political story. And that was how Odette told it. In 1973, after her brother-in-law rejected her, she kept walking, home to Kinunu. She found her father’s house empty and one of his side houses burned. The family was hiding in the bush, camping among their banana trees, and Odette lived with them there for several months. Then, in July, the man in charge of the pogroms, Major General Habyarimana, ousted Kayibanda, declared himself President of the Second Republic, and called a moratorium on attacks against Tutsis. Rwandans, he said, should live in peace and work together for development. The message was clear: the violence had served its purpose, and Habyarimana was the fulfillment of the revolution.
“We really danced in the streets when Habyarimana took power,” Odette told me. “At last, a President who said not to kill Tutsis. And after ’seventy-five, at least, we did live in security. But the exclusions were still there.” In fact, Rwanda was more tightly regulated under Habyarimana than ever before. “Development” was his favorite political word and it also happened to be a favorite word of the European and American aid donors whom he milked with great skill. By law, every citizen became a member for life of the President’s party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), which served as the all-pervasive instrument of his will. People were literally kept in their place by rules that forbade changing residence without government approval, and for Tutsis, of course, the old nine-percent quota rules remained. Members of the armed forces were forbidden to marry Tutsis, and it went without saying that they were not supposed to be Tutsis themselves. Two Tutsis were eventually given seats in
Habyarimana’s rubber-stamp parliament, and a token Tutsi was given a ministerial post. If Tutsis thought they deserved better, they hardly complained; Habyarimana and his MRND promised to let them live unmolested, and that was more than they had been able to count on in the past.
The Belgian director of Odette’s old school in Cyangugu would not readmit her, but she found a place in a school that specialized in the sciences, and began preparing for a career in medicine. Once again, the headmistress was a Belgian, but this Belgian took Odette under her wing, keeping her name out of the enrollment books, and hiding her when government inspectors came looking for Tutsis. “It was all trickery,” Odette said, “and the other girls resented it. One night, they came to my dormitory and beat me with sticks.” Odette didn’t dwell on the discomfort. “Those were the good years,” she said. “The headmistress looked after me, I had become a good student—first in my class—and then I was admitted, with some more trickery, to the national medical school in Butare.”
The only thing Odette said about her life as a medical student was: “In Butare once, a professor of internal medicine came up to me and said, ‘What a pretty girl,’ and he started patting my bottom and tried to set up a date even though he was married.”
The memory just popped out of her like that, with no apparent connection to the thought that preceded it or the thought that followed. Then Odette sped ahead, skipping over the years to her graduation and her marriage. Yet, for a moment, that image of her as a young student in an awkward moment of sexual surprise and discomfort hung between us. It seemed to amuse Odette, and it reminded me of all that she wasn’t telling as she recited her life story. She was keeping everything that was not about Hutu and Tutsi to herself. Later, I met Odette several times at parties; she and her husband were gregarious and understandably popular. Together they ran a private maternity and pediatrics practice called the Good Samaritan Clinic. They were known as excellent doctors
and fun people—warm, vivacious, good-humored. They had a charmingly affectionate ease with each other, and one saw right away that they were in the midst of full and engaging lives. But when we met in the garden of the Cercle Sportif, Odette spoke as a genocide survivor to a foreign correspondent. Her theme was the threat of annihilation, and the moments of reprieve in her story—the fond memories, funny anecdotes, sparks of wit—came, if at all, in quick beats, like punctuation marks.
This made sense to me. We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us, and, looking back, there are these discrete tracks of memory: the times when our lives are most sharply defined in relation to others’ ideas of us, and the more private times when we are freer to imagine ourselves. My own parents and grandparents came to the United States as refugees from Nazism. They came with stories similar to Odette’s, of being hunted from here to there because they were born as a this and not a that, or because they had chosen to resist the hunters in the service of an opposing political idea. Near the end of their lives, both my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather wrote their memoirs, and although their stories and their sensibilities were markedly different, both ended their accounts of their lives right in the middle of those lives, with a full stop at the moment they arrived in America. I don’t know why they stopped there. Perhaps nothing that came afterward ever made them feel so vividly, or terribly, aware and alive. But listening to Odette, it occurred to me that if others have so often made your life their business—made your life into a question, really, and made that question their business—then perhaps you will want to guard the memory of those times when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and inviolably your own.
It was the same with nearly all the Tutsi survivors I met in Rwanda. When I pressed for stories of how they had lived during the long periods between bouts of violence—household stories, village stories, funny stories, or stories of annoyance, stories of
school, work, church, a wedding, a funeral, a trip, a party, or a feud—the answer was always opaque: in normal times we lived normally. After a while I stopped asking, because the question seemed pointless and possibly cruel. On the other hand, I found that Hutus often volunteered their memories of life’s engrossing daily dramas before the genocide, and these stories were, just as the Tutsi survivors had said, normal: variations, in a Rwandan vein, of stories you might hear anywhere.
So remembering has its economy, like experience itself, and when Odette mentioned the hand of the professor of internal medicine on her bottom, and grinned, I saw that she had forgotten that economy and wandered in her memories, and I felt that we were both glad of it. A professor had imagined her susceptible and she had imagined that as a married man and her teacher he should know greater restraint. They had each other wrong. But people have the strangest notions as they navigate each other in this life—and in the “good years,” the “normal times,” that isn’t the end of the world.
ODETTE’S HUSBAND, JEAN-BAPTISTE Gasasira, had a Tutsi father and a Hutu mother, but his father had died when Jean-Baptiste was very young, and his mother had succeeded in arranging for him to have Hutu identity papers. “That hadn’t prevented him from being beaten up in ’seventy-three,” Odette said, “but it meant the children had Hutu papers.” She had two sons and a daughter, and might have had more if she and Jean-Baptiste hadn’t been traveling abroad a great deal in the 1980s, to pursue specialized medical studies, “a big opportunity for Tutsis,” which was facilitated by their friendship with the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Education.
When Habyarimana took over, Rwanda was significantly poorer than any of its neighbor states, and by the mid-1980s it was economically better off than any of them. Odette and Jean-Baptiste, who had settled into well-paid jobs at the Central Hospital
of Kigali, were living very close to the top of the Rwandan ladder, with government housing and cars and a busy social life among the Kigali elite. “Our best friends were Hutus, ministers and those who were in power from our generation,” Odette recalled. “This was our crowd. But it was a bit hard. Even though Jean-Baptiste was hired as a Hutu, he was seen to have the face and manner of a Tutsi, and we were known as Tutsis.”
The sense of exclusion could be subtle, but with time it became increasingly blunt. In November of 1989, a man came to the maternity ward asking for Dr. Odette. “He was very impatient and insisted we had to talk. He said, ‘You’re needed at the Presidency, at the office of the Secretary-General of Security.’” Odette was terrified; she assumed that she would be interrogated about her habit, during occasional trips to neighboring countries and to Europe, of visiting family members and Rwandan friends living in exile.
Since 1959, the diaspora of exiled Rwandan Tutsis and their children had grown to include about a million people; it was the largest and oldest unresolved African refugee problem. Nearly half of these refugees lived in Uganda, and in the early 1980s a number of young Rwandans there had joined the rebel leader Yoweri Museveni in his fight against the brutal dictatorship of President Milton Obote. By January of 1986, when Museveni claimed victory and was sworn in as President of Uganda, his army included several thousand Rwandan refugees. Habyarimana felt threatened. For years he had pretended to negotiate with refugee groups who demanded the right to return to Rwanda, but, citing the country’s chronic overpopulation, he had always refused to let the exiles come home. Ninety-five percent of Rwanda’s land was under cultivation, and the average family consisted of eight people living as subsistence farmers on less than half an acre. Shortly after Museveni’s victory in Uganda, Habyarimana had simply declared that Rwanda was full: end of discussion. Thereafter, contact with refugees was outlawed, and Odette knew how thorough Habyarimana’s
spy network could be. As she drove to the Presidency, she realized that she had no idea what to say if her visits to exiles had been discovered.
“Dr. Odette,” Habyarimana’s security chief said, “they say you’re a good doctor.”
Odette said, “I don’t know.”
“Yes,” he went on. “You’re said to be very intelligent. You studied at these good schools without the right. But what did you say in the hospital corridor recently, after the death of President Habyarimana’s brother?”
Odette didn’t know what he was talking about.
The security chief told her: “You said that demons should take the whole Habyarimana family.”
Odette, who had been trembling with fear, laughed. “I’m a doctor,” she said. “You think I believe in demons?”
The security chief laughed, too. Odette went home, and the next morning, as usual, she went to work. “I started my rounds,” she recalled. “Then a colleague came up to me and said, ‘You’re always going away. Where are you going to go now, to Belgium, or where?’ And he took me to see—my name had been struck from the doors to the wards, and everyone was told I didn’t work there anymore.”