6

TUTSIS WERE NOT alone in their disappointment as the Second Republic calcified into a mature totalitarian order, in which Habyarimana, running unopposed, claimed a comical ninety-nine percent of the vote in the presidential elections. The President’s entourage was drawn overwhelmingly from his home base in the northwest, and southern Hutus felt increasingly alienated. Among the peasant masses, Hutus remained very nearly as downtrodden as Tutsis, and they were put to hard use after Habyarimana revived the despised colonial regime of mandatory communal work details. Of course, everyone turned out, as the ubiquitous MRND-party enforcers required, to chant and dance in adulation of the President at mass pageants of political “animation,” but such mandatory civic cheer could not mask the growing political discontent in much of Rwandan society. While the country as a whole had grown a bit less poor during Habyarimana’s tenure, the great majority of Rwandans remained in circumstances of extreme poverty, and it did not go unnoticed that the omnipotent President and his cronies had grown very rich.

Then again, it had never been otherwise in Rwandan memory, and compared to much of the rest of postcolonial Africa, Rwanda appeared Edenic to foreign-aid donors. Just about everywhere else you turned on the continent, you saw the client dictators of the Cold War powers ruling by pillage and murder, and from the rebels who opposed them you heard the loud anti-imperial rhetoric that makes white development workers feel bitterly misunderstood. Rwanda was tranquil—or, like the volcanoes in the northwest, dormant; it had nice roads, high church attendance, low crime rates, and steadily improving standards of public health and education. If you were a bureaucrat with a foreign-aid budget to unload, and your professional success was to be measured by your ability not to lie or gloss too much when you filed happy statistical reports at the end of each fiscal year, Rwanda was the ticket. Belgium shoveled money into its old stomping ground; France, ever eager to expand its neocolonial African empire—la Francophonie—had begun military assistance to Habyarimana in 1975; Switzerland sent more development aid to Rwanda than to any other country on earth; Washington, Bonn, Ottawa, Tokyo, and the Vatican all counted Kigali as a favorite charity. The hills were thick with young whites working, albeit unwittingly, for the greater glory of Habyarimana.

Then, in 1986, the prices of Rwanda’s chief exports, coffee and tea, crashed on the world market. The only easy profits left were to be had from scamming foreign-aid projects, and the competition was intense among the northwesterners, who had risen to prominence on Habyarimana’s coattails. In criminal syndicates like the Mafia, a person who has become invested in the logic and practices of the gang is said to be owned by it. This concept is organic to Rwanda’s traditional social, political, and economic structures, the tight pyramids of patron-client relationships that are the one thing no change of regime has ever altered. Every hill has its chief, every chief has his deputies and his sub-bosses; the pecking order runs from the smallest social cell to the highest central authority. But if the Mwami—or, now, the President—essentially owned Rwanda, who owned him? Through control of parastatal businesses, of the MRND political apparatus, and of the army, a knot of northwesterners had by the late 1980s turned the Rwandan state into little more than an instrument of their will—and with time the President himself stood more as a product of regional power than as its source.

From Rwanda’s state radio and its generally timid newspapers, one would have been hard pressed to guess that Habyarimana was not entirely the lord and owner of his public face. Yet everyone knew that the President was a man of insignificant lineage, possibly even the grandson of a Zairean or Ugandan immigrant, while his wife, Agathe Kanzinga, was the daughter of big shots. Madame Agathe, a great churchgoer, fond of binge shopping in Paris, was the muscle behind the throne; it was her family and their cronies who had bestowed their aura on Habyarimana, who had spied for him, and who occasionally and with great secrecy had killed for him, and when the national belt began tightening in the late 1980s, it was le clan de Madame that prevailed in profiteering from foreign aid.

BUT THERE IS so much you should know here—all at once. Permit me a quick aside.

In the fall of 1980, the naturalist Dian Fossey, who had spent the past thirteen years in the mountains of northwestern Rwanda studying the habits of mountain gorillas, withdrew to Cornell University to finish a book. Her deal with Cornell required her to teach a course, and I was one of her students. One day, before class, I found her in one of her famously dark moods. She had just caught her cleaning lady removing the hair from her—Fossey’s—comb. I was impressed: a cleaning lady, much less such a diligent one, struck my undergraduate imagination as highly exotic. But Fossey had had a row with the woman; she may even have given her the sack. She told me that her hair and, for that matter, her fingernail clippings were for her to dispose of. Burning was best, though a flush toilet was OK, too. So the cleaning lady was a scapegoat; it was herself whom Fossey was mad at. Leaving her hair lying about like that was bad form: anybody could get hold of it and work a spell on her. I didn’t know at the time that Fossey was popularly known in Rwanda as “the sorceress.” I said, “You really believe that hocus-pocus?” Fossey shot back, “Where I live, if I didn’t I’d be dead.”

Five years passed, and I saw in the newspaper that Dian Fossey had been murdered in Rwanda. Somebody killed her with a machete. Much later, there was a trial in Rwanda, a murky proceeding: a Rwandan defendant was found hanged in his cell before he could testify, and one of Fossey’s American research assistants was tried in absentia, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The case was closed, but suspicions remained that it had not been solved. Many Rwandans still speak of a cousin or in-law of Madame Agathe Habyarimana as the true sponsor of the murder; his motive was said to have something to do with gold and drugsmuggling operations—or perhaps gorilla poaching—in the national park around Fossey’s research station. It was all very murky.

When Odette told me of her talk with Habyarimana’s security chief about the question of demons, I thought of Fossey. Power is terribly complex; if powerful people believe in demons it may be best not to laugh at them. A United Nations press officer in Rwanda gave me a photocopy of a document he had picked up in the wreckage of Habyarimana’s home after the genocide. (Among the President’s possessions, trophy seekers also found a movie version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, with a hagiographic portrait of the Führer on the package.) The document consisted of a prophecy delivered in 1987 by a Catholic visionary, known as Little Pebbles, who claimed direct communication with Our Blessed Mother Virgin Mary, and who foresaw imminent desolation and the end of time. Little Pebbles’ scenario for the coming years involved a Communist attempt on the Vatican, civil war in every country on earth, a series of nuclear explosions, including that of a Russian reactor on the North Pole that would cause a shield of ice to form in the stratosphere, blocking out the sun and leading to the death of a quarter of the world’s population; thereafter, earthquakes would make whole nations disappear, and famine and plague would eliminate many of the people who had bothered to survive so far. Finally, after a total nuclear war and three days of darkness, Little Pebbles promised, “Jesus Christ will return to earth on Easter Sunday, 1992.”

I can’t say that Habyarimana ever read this forecast, only that it found its way into his household, and that it was close in spirit to views that fascinated his powerful wife. A hill called Kibeho, which stands near the center of Rwanda, became famous in the 1980s as a place where the Virgin Mary had the habit of appearing and addressing local visionaries. In Rwanda—the most Christianized country in Africa, where at least sixty-five percent of the population were Catholics and fifteen percent were Protestants—the Kibeho visionaries quickly attracted a strong following. The Catholic Church got up an official “scientific commission of inquiry” into the phenomenon, and declared it to be largely authentic. Kibeho was a big deal. Pilgrims came from all over the world, and Madame Agathe Habyarimana was a frequent visitor. With the encouragement of the Bishop of Kigali, Monsignor Vincent Nsengiyumva (himself an enthusiastic member of the central committee of the MRND), Madame Agathe often brought several Kibeho visionaries along on international trips. These young women had much to report from their colloquies with the Virgin, but among the Marian messages that made the strongest popular impression was the repeated assertion that Rwanda would, before long, be bathed in blood. “There were messages announcing woe for Rwanda,” Monsignor Augustin Misago, who was a member of the church commission on Kibeho, told me. “Visions of the crying Virgin, visions of people killing with machetes, of hills covered with corpses.”

Rwandans often describe themselves as an uncommonly suspicious people, and with some reason. Wherever you go in Rwanda—to a private home, a bar, a government office, or a refugee camp—drinks are served with the bottle caps on, and opened only before the eyes of the drinker. It is a custom that honors the fear of poison. An open bottle, even a bottle with a visibly loose cap, is unacceptable. Glasses, too, are suspect. When, as with the potent banana beer consumed by the peasantry, a drink comes unbottled from a common pot, or when a drink is to be shared, the provider must take the first sip, like a food taster in a medieval court, to prove that it is safe.

Tales of alleged poisoning regularly punctuate Rwanda’s historical lore. Marc Vincent, a pediatrician from Brussels who served with the colonial administration during the early 1950s, found that the locals regarded poisoning and sorcery as the root causes of all fatal illnesses. In his monograph L’enfant au Ruanda-Urundi, Vincent recalled overhearing a very sick ten-year-old boy telling his father, “When I die, you must see who poisoned me.” And an eight-year-old told Vincent, “Yes, death exists, but all those who die here, it’s not ordinary death, it’s sorcery: when you spit on the ground, one takes your saliva, one takes the dust on which you walked. My parents have told me to watch out.” Such attitudes, Vincent reported, pervaded all levels of society: “The natives see poisoners everywhere.”

Even today, deaths are often explained on radio trottoir—sidewalk radio, the ever-warping word of the street—and in the more formal media as the work of invisible poisoners. In the absence of evidence to prove or disprove such rumors, the enduring fear of poison takes on the quality of metaphor. When death is always the work of enemies, and the power of the state considers itself in concert with the occult, distrust and subterfuge become tools of survival, and politics itself becomes a poison.

SO HABYARIMANA WAS shadowed by his wife, and his wife, at least, had forebodings of total destruction. Rwandans seemed to think she should know. On radio trottoir, Madame Agathe was called Kanjogera, after the wicked queen mother of Mwami Musinga, the Lady Macbeth of Rwandan legend. Le clan de Madame, Agathe’s court within the court, was known as the akazu, the little house. The akazu was the core of the concentric webs of political, economic, and military muscle and patronage that came to be known as Hutu Power. When the President crossed the akazu, he was quickly set straight. For instance, Habyarimana once cultivated a protégé from outside the akazu, Colonel Stanislas Mayuya; he liked Mayuya so much that one of the chiefs of the akazu had Mayuya shot dead. The gunman was arrested; then he and the prosecutor on the case were also killed.

Mayuya’s assassination occurred in April of 1988. A strange year followed. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank demanded that Rwanda implement a program of “structural adjustment,” and the government’s budget for 1989 was slashed nearly in half. At the same time, taxes and forced-labor demands increased. Inadequate rains and a mismanagement of resources created pockets of famine. Details of corruption scandals leaked out, and several of Habyarimana’s critics suffered so-called automobile accidents, in which they were run over and killed. To prevent Rwanda’s sterling image from being tarnished in the eyes of international aid donors, the Kigali police launched vice squads to arrest “prostitutes,” a category that included any number of women who had run afoul of the high authorities. The Interior Ministry deputized Catholic militants to vandalize shops that sold condoms. Independent-minded journalists who took note of all this mischief were thrown in jail; they were followed by unemployed idlers whose heads had been shaved in preparation for a “re-education” program.

The more trouble there was, the more new troublemakers emerged. Hutu oppositionists of diverse stripes began finding their voices and lobbying for attention from the Western governments whose aid allocations underwrote about sixty percent of Rwanda’s annual budget. The timing was perfect. Following the breach of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989—the same month that Odette was fired—the victorious Cold War powers of Western Europe and North America began demanding gestures of democratization from their client regimes in Africa. It took a good deal of bullying, but after a meeting with his chief foreign patron, President François Mitterrand of France, Habyarimana suddenly announced, in June of 1990, that it was time to establish a multiparty political system in Rwanda.

Habyarimana’s embrace of reform was conspicuously half-hearted, a capitulation to foreign coercion, and instead of simple relief and enthusiasm, the prospect of an open competition for power provoked widespread alarm in Rwanda. It was universally understood that the northwesterners, who depended on his power and on whom his power increasingly depended, would not readily surrender their percentage. While Habyarimana spoke publicly of a political opening, the akazu tightened its grip on the machinery of the state. As repression quickened in direct proportion to the threat of change, a number of the leading advocates of reform fled into exile.

And then, in the early afternoon of October 1, 1990, a rebel army, calling itself the Rwandese Patriotic Front, invaded northeastern Rwanda from Uganda, declaring war on the Habyarimana regime, and propounding a political program that called for an end to tyranny, corruption, and the ideology of exclusion “which generates refugees.”

EVERY WAR IS unconventional after its own fashion. Hutu Power’s unconventionality did not take long to show. The RPF invasion began with fifty men crossing the border, and although hundreds soon followed, the field of combat was clearly demarcated: a patch of national park in the northeast. If it was the RPF you wanted to fight, all you had to do was go up to the front. But on the night of October 4—three days after the invasion—there was a lot of shooting in and around Kigali. In the morning, the government announced that it had successfully put down a rebel attempt on the capital. This was a lie. There had been no battle. The gunfire was a charade, and its object was simple: to exaggerate Rwanda’s danger and to create the impression that rebel accomplices had infiltrated the country to its core.

The RPF invasion offered the Habyarimana oligarchy its best weapon yet against pluralism: the unifying specter of a common enemy. Following the logic of the state ideology—that identity equals politics and politics equals identity—all Tutsis were considered to be RPF “accomplices,” and Hutus who failed to subscribe to this view were counted as Tutsi-loving traitors. Habyarimana’s crowd didn’t want a border war, but they welcomed nationwide turmoil as a pretext for rounding up “internal enemies.” Lists had already been prepared: educated Tutsis, prosperous Tutsis, and Tutsis who traveled abroad were among the first to be arrested, and prominent Hutus who were, for one reason or another, considered to be out of step with the regime were picked up as well.

Odette’s husband, Jean-Baptiste, received a call from a presidential deputy, who said, “We know you’re a Hutu, but you’re very close to these Tutsis because of your wife. If you love your family, tell these Tutsis to write a letter to the President, confessing their acts of treason with the RPF.” The deputy dictated a sample letter. Jean-Baptiste replied that his friends had nothing to do with the RPF, which was true. Before the RPF struck, almost nobody outside of its ranks had known of its existence. But Habyarimana had repeatedly expressed his fear that the Rwandans in the Ugandan army were plotting against him, and the RPF invasion had, in fact, involved a mass desertion from the Ugandan ranks. As far as Habyarimana and his entourage were concerned, that was proof that anybody they suspected was, by virtue of their suspicion, an enemy agent.

Jean-Baptiste told his interrogator that he had no contacts with exiles. Odette didn’t know why he was left alone after that; nearly ten thousand people were arrested in October and November of 1990. But all sorts of mistakes were made. For instance, when men were sent to the hospital to arrest Odette they got the wrong person. “I had been given my job back,” she said, “and I had a colleague who had the same name. She was Hutu and she denied that she was me, but she was much taller than I am and they said, ‘There’s only one Tutsi doctor named Odette.’ So she was imprisoned and tortured, and in 1994 she was again mistaken for a Tutsi, and killed.”

Throughout the first weeks of the war, the government called on the population to keep calm. But the fake attack on Kigali, and the mass arrests, sent another message. On October 11, just ten days after the RPF invasion, local officials in the village of Kibilira, in Gisenyi, instructed Hutus that their communal work duty for the month would consist of fighting their Tutsi neighbors, with whom they had lived in peace for at least fifteen years. The Hutus went to work with singing and drumming, and the slaughter lasted three days; some three hundred fifty Tutsis were killed, and three thousand fled their homes. For those whose memories do not extend as far back as Odette’s, the massacre at Kibilira is remembered as the beginning of the genocide.