I FIRST MET JEAN-CLAUDE MUNYEZAMU on a summery field in Calgary seven years earlier. Our children were on the same under-five community soccer team (“Go Tigers!”) and Jean-Claude was one of the volunteer coaches, though coaching kids at that age amounted primarily to making sure they were at least running in the same direction. Jean-Claude and I became friends; our wives became friends, our children as well.
When I found out where he was from, one of the first things I asked him—which I cringe at, even now—was “So you’re from Rwanda? Are you a … Tutsi or a Hutu?”
He smiled softly. “Tutsi.”
I did a quick calibration in my head: In Rwanda, did the Tutsis kill the Hutus, or did the Hutus kill the Tutsis? That’s how little I knew. I had only vague recollections of one of the worst mass killings in human history.
At their home in southwest Calgary, Jean-Claude’s wife Christine would cook bubbling stews served with ugali, a loaf-like communal dumpling torn and dipped. Over tall glasses of ginger-laced tea—a Rwandan specialty—Jean-Claude would urge me to visit his country someday.
“Rwanda is beautiful,” he’d say, and Christine would agree. “You have to see it! Take your boys.”
“We’ll go there together,” Jean-Claude said. “We’ll bring soccer equipment to donate.”
I hesitated, not for reasons of safety—but of sadness. I’d always maintained that a sense of humour can be found in any destination, no matter how bruised, how battered, and that through humour we can find a sense of shared humanity. But Rwanda?
Through Jean-Claude, I’d gotten to know Calgary’s Rwandan community, and through them I had gained the smallest glimpse into the terrors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis of Rwanda, when over the course of one hundred horrific days, upward of one million men, women, and children were butchered under the racially charged ideology of Hutu Power.1 More than 75 percent of the Tutsi population inside Rwanda was wiped out and almost all Hutu political moderates executed in what has been described by analysts as “the most efficient and complete genocide of modern times.” Also targeted were independent journalists, lawyers, human rights investigators, members of the opposition—anyone on the wrong side of power. But whereas political opponents had been killed for what they believed, Tutsis were killed simply for having been born. This is the key distinction of a genocide. The Tutsis were not targeted as individuals; they were targeted as a group. It was a deliberate, well-planned, organized undertaking. One million people in one hundred days. It was a killing rate five times higher than that attained by the Nazis.
A young Rwandan woman in Calgary, speaking softly, told me how she’d survived the carnage as a little girl by climbing under the “buddies.” But no—not buddies. In her lovely accent, so rounded and rich, she was referring not to buddies, but bodies.
Whenever I describe Jean-Claude as a genocide survivor, he quietly corrects me. “I’m not a survivor, I’m an escapee. There is a big difference.” He was never hunted through the marshes, hacked at by machetes. He never hid under the dwindling warmth of buddies.
Jean-Claude’s mother had died when he was little, so when his father passed away in 1993, Jean-Claude, as a young man of nineteen, knew there was nothing keeping him in Rwanda.
“As a Tutsi, it was oppressive. You were a second-class citizen. You were targeted constantly.” Dark clouds were forming. Practice massacres had already occurred in the outlying regions. The walls were closing in, and a sense of dread pervaded every transaction as the radio and newspapers exhorted Rwanda’s Hutu majority to “stop having mercy” on the Tutsis. Fortunately for Jean-Claude, he had a brother in Kenya, and that would prove to be his escape hatch. He scraped together enough money to pay a truck driver to smuggle him across the border into Tanzania under a cargo of coffee beans, past armed soldiers and then overland to Mombasa.
The genocide in Rwanda began ten months later.
Jean-Claude Munyezamu had made it out alive. His brothers and cousins, his uncles and nephews, were not so lucky. An older sister and her infant child were rescued by UN peacekeepers from a church just before the killers swarmed in. “She lives with that—with the trauma of that—every day,” Jean-Claude told me.
Jean-Claude reached Canada by a circuitous route that took him first through Tanzania and Kenya, and then as an aid volunteer to Somalia and Sudan, until finally—and most daunting of all, perhaps—he landed in Montreal in the middle of February. “When I arrived it was minus thirty-two and I was wearing a hoodie. It was the warmest jacket I could find. I grew up on the equator, and when I got out of the airport it felt like the cold was sucking the air out of my lungs.” He laughed. “I wondered if I should not have stayed in Africa.”
Granted permanent residency status, he settled in Alberta, worked as a meat cutter, an oil-rig worker, a taxi driver, learned English, and attained his Canadian citizenship. He began volunteering at Calgary homeless shelters and, in his spare time, set up Soccer Without Boundaries, a volunteer-run program for immigrant and refugee children. The goal was to help them integrate into their local communities through an open-door sports program—and it worked. Very well, in fact. I helped out with his soccer club now and then, was thanked profusely and far in excess of whatever minor assistance I’d provided, and through it got to know parents and children from countries as far afield as—and this is just a partial tally, mind you—Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Korea, the Philippines, Uruguay, and Colombia.
Today, Jean-Claude sits on the Premier’s Council on Culture. He has received the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for his work with youth. He is married, with three children. A father, a husband, a community organizer, a soccer coach. And a genocide escapee.
2
RUSUMO FALLS IS A FATEFUL BOTTLENECK, for it was at Rusumo, where the river narrows, that an obscure German count first crossed over into the Kingdom of Rwanda. This was in 1894. Other explorers had skirted the edge of this remote realm; none had entered.
Rwanda lies in the crosshairs of Africa. Known as the “Land of a Thousand Hills,” it is the true heart of the continent, the last region to be reached by Europeans, one never impacted by the slave trade, located along the farthest watersheds of the Congo and Nile rivers.
What the German count discovered surprised him. Here, in the deepest reaches of Africa, was a complex, highly organized, semi-feudal society with a divine king, or mwami, in the centre and a network of aristocrats, courtiers, prefects, and vassals radiating outward from his majesty’s royal court. It was highly bureaucratic as well, with an administration divided into four levels: prefecture, district, hilltop, and local commune. Every hill had its chiefs, every chief his delegate. Every farm, every home, every house was accounted for.
Rwanda was—and still is—the most densely populated country in continental Africa: fertile soil and a fertile populace as well. The culture was cohesive and tightly controlled, and the people were known throughout the region for being law-abiding and compliant—traits that mark Rwanda, for better or worse, right through to today. A Hutu lawyer, struggling to explain how so many of his fellow countrymen could be incited to mass murder, admitted, “Conformity is very deep, very developed here. In Rwanda, everyone obeys authority.”
In many ways, the roots of the 1994 genocide were planted by that first German count pushing across the narrow gap at Rusumo Falls, filling in the last part of the map. Even before the Germans appeared, the mercantile empires of Europe had divided Africa among themselves, drawing presumptuously decisive lines on cartographical charts, claiming tracts of land so vast they defied the imagination. Rwanda was claimed by Germany without anyone from Germany ever having set foot in it; the kingdom was so remote it took nearly ten years before even that first count arrived. Of course, he didn’t tell the mwami he had come to claim a kingdom. It was a scouting mission as much as anything, an act of stealth, the opening gambit of a slowly constricting campaign.
Although Rwanda was part of German East Africa, German rule didn’t last. During World War I, Belgian troops occupied the kingdom, and with Germany’s defeat, the colony was handed over to Belgium, which had been ruling the Congo next door in what can only be called a reign of terror. Rwanda was—and still is—one of the most culturally homogeneous nations in Africa: everyone spoke the same language, followed the same religion, shared the same territory. It was certainly more united and homogeneous, both linguistically and culturally, than was Belgium. Or Germany, for that matter.
Society was divided into numerous clans and two main social classes: the minority Tutsis, who were traditionally cattle herders, and the Hutu majority, who were farmers. Rwanda’s royal lineage was drawn exclusively from the Tutsis, who made up roughly 16 percent of the population, though some estimates put the Tutsi population closer to 20 percent.2 A small number of pygmy hunter-gatherers, known as the Twa, lived in the forests, making up less than 1 percent of the population.
The Tutsi herders held a higher social status than Hutu farmers, who were often involved with them in a master–client relationship. (The word Hutu signifies “subject” or “servant,” whereas Tutsi refers to someone rich in cattle.) But the obligations went both ways, and the system was so intricate that it was referred to as “intertwined fingers.”
It’s important to note that “wealthy” was not synonymous with “Tutsi.” Tutsis of high lineage were a minority even among their own people. Most were just as poor and put-upon as their Hutu neighbours, and intermarriage was common enough not to be an issue. It’s also important to note that Hutu and Tutsi do not represent different ethnic groups, and certainly not different “tribes.” The defining markers of ethnicity—a separate language, territory, religion, or culture—simply don’t apply. There was no “Hutuland,” no “Tutsiland”; no Hutu language, no Tutsi dialect. The two groups didn’t even have distinct surnames, unlike in Northern Ireland, say, where the gaping Protestant–Catholic divide, based on competing histories and differing religious affiliations, is easily divined; in Belfast a “Johnston” or a “Murphy,” a “Billy” or a “Seamus,” knows immediately which side of the divide the other is on. In Rwanda the categories were more fluid than that; if a Hutu farmer owned enough cattle, for example, he became a Tutsi.
European culture, however, steeped as it was in the proto-fascist ideals of Social Darwinism, was obsessed with notions of race, and in Rwanda the colonial rulers decided that the Tutsi were a separate “race” from the Hutu. This was part of a pernicious strain of historical quackery known as the “Hamitic hypothesis,” though myth would be a more accurate term.
Baffled when faced with a developed society in the heart of darkest Africa, the Europeans concluded that Rwandan civilization must have come from somewhere else. The Tutsis, being taller, lighter skinned, finely featured, and thinner nosed, were considered more “European” in appearance, making them, almost by definition in European eyes, superior to the shorter, squatter, broader faced, darker skinned “Negroid” Hutus. The Hamitic hypothesis posited that the Tutsis were not “real” Africans but rather a lost tribe of Israel, having migrated south from Egypt or Ethiopia as the descendants of Ham, Noah’s outcast son. Missionaries embraced this bit of Biblical nonsense, and in doing so granted the Tutsi aristocracy a privileged place in an imperially sanctioned racial hierarchy. Throughout the Bantu region of Africa, this bizarre myth was used to explain—or rather, explain away—all signs of civilization, from the use of iron tools to advanced political systems to monotheistic beliefs, but only in Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi did it become so entrenched, so corrosive.
Whether their much-ballyhooed physiological differences—which are not in any way universal; Rwandans themselves are notoriously inaccurate when it comes to guessing who is a Tutsi and who is a Hutu based solely on appearance—were due to generations of dietary divergence or are in fact the genetic relic of some distant and now-forgotten migration is really a moot point. Any separate origins that might have explained the difference in appearance between Tutsi and Hutu are lost in the mists of time. Their language and culture are now the same. It is worth repeating: Tutsi and Hutu are social categories, not ethnicities.
Certainly, on either end of the spectrum are people who look more “Hutu” and those who look more “Tutsi,” but most exist in the muddled middle. As a vice-president of the former Rwandan National Assembly confessed, “Even we can’t tell us apart.” And these physical differences are shrinking as lifestyles change—a telling detail, suggesting as it does that such traits may indeed be the lingering inheritance of an aristocratic diet over that of the commoners, a distinction between milk-drinking pastoralists and hard-working agriculturalists who consumed more grains and root vegetables. (As a French social geographer has pointed out, the difference in height recorded between Hutu and Tutsi was “exactly the same difference that existed in France between a conscript and a senator in 1815.”)
This may seem esoteric, but so much of what followed was predicated on exactly these myths and perceived physical differences. During the genocide, people were killed simply for being tall. And one of Jean-Claude’s cousins survived because, being short and heavy-set, he was able to bluff his way through the killers’ roadblocks by passing himself off, in an angry huff, as a Hutu.
It was the Germans who first decided that the Tutsis were a more highly evolved “race,” but it was the Belgians who brought the idea to fruition, making race the defining aspect of colonial policy in Rwanda. In an eerie foreshadowing of Nazi racial studies, Belgian scientists armed with calipers and clipboards set about measuring the nose length and cranial capacity of Africans, carefully recording height and gradations of skin colour and then classifying subjects into two mutually exclusive groups. “Unlike the Tutsi, the Hutu have a wide brachycephalic skull,” a typical entry might read. (The black-and-white photographs of these experiments are unsettling, to say the least.) When in doubt, the Belgians counted cows; if someone owned enough cattle he became “Tutsi.” In the 1930s, Belgium began issuing racial ID cards marked HUTU or TUTSI, which every Rwandan was required by law to present. In 1994, these same identity cards would become death warrants.
While the mwami himself was traditionally drawn from a Tutsi line, as were his cattle chiefs, the land chiefs were often Hutu and the war chiefs were either. Any given hill might have three different subchiefs overseeing it. Under Belgian rule, that changed. The Hutu chiefs were deposed, one after another, and replaced with Tutsis,3 and when, as they had in the Congo, the Belgians brought in a system of forced labour and mandatory cash crops, the Tutsis were exempted—just as the Hutu were systematically excluded from positions of power and privilege.
In imposing forced labour, whether to pick crops, build roads, drain swamps, or clear land, the Belgians favoured strips of sun-dried hippopotamus hide as their primary means of persuasion, and the era of Belgian rule in Rwanda became known as “the time of the whip.” The Hutu bore the brunt of it. Tutsi overseers, meanwhile, were forced to push the peasantry to greater and greater limits. “Whip them or we will whip you” was the directive they were given as Rwanda became one vast work camp. The inner heart of Africa may have avoided the slave trade of previous centuries, but not its modern manifestations.
Average Tutsis were hardly pampered. The vast majority remained, as always, just as poor as their Hutu neighbours. Resentment bubbled and boiled nonetheless, and so, on the eve of Rwandan independence in 1962, when Belgium suddenly threw its support behind “majority rule” (meaning Hutu), payback was inevitable.
Instead of rejecting the Hamitic hypothesis, Hutu nationalists took it further, citing it as evidence that the Tutsis were foreign interlopers, a “race of invaders that does not belong in Rwanda.” Under the clarion cry of the Hutu Manifesto, the Hutu peasantry was presented as the “pure” race of Rwanda, its true inhabitants, an oppressed majority. Instead of replacing the racial stereotypes of colonial rule, the Hutu Social Revolution reinforced them, embracing the very myths that had been used against them.
Rwanda was declared a republic and its monarchy abolished. (A largely symbolic act, as the king had long been reduced to near-figurehead status.) The Hutu majority took power—with a vengeance. The new nationalist government immediately began purging Tutsis from public office. Racial quotas were imposed, ID cards retained, and violence against Tutsis actively encouraged. A culture of impunity took hold, and what had begun as a cry for justice turned into a lust for revenge; and oh how often are those two ideas—justice and revenge—conflated. A UN Commission warned early on that Rwanda was now in the grip of a regime that employed measures bordering on “Nazism against the Tutsi minority.”
The first massacres aimed at cleansing Rwanda of its Tutsi population had happened even before independence was granted. In the years that followed, the situation only got worse. More than 100,000 Tutsis fled, spilling into refugee camps in Burundi, Uganda, and the Congo. This was only the first wave. The number would eventually top a million as the Tutsi diaspora became Africa’s largest and longest-running refugee crisis, one that created a nation-in-exile, a stateless state yearning for return, with the Tutsis as the self-described “Jews of Africa.” Sadly, the parallel would not end there.
When Tutsi exiles in Burundi launched a series of raids into Rwanda, crossing the border under cover of darkness to attack military posts before melting back into the night, the Hutu government responded in vicious fashion, butchering Tutsi civilians by the score. In December 1963 alone, more than 10,000 people were murdered. British philosopher Bertrand Russell described the atrocities in Rwanda as “the most horrible and systematic massacres we have witnessed since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.” As a French witness noted, “The goal was not just to loot but to kill, to exterminate all those that bore the Tutsi designation.”
After Rwanda’s minister of defence, Juvénal Habyarimana, a northern Hutu, seized power in 1973, the country was drawn increasingly into the French sphere of influence, with France effectively replacing Belgium as the country’s primary patron. Under the banner cry of la Francophonie, Rwanda was seen as a bulwark against creeping Anglo-American influences in the region, and the French government happily supplied arms, cash, and military training to the Habyarimana regime, racist doctrines and ethnic quotas be damned.
Like the boiling of the apocryphal frog, restrictions on Tutsis increased by increments as the heat was slowly turned up. Access to travel, employment, and higher education was severely limited. Having been excluded almost entirely from political life and the military as well, Tutsis in Rwanda carved out a niche for themselves in the private sector instead. But any success they had was resented—murderously so. Like the Jews in pre-war Germany, the Tutsis of Rwanda were accused of hoarding wealth, of secretly controlling the banking system, of being cunning and conniving, treacherous and traitorous.
And when the refugees outside of Rwanda began pressing the government for the right of return—a right guaranteed under the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights—Habyarimana replied brusquely that Rwanda “was full,” and that they could not come home.
The next time, they would not ask. They would come.
3
IN 1988, TUTSI EXILES IN UGANDA formed a rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Several prominent Hutu opposition leaders, having fled the decaying Habyarimana regime, joined their ranks. (Although founded among the Tutsi diaspora, the RPF saw itself as a pan-Rwandan movement whose goal was to topple the Habyarimana regime and end the politics of ethnic identity. Their mantra, often repeated, was “Our fight is with the government of Rwanda, not the Hutu.”) Among the leaders was a skinny, relentlessly serious young officer who had grown up in the refugee camps of Uganda across from the misted mountains of Rwanda, that Promised Land, just out of reach. His parents had fled the anti-Tutsi violence in Rwanda thirty years earlier, carrying him across as a toddler. He was a descendant of the Tutsi aristocracy, his name was Paul Kagame, and he would change the course of history.
In 1990, the RPF launched a surprise attack from Uganda. The initial invasion was beaten back with the help of French troops and helicopters, but it sent shock waves through the halls of power nonetheless. President Habyarimana had always had an uneasy relationship with the Hutu extremists inside his own party, and in the panicked aftermath of the attack, he lost control of them entirely. Within two weeks of the RPF invasion, government officials were secretly discussing—and organizing—the mass killing of Tutsis.
By 1992, the Belgian ambassador was warning that a secretive cabal within Habyarimana’s inner circle was preparing “the extermination of the Tutsis of Rwanda.” His report was promptly ignored. French newspapers likewise raised the alarm that Hutu leaders were planning a “final solution” to the ethnic problem—echoing quite intentionally the Nazi wording. In 1993, Paris-based magazine Libération alerted readers that “in the far hills of Rwanda … France is supporting a regime which for two years, with militias and death squads, has been trying to organize the extermination of the minority Tutsis.” The coming holocaust was not an unforeseen event; it was well documented, well prepared, and well known far in advance. Genocide is never spontaneous. It takes planning, it takes intent.
The RPF, meanwhile, had regrouped. They pushed deep into Rwandan territory, sending hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees fleeing before their advance. The RPF had expected to be greeted as liberators; instead they were seen as foreign invaders. Amid the stampeding fears of this invasion, a “re-conquest” in the eyes of Hutu extremists, anti-Tutsi sentiment reached its apogee under a racial ideology known as Hutu Power.
An endless barrage of radio and newspaper propaganda portrayed Tutsis as cockroaches—inyenzi, a term first used to describe the cross-border raids of the 1960s—and as snakes, racially impure subhumans worthy of eradication. Genocide, after all, is always preceded by propaganda, and in Rwanda the media played a shameful, dishonest role in what followed. The 1994 genocide against the Tutsis was the result of decades of indoctrination. Think of what the Nazis were able to achieve—the hatred and vile scapegoating, the yellow stars and horrors of the Holocaust—in just twelve years. Now imagine the propaganda and brainwashing going on for generations, and you will understand how toxic Rwandan society had become.
Gérard Prunier, a French scholar of East African history, notes, “It is not because of its ‘primitiveness’ that Rwanda could suffer from a genocide; quite the contrary... In Rwanda, all the preconditions for a genocide were present: a well-organized civil service, a small tightly-controlled land area, a disciplined and orderly population, reasonably good communications and a coherent ideology containing the necessary lethal potential.”
Under the tactically precise leadership of Paul Kagame, the RPF had fought its way to the outskirts of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, before falling back. A distraught Habyarimana, with his back to the wall and his options severely limited, had finally given in and signed a wide-ranging peace agreement in Arusha, Tanzania. The Arusha Accords, as they were known, included the right of return for all Rwandan refugees, integration of the RPF into the armed forces, and the creation of a broad-based transitional government that would include moderates and members of the opposition in Cabinet, leading toward a democratically elected parliament. As a sweeping blueprint for change, with extensive political, legal, social, and military reforms, the Arusha Accords would have transformed Rwanda—had they been implemented.
The peace agreement also contained a provision for a UN mission to oversee the transition to democratic rule, during which French troops supporting the Habyarimana regime would be required to withdraw. The RPF had assumed that the presence of UN peacekeepers would protect the Tutsi minority. They were wrong.
Hutu extremists saw the Arusha Accords as nothing less than capitulation, and they denounced Habyarimana as a traitor and an accomplice. Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, a Hutu Power hardliner, had stormed out of the peace negotiations, saying he was going back to Rwanda to prepare “Apocalypse deux”—a second apocalypse. Bagosora would prove to be a man of his word.
An internal U.S. intelligence report warned that if the peace process failed, half a million people could die. As it turned out, the report was overly optimistic in its estimate. Even as the Arusha Accords were being finalized, homes in Kigali were being marked with X’s. This was merely for a census, government officials insisted. Only Tutsi homes were being marked.
When Canadian general Roméo Dallaire was informed that he would be overseeing a peacekeeping mission to Rwanda, he thought, Great!, and then asked, “That’s in Africa, isn’t it?”
The UN arrived in December 1993 with few supplies and a limited mandate, one that explicitly forbade military intervention. General Dallaire had requested a minimum of 4,500 troops. He received 2,500. They were cobbled together from twenty-four different countries, and included office staff and unarmed military observers: a motley, poorly prepared, minimally equipped assortment of men and women tasked with keeping peace in one of the most volatile regions of the world. This was peacekeeping on the cheap, run on a shoestring, and Dallaire found himself constantly short of fuel, vehicles, ammunition—even food.
Portents soon surfaced. A highly placed informant dubbed “Jean-Pierre” whispered to Dallaire that death lists of Tutsi civilians and Hutu opposition members were being compiled and that illegal arms were being stockpiled in defiance of the Arusha Accords. He warned Dallaire that there were plans afoot to kill Belgian peacekeepers as well, with the Hutu Power extremists reasoning—correctly, as it turned out—that at the first sign of casualties, Belgium would cut and run. (Belgian troops made up the core of the mission, and were the best trained and best equipped; extremists knew that losing them would gut the UN presence.) Dallaire faxed UN headquarters in New York, informing them of the warnings he’d received and saying that he was preparing to raid the alleged cache and seize the weapons. The response was immediate and unequivocal: Dallaire was to do no such thing. Such actions were outside his mandate. He was instead to turn the information over to the Rwandan government—the very people who were stockpiling the weapons. The UN raid never went ahead, and Jean-Pierre was never heard from again.
Incredibly, even as hate radio station RTLM was openly calling for the mass extermination of Tutsis, French weapons kept arriving via various conduits. French troops may have been withdrawn under the terms of the Arusha Accords, but France itself provided arms, cash, training, and logistical support to the genocidal regime before, during, and even after the killings. The Habyarimana government had started importing shipments of machetes from China as well, under the guise of “agricultural implements”; these were distributed to Hutu militias and neighbourhood groups. In the lead-up to the genocide, more than half a million machetes were brought in, one for every three Hutu adult males. A propaganda newspaper headline asked: WHAT WEAPON SHALL WE USE TO CONQUER THE INYENZI COCKROACHES ONCE AND FOR ALL? Beside it was a picture of a machete.
On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana’s plane was shot out of the sky.
He was returning from a one-day summit in Dar es Salaam. Also on board were several of the president’s key advisers and confidants, his chief of staff, his private secretary, his head of presidential security, and even his personal physician, as well as the president of neighbouring Burundi who had, fatefully, asked for a ride home. Habyarimana had made it clear that upon his return to Kigali he would—finally—be swearing in the broad-based transitional government required under the Arusha Accords. Had his plane touched down, it would have signalled the end of Hutu Power.
And so, as the presidential Falcon 50 jet came in low on its final approach to the Kigali airport, ground-to-air missiles streaked into the night sky. The jet exploded in mid-air, with the wreckage crashing into the grounds of the Presidential Palace.
A 2012 French judicial inquiry would determine that the missiles had been fired from inside the Kanombe military base, where Colonel Bagosora had once been in charge of the anti-aircraft battery. Bagosora would have been well-versed in the flight path the president’s plane would follow as it went directly over the base, but to this day, no one knows for certain who pulled the trigger. What we do know is that the death of Habyarimana was the signal for Bagosora’s apocalypse to begin.
Extremist news editorials and Hutu Power radio broadcasts had been predicting just such an event. The editors at the Kangura newspaper had declared that President Habyarimana would be assassinated, not by treacherous Tutsis, but at the hands of Hutu citizens enraged at his betrayal. HABYARIMANA WILL DIE IN MARCH ran one banner headline. They were off by only six days. Soldiers at Camp Kigali had also heard rumours that the president was going to be killed.
On April 3, RTLM radio had predicted, with ominous confidence, that “a little something” would happen in Kigali over Easter. “On April 7th and 8th you will hear the sound of bullets and grenades exploding.” They were off by only one day. Within an hour of Habyarimana’s death,4 the systematic slaying of prominent Hutus who’d supported the Arusha Accords had begun. Under the directives of the Presidential Guard, crowds quickly assembled and headed straight for the homes of the ruling party’s political opponents. “Things happened very rapidly,” Dallaire’s chief of staff would later recall. “As if they had been rehearsed.”
Colonel Bagosora moved swiftly to install an interim government and eliminate potential rivals. The president’s death wasn’t merely an assassination, it was a coup d’état, and dawn found the colonel addressing a mob of armed militias near the airport. “Erect roadblocks at the roundabouts, let no one escape,” he ordered. “Hunt the Tutsis down, house after house.” “Muhere ruhande,” he had said, meaning, “Go about it systematically,” the way one might pull weeds or clear brush.
Among the first to die was Agathe Uwilingiyimana, Rwanda’s prime-minister-in-waiting, a moderate Hutu who had been named transitional leader under the peace accords. She was waiting for Habyarimana to return so that she could be sworn in. As a former schoolteacher and minister of education, she’d tried to end ethnic quotas in public schools and had been physically attacked for it. Although Hutu, she had refused to identify herself as such, saying, “I am a Rwandese and I am a person. I have a role to play in my country and it does not matter whether I am a man or a woman, a Hutu or a Tutsi.” They killed her in a particularly brutal fashion.
The UN soldiers from Belgium and Ghana who had been sent to protect Agathe Uwilingiyimana were quickly disarmed and taken as captives to the Camp Kigali army barracks, where the Ghanaians were released and the Belgians beaten, then murdered. They were being killed even as General Dallaire sped by en route to a meeting with Colonel Bagosora to negotiate their release. Dallaire would later collect their ten bodies, laid out like sacks of potatoes, at the hospital morgue.
A mass evacuation of expats was soon underway. Within four days, almost 4,000 foreign nationals had been airlifted to safety, and within a week Belgium—just as Hutu Power ideologues predicted—had pulled out of Rwanda, abandoning thousands of terrified civilians who had been under their protection. As soon as the Belgians rolled away, the killers rushed in. It was an ignoble retreat, to say the least.
The killings spread quickly across the country. Roadblocks went up and ID cards were demanded, with Tutsis executed on the spot. (The lack of a card was usually taken as evidence of guilt.) Occasionally, the victims had their feet chopped off first to “cut them down to size,” a mocking reference to the tall nature of Tutsis. Machete-wielding members of youth militia groups, many of whom had been trained by French troops and who were known collectively as interahamwe, “those who work together,” roamed the streets hooting for blood, carrying lists of names. Others, armed with homemade clubs studded by nails, chased their victims from house to house, room to room, as neighbours killed neighbours and coworkers hunted down former friends. Property that belonged to the victims was often handed over to the people who had killed them, giving a strong economic incentive to the carnage as well. The genocide was, in the words of one commentator, “a licence to loot.”
Everyone was targeted, even children—especially children. “The child of a snake is still a snake!” the propagandists cried, reminding listeners constantly that Paul Kagame had been only two years old when his family escaped to Uganda. They must not make the same mistake again. “Rip up the weeds by the roots! Wipe them out completely!” This was the message: Leave none to tell the story. Once the genocide got underway, a fearful logic compelled it forward. The necessity for complete eradication took hold; you couldn’t allow any witnesses to survive, and you had to implicate every Hutu in the crime. The guilt would be shared; no one would be spared.
Rwanda became an abattoir as UN troops looked on in horror. Thousands of bodies dumped into rivers floated downstream, where they tumbled over Rusumo Falls and eventually washed up on the shores of Lake Victoria to the stunned disbelief of their Ugandan neighbours. Hundreds of bodies, without end. “By early May,” journalist Linda Melvern writes, “an estimated 5,000 a day were coming down the Akagera River.” And all of it sanctioned by the screeching voices on the radio, exhorting the racially pure Hutu to wipe out the traitorous Tutsi minority.
RTLM became known as “Radio Machete,” providing names, addresses, and even licence plate numbers and makes of the vehicles belonging to those “cockroaches” and “collaborators” who needed killing. Radio announcers would direct hunters to the hiding places, to the schools and churches, to the homes of “soft” Hutus rumoured to be giving shelter to Tutsis, marking them all for death. RTLM even sent out calls to bulldozer drivers when it came time to prepare mass burial pits. “The graves are still half-empty! Who will help us fill them up?” the announcers asked, appealing to the population to work ever harder. In Rwanda, radio was like the Voice of God, and it was common to see Hutu militias manning the barricades with a bloodied machete in one hand and a portable FM radio in the other. As Dallaire noted, “The génocidaires used the media like a weapon.” The radio and the machete: these were the two primary tools of the genocide, one to give the orders, the other to carry them out. (Given the role the media played throughout the genocide, heavy restrictions now exist in Rwanda forbidding any hint of “divisiveness.” Rwandans are not as enamoured as we in the West are with the notion of an unfettered, unbridled media—understandably so, perhaps.)
Even as the Belgians were pulling out, Dallaire was asking for more troops, arguing that with just 5,000 soldiers and an expanded mandate he could stop the slaughter. He received neither. Instead, the UN voted to slash Dallaire’s mission, reducing it by 90 percent to a token force of just 270 “observers.” Journalist Scott Peterson, on the ground through much of it, noted that “Rwanda was the first ever case in which the UN responded to a crisis by reducing its commitment.” (In the end, Dallaire managed to keep 470 personnel, due largely to the unflinching support of countries like Ghana and Tunisia, who stood firm. The men and women of Ghana’s peacekeeping force in particular almost singlehandedly salvaged the mission.)
The United States had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Somalia, and the Clinton administration had no stomach for further humanitarian interventions in Africa; the photo ops were bad. Do you remember those images of the bodies of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu? Rwanda paid the price for that. The White House refused even to use the word “genocide” when referring to what was happening; the most they would admit was that “acts of genocide may have occurred.” When a reporter tartly asked, “How many ‘acts of genocide’ does it take to make a genocide?” the administration refused to answer. Had the U.S. acknowledged that a genocide was occurring, the UN Security Council would have been required to act under the terms of its own Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Instead, the United States, backed by Great Britain, blocked all attempts at expanding the mission.
A panel of military experts later concluded that Dallaire had been correct in his assessment: 5,000 troops early on, with minimal air cover and a more robust mandate, was all it would have taken to prevent at least half of the deaths that occurred; 500,000 people might have been saved. Dallaire laid the blame squarely on three members of the Security Council: the U.S., the U.K., and France. “The blood is on their hands,” he wrote.
Outgunned, outmanned, and often surrounded, the beleaguered UN peacekeepers—unable to stop the killings—focused instead on protecting those already under their care while negotiating prisoner exchanges and arranging temporary ceasefires. Although the mission itself is considered a failure, more than 16,000 lives were saved by Roméo Dallaire’s small band of blue berets.5 Among them: Jean-Claude’s sister and her baby boy.
4
PRIOR TO THE GENOCIDE, Rwanda was known, if at all, as the site of Dian Fossey’s groundbreaking research into the endangered mountain gorillas of the Virunga rainforests. In trying to come to terms with Rwanda, I found myself at one point chapter-hopping among three different books: Gorillas in the Mist, Fossey’s celebrated account of her time in Rwanda; Conspiracy to Murder, Linda Melvern’s powerful rendering of the genocide; and Rwanda, Inc. by business analysts Patricia Crisafulli and Andrea Redmond, subtitled How a Devastated Nation Became an Economic Model for the Developing World.
I felt like one of the blind sages of Indian lore, groping my way toward an understanding of an elephant in the dark: here the wall of its flank, there the tree trunks of its legs, the serpent of its trunk, the fly-whisk of its tail. How to reconcile these radically different versions of a country that has become a shorthand for failure, on par with Waterloo or Vietnam? We don’t want this turning into another Rwanda, we say now. But to which Rwanda are we referring? Given the country’s remarkable turnaround, shouldn’t we hope for more nations in Africa to follow Rwanda’s lead, for more countries to become “another Rwanda”? Or is today’s Rwanda the oppressive dictatorship that its exiled critics claim?
The 1994 genocide ended, as all genocides do, not through economic sanctions or UN resolutions or heartfelt good intentions, but through armed intervention. When the killings began, the RPF called off its ceasefire and fought its way into Kigali, forcing the génocidaires to flee westward into Zaire (as the Congo was then known). It took three months, but the government finally fell. The RPF had defeated an armed force twice its size, one backed by sophisticated French weaponry and—in the earlier stages and the latter—French troops as well.
To the victors came not the spoils, but the wreckage of a failed state. The RPF had taken control of a ruined city. A ruined nation. Corpses clogged the rivers and the irrigation ditches, and lay rotting in heaps in schoolyards and soccer fields. A terrible silence had descended upon the country.
Canadian journalist Hugh McCullum, in Rwanda during the genocide, recalled the challenges the country now faced: “Nearly a million people had been killed, about three million were refugees and another two million were internally displaced. Africa’s most densely populated country had become a ghost state…. The RPF was faced with a bankrupt, depopulated, frightened and traumatized population with none of the infrastructure of government in place.”
The Central Bank had been ransacked and its treasury looted, Rwanda’s entire reserve of hard currency seized by the departing regime when it fled. The basic institutions of society—sanitation, electrical grids, medical care, policing, judiciary—were either crippled or nonexistent. When the RPF swore in a broad-based coalition government required under the Arusha Accords, Rwanda had no money, no working telephone lines, no electricity, no working offices. The World Bank reported that after the genocide Rwanda was now the poorest nation on earth.
The turnaround since then has been nothing short of miraculous. Indeed, the very seeds of Rwanda’s rebirth lay in its destruction; the genocide had left the country bare, a tabula rasa waiting to be rewritten.
If there is one lesson that African history teaches us, it is this: The Western model doesn’t work here. And if madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, the West’s approach to Africa has been marked by madness. Following the apocalypse of 1994, desperate to rebuild, Rwanda looked east, not west. Where had similar countries been devastated, reduced to rubble and abject poverty—only to pull themselves out of the ruins? The answer: Asia. Japan after Nagasaki and Hiroshima; South Korea and Taiwan after civil war, invasion, and partition. Or how about the emerging Southeast Asian markets of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand, which have taken off over the last twenty years, following Japan and South Korea’s lead? If Asia could do it, why not Africa? If Singapore, why not Rwanda? It was Asia, after all, that was once the world’s economic basket case, not Africa. It was Asia that was considered hopeless: overpopulated, underdeveloped, and culturally unsuited for modernity—or so we were told. (The same Confucian values used to explain why Asia could never compete economically with the rest of the world are now being cited to explain why Asia has been so remarkably successful. Academics are nothing if not pliable.) In 1969, Africa’s GDP per capita was higher than Asia’s. South Korea’s GDP was once at the same level as Sierra Leone’s. Not anymore.
In light of this, Rwanda has modelled its recovery on the Asian example. Geographically, Rwanda—a small, landlocked, mountainous country—is the “Switzerland of Africa,” which is exactly how early European travellers described it. But socially and economically, it is rebranding itself as “Africa’s Singapore”: a tightly controlled, politically stable, economically innovative, autocratic democracy dominated by a single party. (In the last election, the ruling RPF won 41 of 53 elected seats.) If Rwanda’s success baffles Western commentators, it is precisely because it is not predicated on a Western model.
In defiance of African stereotypes, Economist magazine has heralded Rwanda as one of the most business-friendly countries in the world, one “blessedly free of red tape,” noting that “no African country has done more to curb corruption. Ministers have been jailed for it.” Corruption has long been the bane of African political culture, and Rwanda has tackled this head-on. By 2013, Transparency International had ranked Rwanda as the least corrupt nation in Africa and in the top fifty nations globally. Its ranking has fluctuated since then but is still considerably higher than that of many European states. Greece, Italy, I’m looking at you.
Even the doom-and-gloom stalwarts at the World Bank, a group not known for their rah-rah boosterism of African economies, placed Rwanda among the top ten nations in the world in which to start a new business.
I could go on—and I think I will.
The World Bank also ranks Rwanda among the world’s top nations when it comes to the ease of doing business, which includes registering property, obtaining permits, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, and more. To help this along, the Rwanda Development Board (RDB) has set up a “one-stop” centre for processing all the permits and paperwork required to incorporate. In Rwanda, a new business can usually be registered and fully ready in as little as six hours and for a nominal fee, free if it’s done online.
The RDB itself is modelled directly on the Singapore Economic Development Board, a government department designed to seek out and actively encourage foreign partnerships in hospitality, manufacturing, and infrastructure. Even the country’s new nickname, “Rwanda Inc.,” suggesting as it does government and business working closely together, with private and public sectors in sync (rather than in opposition to each other), draws to mind Asian parallels and similar references to “Japan Inc.”
The country’s long-term goals include turning Rwanda into a regional financial hub, parlaying its reputation for stringent business practices and a lack of corruption into establishing itself as a banking destination as well. A financial Switzerland, in other words.
On a smaller scale is the “value added” axiom Rwanda has adopted. (This use of simple guiding principles, rules of thumb rather than sweeping ideological agendas, is also very Japanese/Korean/Singaporean in its approach.) Instead of shipping raw materials out of the country, the goal now is to add value to them beforehand. For example, whereas Rwanda had once exported raw coffee beans to other countries, where the crops were then washed, sorted, and resold at a much higher price, Rwandan coffee companies, with government backing, have now built more than 240 washing stations across the country, where the beans are cleaned and outer hulls removed. The final product is sorted by grade and quality before it’s shipped, all of which greatly adds to its value. The result? A 33 percent increase in income from coffee exports in a single year.
Rwanda is still one of the world’s poorest countries, with an annual budget heavily dependent on foreign aid and an economy still overly reliant on subsistence farming. But with the government’s Vision 2020 blueprint, the aim is to transform Rwanda into a middle-income, knowledge-based economy, one that is competitive regionally and globally. Vision 2020 presents a wide-ranging and ambitious agenda, one focusing on poverty reduction, gender equality, compulsory education, universal health care, skills-based training, and local development initiatives.
Here are some more highlights, presented in convenient bullet form:
•Over the last five years, more than one million people in Rwanda have been lifted out of poverty—in a country of 11 million. By 2020, it’s projected that more than 70 percent of the population will be above the base poverty line.
•The economy has been growing by an average of 7 percent a year and has almost doubled in size over the last ten.
•Where literacy rates were at barely 50 percent prior to the genocide, today 97 percent of children are enrolled in primary education, which in Rwanda runs from Grade 1 to 9. According to UNICEF, these are the highest enrolment rates in Africa, with more than 70 percent of the students completing Grade 9. Rwanda now spends more on education than it does on the military. University enrolment is nearing 80,000, compared to just 3,000 before the genocide.
•Early childhood mortality has been reduced by 80 percent, one of the steepest declines ever recorded. The UN credits Rwanda with having saved 590,000 children between 2000 and 2015.
•Ambitious immunization and anti-malaria campaigns, together with a community-based health insurance system and a rapidly rising life expectancy (average life expectancy in Rwanda is now 65 years, up from 48 in 1990), have earned Rwanda accolades from the World Health Organization. And although Rwanda continues to suffer from a serious shortage of doctors and other health care workers, more than 97 percent of the population now has medical coverage, the highest in Africa. A quarter of the national budget goes to health care, which is again the highest proportion of any state in Africa.
•Rwanda has also received awards from the UN for addressing issues of gender-based violence and women’s rights. The country’s innovative “one-stop” centres for women, offering legal, health, reproductive, and protective services under one roof, have been rightfully lauded, as has Rwanda’s use of microloans for widows and women in poverty to help them launch small businesses. With just a little bit of capital and some training, they will make their own opportunities: this is the guiding principle, the rule of thumb, behind these small loans. It might just as easily be applied to Rwanda as a whole.
I could go on—but I won’t.
I do realize that Africa is littered with similar “blueprints for success” and “visions for a brighter tomorrow,” but Vision 2020 is no chimera: Rwanda is meeting its targets, is on track, and is even ahead of schedule in several areas. Still overly reliant on foreign aid, true, but working hard to change that.
The Rwandan approach, a seemingly contradictory combination of progressive social programs and centralized decision making, coupled with radically decentralized governance, is based on a staunchly pro-business philosophy in which enterprise is rewarded and rules are respected. Socially progressive pro-business policies? Centralized decentralized decision making? It’s enough to make your head spin—if you were to try to force it into a pre-set political philosophy. But instead of “left wing” or “right wing,” Rwanda has been pre-eminently pragmatic. An example: In Singapore, gum on the sidewalks was becoming a problem, so chewing gum was outlawed. Simple, yes? Likewise Rwanda’s ban on plastic bags. These non-biodegradable tumbleweeds seen clotting up fence posts and littering the windblown cityscapes of Africa are illegal in Rwanda. And the laws are taken seriously. Walk down the street swinging a plastic bag, and you risk arrest and a fine of $150. Shop owners foolish enough to stock plastic bags face jail time. In Rwanda, it’s paper or cloth only, with polythene bags confiscated at the airport with a seriousness usually reserved for baggies filled with weed. There. Problem solved.
Rwanda’s approach to homosexuality is equally revealing. Unlike in neighbouring countries such as Tanzania, Burundi, and Uganda, or Cameroon and Nigeria, where gay citizens can be imprisoned, beaten, and even threatened with execution, Rwanda’s post-genocide constitution explicitly recognizes all citizens as having equal rights and the same legal protections. When influential evangelical church leaders in Rwanda tried to pressure the government into introducing harsh anti-gay laws similar to those recently passed in Uganda (where tabloid newspapers began publishing the names and addresses of “notorious homosexuals” to be ostracized and attacked, in much the same way that Hutu Power newspapers in Rwanda had once published lists of Tutsis), the government of Rwanda refused. They knew too well the consequences of targeting one segment of society, of singling out one specific group of people.6
In Rwanda, the ethnic ID cards are long gone, and it is now prohibited to publicly identify or denounce someone as “Tutsi” or “Hutu.” In private, among friends and family, you may refer to yourself however you like, but the public sphere is a different matter. The official policy is now “one people, one language, one culture, one Rwanda.” And in much the same way that Germany, France, and other European nations introduced laws prohibiting Nazi symbols and any denial of the Holocaust after World War II, Rwanda has brought in strict laws concerning genocide denial. Fomenting social divisions or propagating a racial ideology is treated very seriously. And just as, after the catastrophe of Mussolini, Italy made it a crime to publish or promote any “apologia for fascism,” in Rwanda the ethnically based doctrine of “Hutu Power” is outlawed.
It is important to remember that Hutu Power is an ideology, not an ethnic identity. So when misguided commentators in the West lecture Rwanda about the need for “reconciliation” between the government and supporters of Hutu Power, try replacing the phrase “Hutu Power” with “Nazi propagandists,” and see how far you get. When people speak about reclaiming Hutu identity (as opposed to a pan-Rwandan identity), keep in mind that this divide was entrenched for generations and always in opposition to that of “Tutsi.” Try floating the idea of reintroducing yellow stars for Jews and see the type of reaction this garners, or try arguing that it’s your ethnic right as an Aryan to promote a pure-race ideology. The West routinely demands a malleability in Rwandans that they would never expect of themselves.
From poverty reduction to increased literacy, from economic growth to environmental reforms, from women’s rights to universal health care, Rwanda’s recovery has been remarkable, and the person responsible for much of it is the same person who ended the genocide: the controversial and always divisive Paul Kagame.
As the RPF commander who spearheaded the advance that toppled the Hutu Power government, President Kagame is loved and loathed in equal parts. Hailed as a hero, denounced as a dictator, he is a polarizing figure, inevitably described as a “strongman,” but one who is nonetheless credited with bringing about Rwanda’s extraordinary reconstruction.
Addressing an American university, the perpetually dour and stick-thin Kagame (he always reminds me of a high school chemistry teacher who’s called you into his office because he’s disappointed with your grades) repeatedly stressed, “There is no magic formula.” Instead, he spoke about the importance of individual Rwandans working with each other in a collective commitment. He was invoking the Rwandan tradition of communal effort, of obeying authority, of following the rules—the same traits the génocidaires had employed to such devastating effect—to help rebuild the country. The goal is to use these cultural mores for constructive rather than destructive purposes, in much the same way that Germanic traits of meticulousness and efficiency, which the Nazis exploited so well, and the Japanese sense of collective identity and a strong work ethic, which the Imperial army took advantage of, would later be harnessed for economic rather than militaristic aims. If countries like Germany and Japan, Korea and Vietnam, have turned themselves around—helped by generous dollops of foreign aid, it should be noted—why not Rwanda?
Social mobilization, cultural homogenyeity, effective bureaucratic organization, and an emphasis on group obligations over personal entitlements: the “Rwandan miracle,” as it is known, is very much in the Asian tradition. In words that could easily have come from the podium of any Japanese post-war leader, Kagame insisted that “national prosperity will be achieved only through a people’s capacity to work together, to find common ground, a common cause, a common purpose. There has not been a Rwandan miracle, as such,” he noted, “but millions.”
It was time to see this miracle firsthand.
5
I ARRIVED IN KIGALI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT to the cool embrace of an equatorial night, surfing my way into the main terminal with a crowd of passengers who were apparently under the impression it was a footrace to the baggage carousel.
Jean-Claude had arrived a few days earlier, and he greeted me with a handshake and a hale “Welcome to Rwanda!”
Older travel accounts describe the Kigali airport as cavernous and half-empty, but those days are long gone; the airport has burst its seams like stuffing from a pillow.
“They are building a new one,” Jean-Claude shouted as we manoeuvred my bags through the full-court press of passengers at the terminal. (Entire families, it seemed, had come out to greet arriving relatives and see others off.) “It will be south of the city. Much bigger. Much better.”
The relocation was overdue. Rwanda had clearly outgrown its original airport, and in more ways than one: this was the landing strip President Habyarimana’s plane was approaching when it was shot down, the missiles fired from a military base that still sits beside it. It was from that base that the first killings had been unleashed as well; the neighbourhoods around the airport were among the first to be “ethnically cleansed” of Tutsis. So this airport, in a very real sense, was ground zero of the genocide.
Outside, Jean-Claude led me across the parking lot to where a Toyota 4x4 was jammed into an undersized stall.
“Land Cruiser GXR,” he said. “I picked it up from the rental office this morning.”
It would be our home on wheels, our refuge, our albatross, our means of escape, and our dauntless beast over the course of the next three weeks.
Inching out of the airport with Jean-Claude at the wheel, we were soon swept into the street lights and leafy darkness of Kigali at night. The silhouettes of tall buildings were arranged along the crest of hills above us like giant chess pieces: the square rooks of hotels, the ornately curled knights of foreign embassies, and the rounded bishop of a new convention centre, a striking-looking structure, imminent and still hidden under scaffolding—the urban equivalent of gift-wrap.
Kigali is draped across a loose federation of hills, and the city’s main thoroughfares often run along high-wire ridges before dropping suddenly into the valleys below. This layout—the dip and drop, the ridges and sloping descents, the whorls and loops—makes driving through the city akin to navigating a fingerprint.
Jean-Claude flung us into a valley and then down a curved street—all streets in Kigali curve; finding a straight one would be a feat—before a final funhouse drop brought us to the Republika Café.
The Republika, with its large deck and glowing patio lights, is a local landmark. “Very good food,” Jean-Claude assured me.
It didn’t hurt, of course, that the owner was stunningly attractive.
Regal and welcoming, Solange Katarebe is a towering beauty of a woman. Formerly a director of Rwandan Tourism and National Parks and now an entrepreneur, Solange was one of the many confident, smart, and engaging women we would encounter over the next few weeks: running enterprises, overseeing government departments, finalizing business deals, managing conservation programs, running hotels. If the country was firing on all cylinders, it was women who were often as not priming the pumps, gunning the engine.
Nor was this wishful thinking on my part. By law, one-third of all national representatives in Rwanda must be women; in actuality, the number elected is even greater. It currently sits at 64 percent, the highest in the world, making Rwanda the only parliament on earth where women outnumber men. A third of the Cabinet is female, including the ministers of agriculture, energy, health, labour, and foreign affairs.
Rwanda’s new constitution also sets a minimum of 30 percent women on the boards of all publicly listed companies. Half of the country’s fourteen Supreme Court justices are women, and the World Economic Forum’s “global gender gap” report—an evaluation based on economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment—ranks Rwanda in the top ten nations worldwide for women.
Which is to say, Solange was no anomaly.
She wafted from table to table, laughing, chatting, topping up drinks, waving for new ones, and revising tabs accordingly. The beef skewers were dripping with flavour, and Jean-Claude and I raised a toast to the start of our journey, me with Primus beer, Jean-Claude with bottled water. (Jean-Claude doesn’t drink alcohol, something I would learn to begrudgingly accept and eventually forgive.)
“Finally!” Jean-Claude said. It seemed we had been talking about this trip since before we met.
The flickering lights of Kigali formed constellations on the hills across from us, and the beer was as sweet as summer air.
Finally.
JEAN-CLAUDE WAS LIVING IN KENYA when the genocide began.
A teenager on the cusp of his twentieth birthday, he was, as he puts it, “No longer a boy, but not quite a man.” Having crossed the bridge at Rusumo Falls, he’d made his way to the humid port city of Mombasa looking for his brother, only to find out that his brother was no longer there. Rwandans living in the city helped Jean-Claude track him down.
“My brother Saïd was in Nairobi, was working as a truck driver. He had been hired by the UN, or maybe Red Cross or CARE International—I don’t remember which—to deliver supplies to Somalian refugees. There was civil war in Somalia and the refugee camp, it was near the border.”
This was around the time of Black Hawk Down, when U.S. forces were running for cover, disengaging themselves with unseemly haste from further humanitarian interventions in Africa. Somalia was notoriously dangerous and unstable.
“My brother said, ‘Wanna come?’ I said, ‘Sure!’ So I jumped in and off we went. It was a long trip. Very long. This was my first time to see the desert, first time to see camels too. Everything was so different from Rwanda. It was all sand; there was no trees, there was no nothing. And flat. We drove, like, five, six days to get to that place and there was nothing there. Just people. These refugees had not even tents. I was puzzled. How can they live in this environment? I couldn’t believe anyone could survive in that area. You know, I felt sorry for them.”
While Saïd arranged for the cargo to be unloaded, Jean-Claude made friends with some of the children in the camp.
“I showed these kids how to make a soccer ball from plastic bags. There was so much rubbish and plastic blowing around, so what you do, basically, is you take one plastic bag and you put it inside another, then another. There was this kind of twine, you know when they ship stuff, to tie it? I showed these kids how to use that to tighten the plastic, to make it like a real soccer ball. Once I did that, the kids flocked at me. Every child wanted to have their own soccer ball. So I showed them how to make more and more.” He smiles even now at the memory of it. “We couldn’t talk to each other, we didn’t speak the same language. But through soccer, we could become friends, and I said to myself, ‘You know what? I think I will come back.’”
And even though Jean-Claude and his brother were robbed at gunpoint by desert bandits on their way home—“They took my shoes! And those were nice shoes. They were Mizuno running shoes. I hated losing those shoes”—Jean-Claude knew he had found his calling. He returned on his own to the Somali camps, this time as a volunteer with an NGO connected to CARE International.
“This American woman at the NGO, she wanted to set up schools for the kids. She needed to identify who used to be a teacher back in Somalia and also to see how many children there was, how many were alone, how many had no mother, no father. So I thought, ‘We can use soccer to find this information.’ Instead of going to these thousands of people in the camp, calling, ‘Parents, bring your children!’ the children will come to us. We organized them into teams, according to ages, same as how you would organize a soccer league. I was cataloguing the children’s names, where they are from, did they have family, parents. And these kids? They were having fun playing soccer. I stayed in that camp probably for a month. It was very hot. Daytime, it was in the forties. Nighttime, was cold. Then the rainy season came and we couldn’t get out! We got stuck for almost two more months in that camp.” He laughed. “Even today, I still know many Somali words.”
When Jean-Claude returned to Kenya, he found that Saïd had left again, this time for Congo.
“He went to Congo, and I went to Sudan, almost by accident. There was a French organization, maybe Swiss. I went to their headquarters in Nairobi looking for a job, and when I was there, I overheard someone was talking about how they needed a driver to go to a refugee camp, is called Kakuma. It was in northern Kenya near the border with Sudan. So I said, ‘Hey, I can drive!’ They said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’”
We were sitting in a café in Kigali, and the waiter brought me a cup of coffee, spiced with ginger. Jean-Claude asked for pineapple juice.
“But didn’t you have to pass a road test?” I asked. “Or have some sort of licence for that?”
“Oh, they were desperate. They needed someone to go right away, so my driving test was this: I sat in a car with the guy and he said, ‘Okay, drive.’ We drove to an industrial area where this truck, maybe one-ton, was parked. We filled it with diesel and he gave me some money and he said, ‘Okay, you are going to Kakuma.’”
It was 1,200 kilometres from Nairobi to the Sudanese refugee camp.
“I did it in two days. I was bringing, I think, medicine and something to do with sheeting. I was not supposed to bring back that truck, just leave it there and return by bus.”
But then luck intervened. When Jean-Claude arrived, he discovered that the same American woman he’d worked with in the Somali camp was there. She was delighted to see Jean-Claude and asked him to stay and set up another soccer program to help her catalogue students and identify youth at risk. “I’ve been trying,” she told him, “but I can’t do it. Organizing teams and making plastic-bag soccer balls is harder than it looks.”
So once again, Jean-Claude began manufacturing soccer equipment out of scrap materials and calling kids in for the games. The camp was in the Turkana region, near the arid reaches of southern Sudan.
“It was like there was no border between Kenya and Sudan at that time. In the camp, it was not a good life, it was very bad. They ate poorly compared to the Somalian refugees I saw before, were malnourished compared to the Somalian kids, and I found this work was very tough. They were living kind of makeshift lives. Some built shelters with dry branches, some with just pieces of whatever they could find, with nothing on top. And there were scorpions. Everywhere! I was nervous to sleep there at night.”
Jean-Claude later crossed into South Sudan as part of a Red Cross aid convoy. “We went to Lokichogio, to a camp where there was a vaccination program.” Again, Jean-Claude used soccer to draw the refugees out. “I started organizing teams for the kids. But before they could take part, they had to have a vaccination. That was the rule. Worked very well. Not only for vaccinations. You know, there is value to feeling you are part of a team. Kids are kids everywhere, and soccer is a language they understand.”
Jean-Claude’s experiences in Sudan contrasted sharply with those in the Somali camps. “South Sudan was hostile. It was a broken-down society. People had no sense of social obligation. There was no one in the community you could trust, no one you could respect. In Somalia, you could go to see the elders or the imams at the mosque when there was a problem. In Sudan, it was a kind of anarchy. They saw death for a long time those people, first fighting against the north—the Arab region who had dominated them so badly, like slaves really—and then fighting each other. It was a kind of tribal war, one tribe killing another. In Somalia, this kind of anarchy had not started—not yet. But in Sudan, if you were Dinka, you were Dinka. You had nothing to do with the Nuers. The Nuer was your enemy to the very end. That was the one rule they had. The only one. For anything else, there was no rules.”
After his tour of duty as a volunteer in South Sudan, Jean-Claude returned to Saïd’s apartment in Nairobi, feeling concerned about the animosities he had witnessed in the camps. “I made friends in Sudan, was worried about what would happen to them.” But that would pale in comparison to what was coming in his own country.
On his first night back in Kenya, the genocide in Rwanda began.
“It was 5:30 in the morning, and my neighbour Esmaili, he was Congolese, he knocked the door and woke me up. He said, ‘Did you hear the news?’ I said, ‘What news?’ He said, ‘The president of Rwanda, he has died, together with the president of Burundi. His plane was shot down.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ I knew this was going to be bad. This is what everybody was preparing for. This is what the radio was predicting. I remembered my Hutu neighbours in Kigali—those youth militias—saying with a big grin, ‘We’re gonna kill you guys, all of you!’ It was not a secret. When they returned from their training camps, they said, ‘We’re gonna finish you off. You Tutsis, none of you are gonna be left. You are planning to kill us, you are planning to kill the president, but we are gonna kill you first.’ So when I heard what had happened, I thought, ‘This is it. This is what they were preparing for.’”
The Rwandan diaspora in Nairobi gathered at a church called Sainte Thérèse, trying amid the panic and rumours to sort out what was happening back home. Some thought the crisis would soon pass. Others feared the worst. Very few were sanguine at the prospects; the future seemed to have opened up like a dark maw.
“There was some, was studying in Kenya. Their families, all of them, were back in Rwanda. These students felt cut off. Afraid. One said, very quietly, ‘I was talking to my mom right now on the phone and she said they killed our neighbours next door, and now they were coming to our house and then—and then the phone cut off.’ When we heard that, everybody kind of was in shock.”
Many of these students and expats were now stranded, alone and without funds, and without family to turn to.
“They became homeless in an instant. Many of them came to stay with me and my brother. Anyone who doesn’t have somewhere to stay, they came to stay with us. There was a time we were seven people in that one-room apartment! Seven with one table to share.” He laughed. “And it was a small apartment even when it was just me and my brother. But you know, my brother never minded, even though he was the one paying the rent. I remember that, how kind he was.”
As the genocide unfolded on television, Rwandans huddled around their TV sets, watching in disbelief and horror.
“We could recognize people on TV. We could recognize neighbourhoods. There was one family I knew, was living near the soccer stadium. They had a house there. I knew this family very well and I saw their house is being looted on television, saw someone carrying their mattress. And I knew this person, too.” Jean-Claude leaned in and looked me in the eyes, still baffled by it, twenty years later. “The last person you would expect to loot, to steal, was that guy. He was working for the government, for the civil service, a middle-class guy. When I saw him carrying a mattress on his head, stealing from his neighbours, I knew right away that my friends were dead. This guy, he had a machete in his belt. And I thought, ‘My country has gone mad.’”
“Did you call your family? Your brothers, your sister?”
“They didn’t have a telephone. I tried to phone our neighbour, someone who might know what is happened to my family, but it was impossible to find any information. In my mind, everything went in slow motion. The United Nations had evacuated some Rwandese to Kenya, and they were living in these makeshift tents at the Nairobi airport, so I went there to see if I could find news. I recognized people I knew and I could see they were in shock. I don’t know how to say it, except they were blank. Some were the only survivors, the only ones who made it. ‘They killed my whole family. I escaped by jumping the fence at the airport, but my children couldn’t get over the fence and my wife … I don’t know where they are.’ Everybody had different stories, everybody had a broken heart. You would find Hutus also who were fleeing the war with their whole family, including this one guy who had been a minister in the government, a moderate Hutu. He went to Switzerland, I think.”
“A Hutu among the Tutsis? Was there tension between those who’d escaped?”
“Of course. Imagine someone has lost her entire family and here is a government minister with all of his. Imagine you have lost every one of your children, but here is someone who has all of hers. It was very tough.” Jean-Claude finished his pineapple juice, placed the empty glass on the table in front of him. “I knew: I have to go back.”
“To Rwanda?”
“To Rwanda.”
The RPF had taken control of the eastern regions, were routing the armed forces and youth militias of a collapsing regime. The tide had turned, and the génocidaires knew it.
“I had to go. I felt a kind of guilt of not being there, for being safe when everyone else is in such danger. I thought, ‘If I can get to Kigali, maybe I can find my sister, my brothers, my cousins, my family.’”
Jean-Claude took a long-distance coach to Uganda and from there made his way to the border.
“I crossed over at a place called Katuna, between Uganda and Rwanda. The RPF, they weren’t letting many people come into the country, saying it’s too dangerous—unless you had some training to help people, were a nurse or something. There were so many injured people, if you could say ‘I know how to put on a band-aid,’ oh, they took you right away. They called you doctor and sent you in. For me, I saw there was so many cars stuck at the border with no people to drive them. Some cars, they were there since 1990. So I told them, ‘I can drive any type of thing. Motorcycle, sedan, one-ton truck. Anything, I can drive it. Let me.’ So this guy talked to another guy, he said, ‘Okay, see that truck over there?’ It was a pickup truck, a Daihatsu. Was blue, but had been painted black to camouflage it—black, but you could see the blue showing through. It was a big truck. And he said to me, ‘You are going to take that truck to Kigali.’”
This was at a time when there was still fighting in the capital. I asked Jean-Claude, “What was your reaction, when they told you where you would be going?”
“I said, ‘Thank you.’”
“And the cargo?” I asked.
“Nothing. Was empty. But they needed vehicles near the front, near the fighting, to move the men in and the injured out, to move supplies around.”
And so, barely twenty years old, Jean-Claude Munyezamu set about driving a pickup truck into a war zone.
“I had three people squeezed in beside me. Two was military, one was civilian. They had their radio on, were listening the whole time. We drove toward Kigali, and when we reached that place called Nyachonga, is maybe forty kilometres from Kigali, I started seeing signs of the genocide. The fields were very green. Nothing had been harvested. The roads were quiet. Everywhere, it was kind of peaceful and very silent, because the Hutu militias had fled and the RPF had already moved on. But when we get to Nyachonga … You know, the interahamwe used to have a major roadblock in that place.”
There was a long pause. So long, I thought perhaps he had finished telling his story.
“There were so many bodies, Will. You can’t imagine. You really can’t. Lying in fields. Beside the road. Piled on top of each other. It looked like piles of laundry. I slowed the truck down, and when I realized what it was, I said, ‘Oh no, oh no.’ The others in the vehicle, they looked at me and said, ‘You came from where?’ I said, ‘I came from Kenya.’ And they said, ‘Prepare yourself. This is nothing. You’re gonna see much worse than this.’”
On the table between us, wet rings marked the places where Jean-Claude had rested his glass. He drew his finger through them, watched the lines disappear.
“And they were right,” he said. “It got worse. Much worse.”
As they neared the outskirts of Kigali, Jean-Claude could see tracer fire across the skyline, could hear the clatter of gunfire, the subterranean thump of mortar shells hitting unseen targets.
“We passed abandoned checkpoints, saw people chopped. Some, they had no heads. Some, no feet. Some were just pieces of bone and skin.”
It was July 3, 1994. Kigali had fallen to the RPF, but pockets of resistance remained, among them the feared Presidential Guards who were making a last stand, holding on till they too were forced to retreat, leaving behind only death and the wreckage of a ruined state.
“As we drove through the city, I thought, ‘Rwanda is finished. This is not a country anymore.’ I thought maybe this is how the Roman Empire ended. Maybe this is how Egyptian civilization ended. Maybe they just killed themselves.”
Any sense of victory was muted.
“You would see these young RPF soldiers, boys who had been fighting since 1990 to reach Kigali, and you would see them, sitting on the doorsteps of their burned homes looking defeated with their rifles propped up beside them, heads down, like this. Their eyes were empty. I don’t know how to describe it. Just empty. Many of these soldiers, they were my age. Some had been fighting since they were sixteen. I spoke with a few of them; they said it felt like they fought for nothing.”
Jean-Claude spent two weeks in Kigali his first time back. “The pickup truck I was driving, it had no owner, so this vehicle became mine while I was there. We were looking for people’s relatives and other survivors—we collected so many children who were in the bushes or hiding with Hutu neighbours. I found out my sister Claudine was still alive.”
Along with their brother Emmanuel, she had taken refuge at Sainte Famille church in the middle of Kigali. She had her youngest child, a baby boy, with her.
“My brother Emmanuel tried his best. He tried to protect Claudine, tried to protect her baby.”
Crowding in with 8,000 other desperate people, Emmanuel and Claudine found themselves surrounded by taunting interahamwe militias who tormented them for weeks on end under the sadistic watch of Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka. A Catholic priest who liked to swagger about with a pistol strapped to his hip, he provided “death lists” to the militias and Presidential Guards, who would then raid the church to drag out targeted Tutsis and Hutu moderates. It was a slow, incremental slaughter. Twenty people killed one day. Forty the next. The church had become a concentration camp, and Father Wenceslas began forcing young girls and women into providing sex in exchange for their lives.7 Caught in the crossfire, the church grounds were later hit by RPF shells, killing a dozen more.
“My sister was still nursing her baby. When the UN arrived to evacuate people, they started with the women and children. My sister was in the first convoy. I think it was the only convoy that got through.”
His brother Emmanuel didn’t make it.
“He put my sister and her baby on the truck, and he said, ‘Go. I will follow. I will find you.’”
But as soon as the trucks left, the massacres began anew. Thousands died at Sainte Famille under the raptorial gaze of Father Wenceslas. Among the dead, Jean-Claude’s brother Emmanuel.
“We don’t know where his body is. When the killers were done, they brought in those excavators to dig a mass grave and they dumped the bodies in it. Later, the RPF exhumed the bones, but we don’t know which ones are his.”
“You found your sister?”
“I did.”
“And how was she?”
He thought about this a moment. “Shattered.”
KIGALI IS NO LONGER the hollow shell of a city that the RPF inherited or that Jean-Claude drove through in a daze, bodies still littering the streets.
Those same streets are now very safe, very clean—famously so. Travellers in Africa are always taken aback at how tidy Kigali is. Glass towers are spinning themselves into existence on the dizzying pirouette of construction cranes, but even with the city’s population topping a million and growing daily, there are no sprawling slums, no shantytown ghettos stretching into the distance, no garbage pickers living on smouldering hills of trash. This is urban Africa reimagined, something jaded old African hands complain about. Kigali is too clean, they say. Too well-mannered, too manicured. In a word—too livable. Even its layout, with clusters of business centres arranged on separate hilltops, gives the Rwandan capital the feel of a much smaller city. A collection of towns, as it were.
Jean-Claude and I would use Kigali as our base, falling back to the city between extended excursions to the remoter regions of Rwanda, and it was always a pleasure to return. Through a contact of Jean-Claude, we’d rented a spacious, fifth-floor apartment in Kigali’s Kacyiru district in a building owned and operated by Rwanda’s national pension fund. (I liked that the rent we paid went to the Rwanda Social Security Board rather than a private company.) My bedroom looked out over the city, leafy green even in the dry season. Although Kigali, like most of Rwanda, is high enough to be outside the more serious malarial zones (the mosquitoes that carry malaria prefer warmer, lower-lying climes), I still took my anti-malarial pills every morning and slept beneath a cascade of silk netting every night, feeling not unlike a drowsy Southern belle.
I would often wake in the early hours as dawn was tiptoeing in. I would slip free of my netting and pad down the hall to the kitchen to brew a cup of coffee and take it out on the balcony, where I would watch Kigali stir and come to life.
The city revealed itself in layers, shapes appearing like memories in the morning mist. Flowers and ferns. Eucalyptus trees, silhouetted above the rooftops. It was as though they’d built a city in the middle of a garden.
The haze would give way to light, veils removed one by one to the crescendo of birdsong: whistles and cheeps, melodies musical and not-so-musical. Some echoed the sound of water dripping, others were like question marks given voice. Some birds cooed, some chuckled. Some had songs halfway between a sigh and a sob. It was a far cry from the feuding magpies and cacophonous crows back home. One treetop resident, in the foliage directly below our balcony, would call out, “Wait a week! Wait a week!” and I would think, Wait a week for what?
Kigali is a city of brisk mornings, of early risers. It’s purposeful. Older ladies in bent-back postures appear at first light, sweeping the sidewalks by hand, and the whisk, whisk, whisk of their straw brooms feels unnaturally loud in the fragrant hour. On the packed clay of the alleyway below, a security guard tries to coax a kiss from his would-be girlfriend. She declines and walks away, head high, only to stop and throw a smile back his way before she disappears. Just enough to encourage him to try again tomorrow.
Children walk down the alley to school: girls singing their way to class, boys tromping behind, all of them colour-coded by uniform, laughing and shouting, hurrying along. The parade peaks … then peters out. There’s a long pause, and then a single ten-year-old boy comes running, shirt untucked, flip-flops slapping air, books bouncing.
Every morning I watched the same flow of students pass by, and every morning I saw the same boy, always running, always late. I think about him sometimes, even now. I wonder if he ever made it to class on time.
KIGALI’S TOWN CENTRE is as lumpy as the rest of the city. This country is famous for its hills, granted, but somehow I thought they’d have staked out at least one flat piece of land to balance their high-rise hotels and office towers upon. But in Kigali there is no flat piece of land; you’re always walking up or walking down, except perhaps along the marshy flats of the river below. That stretch is prone to flooding, though, and—until fairly recently—crocodiles.
Strapped into our Toyota 4x4, we followed the contours of Kigali into the downtown core as motorcycle taxis—“taxi-motos”—bobbed in and out with a boldness that bordered on bravado. Their minibus competitors, farting along merrily and weighted down with customers, vied for position. Everything was in motion, even the buildings it seemed. New shops were popping up even as we passed; it was like a time-lapse film on double-speed. One such establishment advertised itself proudly as “The New Better Shop,” and the name stuck with me. Seemed redundant on first glance, but no. There is new, but not necessarily better. There is better, but not necessarily new. But this is Kigali—and everything was new better.
Jean-Claude marvelled at this on the drive in: the wide paved thoroughfares, the polished shimmer of new businesses. “It’s amazing,” he said, hands on the wheel, eyes cranked to the skyline (disconcertingly so, I admit). No matter. Even distracted by the city, he threaded his way through with aplomb.
We changed some money, purchased pay-as-you-go cell phones and refillable bottles of filtered water: the usual accoutrements of modern travel. The streets of Kigali were heaving with commerce. The entire city seemed filled with a sense of possibilities being seized. Rwanda, I’d been told, is a nation of incipient entrepreneurs, and this fact jostled up against me at every turn.
Rwandans are also famously beautiful, famously handsome—and slightly haughty, it must be said, at least here in the capital. This is the image Rwandans have across East Africa: long-limbed, elegant, and ever-confident—and oh, how often those last two go together. Much as I hate to propagate stereotypes, I had to concur.
“Is there a convention of supermodels in town this weekend?” I asked.
Jean-Claude laughed.
Ugandan comedian Anne Kansiime opened a recent show in Kigali by saying, “You know, back home in Uganda I’m actually very beautiful—and surprisingly tall. Here, it is a different story.” I had sympathy for Ms. Kansiime. I’d never felt more dishevelled or stumpy than I did shuffling about the streets of Kigali.
Glass office towers, reflecting a blue deeper than the sky they were catching, lined up alongside low-riding shops and overladen stalls. Two versions of Kigali, wedged against each other, often occupying the same space: the Kigali of clay walls and small shops, and that of glass-tower bank centres. Beauty salons and auto parts. Storefront racks of bright-yellow soccer jerseys (“Go Amavubis!”). Trays filled with children’s toys. Soft drinks and running shoes. Fanned displays of magazines. Plumbing gewgaws and electronic gadgets were piled up on sidewalk stalls as the city’s street hawkers moved through, selling phone-card top-ups and Holy Bibles of various value: white leather deluxe, red vinyl pocketbook, and everything in between.
Several new department stores had opened, and in the downtown Nakumatt we came across HD plasma TVs for sale alongside a wide selection of—Jean-Claude couldn’t believe this—treadmills.
Treadmills?
“Now, that—that is a good sign!” he said. You know an economy is taking root, you know people truly have disposable income when, in the words of Jean-Claude, “they can waste their money on a walking machine. This is Kigali!” he exclaimed. “Who needs a treadmill? You are always walking. Up and down, every day, even on a short trip to the store.”
In a lane behind Nakumatt, Jean-Claude bumped into someone he once knew, a soft-spoken older businessman named Paul Ruhamyambuga. He was, I later learned, something of a local legend in Kigali.
While the rest of the city—indeed, the country—still lay in ruins, Mr. Ruhamyambuga was already imagining its restoration. In a public display of confidence, he built the City Plaza office building amid the rubble, sending a message to investors, to the world—but most importantly, to the people—that this was not the end. A new city would rise.
The Jean-Claude he’d known had been a gawky teenager living in Kenya. “The same, but different,” Mr. Ruhamyambuga said, laughing with genuine warmth on meeting the Jean-Claude of today, the Jean-Claude who’d returned. While the two of them spoke in Kinyarwanda, sharing confidences and small remembrances, I looked up at the tinted glass of the City Plaza office tower with its clamorous jumble of small shops crowding in below.
Jean-Claude turned to me and said, “I remember when this was the tallest building in Kigali.”
Once a landmark of the recovery, the City Plaza is now just one building in among the shinier, higher hilltop towers of this new and better Kigali. You’d hardly have known there was ever a war …
FOLLOWING THAT FIRST FORAY into Rwanda after the genocide, Jean-Claude returned to Nairobi, bringing news to families of their loved ones back home.
“Not all the news was good,” he notes.
There was still a pressing need for vehicles and supplies back in Rwanda, and Jean-Claude made the run between Kenya and Kigali ten times or more, ferrying people and goods back and forth, helping to gather children and reunite families—there are people he helped who stay in touch with him to this day. His journeys had a dash of Mad Max about them. “The situation was still very unstable,” he said. “Many of the side roads were filled with landmines. The remote villages were still being attacked.”
But a different sort of adventure was about to begin, although Jean-Claude didn’t know it at the time. During evening services at Nairobi’s Good Shepherd church, he spotted a strikingly beautiful young woman named Christine Karebwayire. She was new to the city, studying at the technical college, and was living nearby with her aunt.
Christine was born into the diaspora. Her parents had fled Rwanda in 1959—during the first genocide against the Tutsis. They’d settled in Burundi and then later in Tanzania, though it might as well have been in Limbo. Although successful in their new life, they were still stateless citizens occupying a liminal world.
“In Nairobi, the Rwandan community was holding an overnight service once a month,” Jean-Claude explained. “It would start maybe at nine o’clock, with greetings and testimonies. Every new person who came, they introduced themself. It was mostly social. It was kind of like open-mike night. I knew almost everybody who was Rwandese living in Nairobi. At that time, I was among the longest-running members of that congregation, so when I saw Christine, I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, who is this?’ I never seen her before.”
Not all of Christine’s extended family had left Rwanda. Her uncle was a prominent church official, Canon Alphonse Karuhije, dean of Kigali’s Anglican cathedral. Denied the rank of bishop by a Hutu rival, he was killed on church grounds during the genocide after being betrayed by a fellow priest.
His wife, Christine’s aunt Thacienne, had escaped the carnage by the slimmest of margins: having gone to visit family in Tanzania over Easter, she was out of the country when the president’s plane was shot down. Canon Karuhije had driven his wife and their five children to the border crossing at Rusumo Falls, had said goodbye, then taken a bus back to Kigali while she continued on with the children. He was returning to the city to oversee Easter Mass. His family would never see him again.
Christine’s aunt, now widowed, was in Nairobi awaiting sponsorship from the Anglican Church for her and her children to go to Winnipeg. Christine was staying with them while she studied at the college, hoping someday to become a nurse.
“Was it love at first sight?” I asked Jean-Claude.
“You know,” he said, “I wasn’t thinking that way. At this time, I was taking care of some children who had been separated from their mother, and I was paying school fees for other ones. I had too many things going on, too many responsibilities.”8
He remembers the car, though. Vividly. “Christine’s aunt still had her husband’s sedan, the one she drove out of Rwanda. Was a Peugeot 505. French-built. Very good car.”
Her aunt needed a mechanic, Jean-Claude helped her find one at a good price, and soon he was spending time with her and her niece.
“Cars and soccer,” I said. “Seems like half your life has been tied to those two, JC.”
When Christine’s aunt left for Canada with her children, Christine moved into an apartment with five other students to continue her studies.
“I used to tease her because she grew up in Tanzania, so she spoke Kinyarwanda mixed with Swahili. Sometimes she didn’t know that it wasn’t correct. She would use a Tanzanian word and I would tease her about this, saying, ‘What is that? That is not Kinyarwanda.’” (Note the disingenuous use of the past tense on Jean-Claude’s part. He still teases her about this.) “So what’s happened is, we became kind of friends. We started hanging out together, then it started to be kind of dating.9 I remember our first date. It was in the afternoon and she came from school to meet me, still in her school uniform. We went to a fish and chips place, and then after we took a bus to the zoo.” He smiled. “It was a good day.”
“Do you remember which animals you saw?”
He thought about this. “No. Not really.”
A simple story of boy meets girl, except that it was set against the backdrop and fallout of an African holocaust. The courtship of Jean-Claude and Christine was a reminder of what the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who covered countless wars and rebellions in Africa, described as “this beautiful and heartening thing, this obstinate, heroic human striving for normality.” The normality of spending time with someone you like, of going on a date. Of taking a bus together, of visiting a zoo.
And then the unexpected: Jean-Claude received sponsorship from a Catholic diocese in Montreal, which meant he would be leaving Africa for a new life in Canada. He promptly asked Christine to marry him.
“And?”
“She said no.”
“What? Why?”
“That’s what I wanted to know! I asked her why and she said, ‘I’m not ready to get married. I’m gonna finish my studies. I’m gonna be a nurse.’ So I said, ‘You can still be a nurse, only now you will be a nurse who is married.’ But she said, ‘Oh, I think that would be very hard. Let’s just continue to be friends instead.’”
But then Christine made a serious mistake. She talked to her friends. She told them Jean-Claude had asked for her hand in marriage and that she’d declined.
“She told the other girls?”
“Of course she did! Can you imagine any girl, a boy asks her to marry him and she says no, and she’s not gonna tell her friends about it? Of course she told them! Soon everybody in the Rwandan community knew.”
“And?”
“My supporters, they began to lobby on my behalf. They told her, ‘You are crazy! You should have said yes!’”
His supporters also advised Jean-Claude, on the sly, to maybe try one more time. And so, just before he departed for Montreal, he asked her again. This time she said yes.
Christine came to Canada six months later, having finished her schooling. She moved first to Winnipeg to live with her beloved aunt and then to Calgary to marry Jean-Claude. The ceremony was at a local church, with Christine resplendent in her wedding gown. I’ve seen the photos; it’s clear why Jean-Claude was so smitten.
There was a Rwandan aspect to the ceremony as well. “I bought her family a cow,” he said. “Is a tradition in Rwanda. The groom presents one to the bride’s family. So I sent a cow to her family in Africa.”
“What, like by Fedex?”
He laughed. “No, I sent the money to buy one. Was an Ankole cow—they call it the ‘Cattle of Kings.’ Very elegant animals.”
Here was the trajectory of lives lived and roads intersecting, of a wedding dress and a kingly gift, and it all started with a truck rumbling across that bridge at Rusumo Falls with a teenage stowaway on board, heart pounding, hidden under heavy sacks of coffee, escaping a coming apocalypse.
10
THE BOULEVARD THAT RAN PAST our apartment in Kigali, palmy in every sense of the word, lacked even the faintest speck of litter. Widows and elderly women are allotted specific sections of major streets, are paid a stipend to keep them clean—and Lord help you if you absent-mindedly drop a candy wrapper on their stretch of pavement. I’d been warned several times that the whisk brooms these ladies wielded could also be used in a pedagogically punitive manner.
Jean-Claude and I went for a walk along this ridge-top boulevard one morning, with Jean-Claude pointing out the flora along the way: avocado trees and pears, hanging heavy with fruit; jacaranda with their piñata-like pods ready to burst in a spray of flowers.
“My father,” Jean-Claude said, “his passion was trees. He knew everything about them. With his brother Adalbert he grafted oranges and lemons onto the same plant. One tree with two different fruits, the neighbours were amazed.”
Jean-Claude’s grandfather had been a member of the Royal Army of King Rwabugiri and was on hand when the German count crossed into the Kingdom of Rwanda and made first contact.
“My grandfather, his name was Rugaju, and he was sent east with the son of the king, the prince, to keep the Germans in check. The Germans were already in Tanzania—Tanganyika, they called it back then. My grandfather’s main assignment was to keep the Germans from crossing into Rwanda.”
The Akagera River marked the outer limits of the kingdom, and the mwami set up a military outpost not far from Rusumo Falls. Jean-Claude’s grandfather was granted land in a nearby village. This was where Jean-Claude’s father was born.
“My family still has land in that area, it’s still our village. You know, in Africa, everyone, even if they are born and raised in the city, they will have a traditional village that they call home. Mine is in the east, in Rundu village.”
Jean-Claude’s father, Ferdinand, was a scholar and a botanist whose talents were recognized early on. “He was sent to Tanzania to learn how to plant coffee plantations when that was first being introduced into Rwanda. He was among the first people to learn how to do that, and he travelled all over the country doing those kinds of work, teaching people how to plant coffee beans and then later eucalyptus.”
His father settled in Kigali with his brother Adalbert, down by the river in a neighbourhood now known as Gisozi.
“My father and Uncle Adalbert were the first people to live there.”
As a leading arborist, Jean-Claude’s father was something of a Johnny Appleseed as well, planting trees tirelessly across Rwanda. “There are forests even now,” Jean-Claude said, “that my father planted. When I pass by them, I can still see my father moving about very carefully, examining each tree, nodding. He was a very thoughtful person. Conversations with him were always about serious matters. My uncle Adalbert, he was more open. I think he knew how to talk to children better than my dad. My uncle lived next door. I had many cousins.”
Jean-Claude and I walked along the spacious sidewalks of Umuganda Avenue as early-morning pedestrians clipped past at a brisk pace in crisp white shirts. Minibuses veered in and out, stopping to pack more passengers in or unload others. The city was like a giant clock winding up rather than down.
“My neighbourhood, the place I grew up, it’s over there, on the other side.” Jean-Claude pointed across the rolling heights of Kigali to a hill opposite, layered with homes. In between, sloping into the valley and then swooping back up the other side, were the rooftops of other homes, so close together as to be overlapping.
We’d reached the Kacyiru roundabout, tidy and well-tended. A circular garden flowing with traffic, it once marked the frontline in the Battle of Kigali, with RPF soldiers hunkered down on one side, exchanging gunfire with members of the elite Presidential Guards on the other. For three months this roundabout had been in the middle of a war zone. If no one had told you …
On a whim, Jean-Claude suggested we walk to his old neighbourhood, through the streets below us, across the river, and then up the other side.
“Hmmm. Looks far,” I said.
“Yes, but I know a shortcut. I remember a certain way to go.”
So we left the wide boulevard of Umuganda Avenue, with its fountain-pen palm trees and its rise-and-shine, starch-shirted commuters, and plunged into the residential area below. A steep path led us into a labyrinth of low-lying clay-brick homes, tightly packed. Every building seemed to be propping up the one next to it, and the lane we were walking down was narrow enough at times that I could have run my hands along both sides.
We had entered a different Kigali. Smaller, clustered, more intimate. The smell of lye soap and wet charcoal: pots scrubbed and cooking fires doused. The raspy cry of a rooster. A young mother tossing wash-water from a basin onto the ground as her toddler, as toddlers are wont to do, toddles by, beaming at the power of his own locomotion. She begins laying out her hand-wrung laundry on a thorny hedge to dry, keeps a sideward eye on us as we pass. An elderly lady in a patterned apron and matching head scarf sweeps an already clean threshold of hypothetical dirt. (The entire neighbourhood being made of clay, sweeping for dust must be more an existential than a pragmatic endeavour.) She looks up at us, is startled into a smile, eyes lost in a nest of wrinkles, as we squeeze by.
A cadre of young men striding uphill stop as well, taken aback by the sight of us coming down; it was as though Jean-Claude and I were blithely cutting through their living rooms, which in a way I suppose we were. Troops of schoolchildren, startled in mid-gambol, stood gape-eyed and O-mouthed, with the bolder among them venturing a quick “Good morning, teacher. How are you? I am fine” as we passed. Learning English in the classroom has given Rwandan students the habit of addressing English speakers, regardless of who they are, as “teacher.” This is usually delivered in a single impressive burst: “Goo’moaning’teacha’howreyoomfine,” after which they scramble back to the laughter and breathless congratulations of their peers. “Muzungu! Muzungu! He talked to a muzungu!” It would be the highlight of their morning, would grow with each telling I’m sure. Some of the smaller children, always with the most encrusted noses it seemed, stopped to force moist handshakes on me, to which I always obliged. Mental note: Buy hand sanitizer.
Muzungu is a Swahili word, borrowed by the Rwandese. I assumed it meant “handsome fellow” or “look yonder at that dapper chap!” because wherever I went, I heard it time and time again, heralding my arrival, departure, existence. The response in Kigali was mild. They see muzungus all the time—not in their local neighbourhoods, maybe, but downtown, fanning themselves in front of banks and hotels, counting bills at the money-changers, looking sweaty and perplexed. Outside of Kigali, however, the refrain of “Muzungu!” would increase dramatically, become almost constant, a sort of background chorus. (When I say to Rwandans, “Muzungu must mean good-looking, right?” they always get a pained look on their faces. “No, no, no,” they explain, “it means white person,” as though I were so dense I hadn’t figured that out. So then I have to explain I was only joking, which elicits even more brow-knitting concern. At one point, I tried doubling down—“Muzungu means super-sexy movie star, right?”—but the response was the same, “No, no, no, it means …”)
Our path through the maze of clay-walled homes grew steeper with every ankle-rolling step, turning my initial canter into an extended downward stumble as I tried not to trip myself into an uncontrolled forward rush.
We came out of this rabbit warren of homes onto the side of another, lower thoroughfare. “I remember this road!” Jean-Claude said. “It’s paved now. And wider. But it wasn’t like this when I was growing up. It used to be so dusty. We would be choking in the dry season.”
Memories came quicker now. On passing a newly built gas station, Jean-Claude read the sign and said, “I know him! I know the owner. I knew him as a boy. He taught himself mechanics in his backyard. He has done very well.” And as we drew closer to the river: “We used to play along these banks, in those marshes. There were only three cars in our neighbourhood. None of this was paved.”
The marshlands of Jean-Claude’s youth have largely been filled in. “There was more water,” he said, somewhat sadly. But there is always more water in our childhood. More water and taller buildings.
We walked across the busy Kinamba overpass, vehicles clipping by in both directions, and Jean-Claude said, “This is where my cousin died. They threw her over the side with the other Tutsis. She was a long time dying. They could hear her crying for two days is what I’m told.”
During the genocide, this overpass was the site of one of the most notorious roadblocks in Kigali. Here, Hutu Power youths tormented and targeted specific people early on, before the more widespread indiscriminate killings began. As the weeks went by, the dead piled up below, began to decompose in the heat; no buddies saved her.
Jean-Claude’s old neighbourhood of Gisozi was on the other side of this overpass, and as we pushed our way through a crowd of workers trundling toward a nearby lumberyard, the air became spiced with the scent of sawdust and cut wood. The road angled uphill and we walked, leaning into our ascent, until we came to a potholed, packed-clay lane branching off from the main road.
“This is the street,” Jean-Claude said. “This is where I grew up.”
His old neighbourhood was now a construction site. The past was under repair, but a few of the older buildings still stood, acting as wary benchmarks on a vastly changed map. It took some time, but with the help of a few young men who lived on the street, we did manage to find a remnant of Jean-Claude’s family home. “Just this part,” he said, laying a hand on its whitewashed texture. A corner incorporated into another building. “These two walls, these were part of our house.”
Jean-Claude was four or five when his mother died.
“I try to find her face, but I can’t. I remember her clothes and her voice—I remember how she spoke, very calm, very kind—I remember her calling my brother when he was outside, telling him that the supper was ready. I remember her sending me to get him. I even remember she was feeding me with a spoon when I was little and how this food that she cooked, we call it igihembe, kind of like a lentil, was so tasty. I remember all of those things, but I can’t remember her face.”
She died in Uganda. She had family there, and when she became ill they sent for her, because Uganda, as a former British colony, had more advanced medical care.
“She went to Uganda,” he said. “And she never came back.”
Jean-Claude was playing outside with his older brother the day he found out.
“It was raining and we had to come inside, and when we did there was so many people there, aunts and uncles, neighbours. They went very quiet when we came in and my dad called us into the room, me and my brother, and he said, ‘I just want to tell you that your mother has passed away.’ But I didn’t know what that means. I was thinking, ‘Okay, so am I gonna see her now?’ After that, I asked my cousin and she explained to me. She said, ‘It means you will never see her again. They are going to put her in a box in the ground.’ That was when I knew my mother was gone and wouldn’t be coming back … My dad was a single parent from that moment until he died.”
Jean-Claude’s mother had been his father’s second wife—he was separated from his first—and the house was filled with the comings-and-goings of step-cousins and assorted siblings.
“I was the second youngest. There were four children from the first marriage, five with my mom.”
“A big family.”
“Yes. Always there were people in this house. It was very crowded, but was fun.”
While we stood looking at the remaining walls of Jean-Claude’s childhood home, he recited the names of various brothers and sisters, “Claudine, Marie-Gorette, my brother Elisé, Denise, Jean-Baptiste, Emmanuel,” speaking more to himself than to anyone.
By this point, we were surrounded by young men in undershirts and flip-flops: temporary workers from the looks of it, pants caked with dry mud. We’d attracted a gathering of schoolchildren as well. They followed us down the lane, walking when we walked, stopping when we stopped, looking where we looked. “Scoot! You’ll be late for school,” Jean-Claude admonished, but school pales in excitement to having a real! live! muzungu set loose in your neighbourhood. At one point a sedan angrily pushed its way through the crowd, the driver casting disapproving glares our way.
The young men who had helped Jean-Claude locate the partial walls of his old home wanted to be paid for their assistance. Jean-Claude scoffed at this. “For helping someone, you think you deserve money? Do you think that is the correct way to act?” He asked them this in Kinyarwanda. Admonished, they stared at their feet with hangdog expressions.
Jean-Claude looked back at that last remaining piece of his childhood.
“Time to go,” he said after a moment.
Now, the problem with walking down, into a valley, say, is that eventually you have to walk back up, and I was already tired. The sun was itching its prickly heat along the nape of my neck and my throat had grown starchy with thirst.
No matter. “We’ll follow the river, then cross back farther down, at the next bridge. We can go up the other side over there.” Jean-Claude pointed out the route we would follow. It would allow us to avoid having to backtrack and would turn our cross-city hike into one extended loop.
Thus began the long trudge back, as on a treadmill.
The road that ran alongside the river, paved as well and busy with traffic, took us past the marshy meadows that formed a bowl in the bottom of Kigali’s many hills.
“The Red Cross owns all of this,” Jean-Claude said. It would have been prime real estate, save for the constant flooding and the boggy soil, to say nothing of the crocodiles. (Kigali’s crocodiles had departed, but one never knows.)
In a grassy field, a scrawny dog was cavorting with a cow and her calf—at least, that’s how the dog saw it, nipping and yapping, in and out of the fray, tail wagging. For the cow it was more akin to harassment; she lowered her head repeatedly, trying to butt the dog clear, but the mutt would scramble aside, sporting that loopy grin dogs wear when caught up in their own hijinks. A tired-looking man in a floppy hat with a long branch resting on his shoulder, a cattle herder by the looks of it, was even now making his way across the field to end the “fun.”
Dogs are a rare sight in Rwanda, but it wasn’t always so. The country once abounded in them, but in the aftermath of the genocide, Rwanda’s dogs began running in feral packs, attacking the wounded, eating the dead, chewing on the bones. The advancing RPF instigated a cull, shooting dogs on sight. Today, Rwanda has fewer than almost any country in Africa, maybe the world.
Something stops Jean-Claude cold.
In an irrigation ditch he sees a tattered red jacket, clogged in the mud.
Jean-Claude stared at it, didn’t move, barely breathed. Then: “I’m sorry. It’s just—for a moment I thought …”
I knew what he thought. He thought it was 1994 all over again. He thought it was a dead body, decomposing. But there were no bodies in the water. Only a discarded jacket. We walked on in silence before Jean-Claude spoke.
“That’s what they looked like,” he said quietly. “The bodies. They looked like piles of old clothes.”
Old clothes and dogs dining on human flesh.
We crossed a bridge to the other side of the river, started our ascent. Along the way we passed a Twa pottery market. The Twa, or “pygmies” as they are known in the West, are the invisible people of Rwanda. Where the Tutsis were cattle owners and the Hutu farmers, the Twa were hunter-gatherers. They lived in the nation’s forest fringes, distinct from Rwanda’s other two solitudes, but during the genocide the Twa were often targeted, too, for no other reason than, Well, why not? Since we’re killing minority groups anyway …
The Twa remain on the periphery of Rwandan society, even though the national government, to its credit, has launched a development program aimed at addressing this imbalance. A purpose-built “cultural village,” where Twa arts and customs are preserved, albeit in a vaguely dioramic form, has been built near Lake Kivu, and new pottery markets, such as the one Jean-Claude and I passed, have been established. Twa pottery is rightly famous, and the line of oversized urns—made of clay, strong and delicate at the same time—attested to their skill. I desperately wanted to buy some but couldn’t imagine how I’d ever get them home in one piece.
Large homes crowded the incline as we walked up, up, up. The lingering effects of jet lag and my own deskbound, ass-in-chair lifestyle were catching up to me as I struggled to suck air into my lungs with less and less success. My chest wouldn’t inflate all the way.
It was a thigh-straining walk, with long zigs and slow zags, and when we finally stopped for something cold to drink at a roadside stall—I staggered up to the counter waving a fistful of Rwandan francs, gasping for amazi (a word I would use often)—a pair of passing motorcycle taxi boys took pity and pulled over. They were looking for a fare, of course, but I imagined they were also concerned about my well-being. I was just about to pant, “Gentlemen, I will gladly pay whatever it takes to get me to the top of the next hill, here is my wallet, take from it whatever amount you wish,” when Jean-Claude intervened, magnanimously waving them off. We were fine, he explained. We didn’t need a ride.
As the taxi-moto boys pulled away with a suit-yourself shrug, Jean-Claude saw the stricken look on my face. “Don’t worry,” he assured me, “we’re almost there.” And by “almost,” he meant another forty-five minutes of slow, steady walking.
My chest-whistling soundtrack had cast a pall over the proceedings, for I knew full well that in just a few weeks’ time we’d be hiking the towering rainforests of the Virunga volcanoes in search of Rwanda’s famed, and famously remote, mountain gorillas. If a stroll through the streets of Kigali knocked me out, it didn’t bode well. I decided to blame it on the altitude. The country’s average elevation is 2,725 metres above sea level—and the lairs of the mountain gorillas are higher still, often 4,000 metres or more. Kigali itself was a “mile high,” as they say.
“Once I (wheeze) get acclimatized (wheeze) to these higher elevations, I’ll (wheeze) be fine (wheeze),” I said.
By the time we got back to our apartment, my lungs were burning from oxygen deprivation and the noonday sun had singed my skin, leaving it an amusing shade of rosé. It had been a three-hour “stroll” by my count.
11
SOLACE MINISTRIES RAN A GUEST HOUSE across the alleyway from the apartment building we were staying in. (Our balcony looked down onto their courtyard.) Solace Ministries also provided a lunch and supper buffet, and when Jean-Claude and I were in Kigali, we often took our meals there, a breezy commute of about ten steps, out the back gate and across the clay-packed alley. Slices of fruit, rich Rwandan coffee, cheese and pastries, omelettes made to order. And when Jean-Claude was away in the evenings, visiting his sister or old acquaintances, I would go on long walks through our neighbourhood that always seemed to end at Solace in time for coffee and cake.
At Solace Ministries, women gather to share their stories. Soft-spoken tales of siblings slaughtered, of husbands hacked down, of mutilations and machetes, of rape and the children born of rape. The woman who ran the office at Solace told us we could sit in and listen if we liked, that we were welcome to hear their stories, but it felt too intrusive. I watched from the wings instead, and even though they spoke in Kinyarwanda, the pain in their voices was unmistakable.
It was a daily aide-mémoire of what survivors still face. Every day, Jean-Claude and I would pass the hall of widows and every day were reminded of the ineluctable logic of hatred. Of hatred, taken to its natural conclusion. Of hatred incubated, encouraged, allowed to run free.
Sometimes the longest walk of the day was the ten steps across the alleyway to Solace.
12
BEYOND ITS GARDEN-LIKE ROUNDABOUTS and well-swept streets, the scars of the genocide are still evident in Rwanda’s capital. You need only to look.
From the shell-pocked walls of the nation’s parliament buildings (where the bullet-hole points of impact have been left as a reminder of the Battle of Kigali, a street-by-street campaign marked by stalemates and sudden sallies, reminiscent of the Siege of Leningrad) to the splattered plaster at the military barracks where the ten Belgian peacekeepers were killed, the capital at times feels like an open-air memorial.
The Belgian monuments, one for each of the soldiers, are understated and poignant, but with a simmering anger in evidence. The families have never forgiven General Dallaire for not storming in and taking the base by force, a wholly unrealistic option considering that the captured Belgian peacekeepers were being held in what was essentially a military fortress with more than 1,500 armed soldiers on hand, well-equipped and fully armed. (The UN, by contrast, had barely forty-seven rounds per person, which would have lasted three minutes at most in a pitched battle.) But no matter. Grief is never rational, and the families of the dead peacekeepers have written their anguish onto the walls of the building where the massacre occurred, maintained now as a memorial by the Belgian embassy.
On a chalkboard inside, preserved under plexiglass, is the heartfelt but misguided j’accuse: “General Dallaire—have you no eyes, no heart?” The families might have better focused their anger on the French government of François Mitterrand, which trained and armed the very soldiers who murdered their sons and husbands, or perhaps have looked more critically at Belgium’s own colonial legacy, in both Rwanda and the Congo, but that would be to diminish the pain of those who lost loved ones—a pain shared, quite literally, by millions of Rwandan women, children, men.
Scars on buildings, scars on skin.
The man Jean-Claude rented our vehicle from had a thick line running across his neck, ear to ear, like a rubbery rope: the distinct slash of a machete.
Scars of the flesh and of the spirit.
The scars that remember, the scars that remain.
Rwanda’s national genocide memorial is just up the road from Jean-Claude’s childhood home. If, as Stalin infamously noted, one death is a tragedy but a million is just a statistic, the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre strives to put a human face on those numbers, tries to stop them from becoming a mere tally, numbly recited, emptied of meaning.
Inside are snapshots and photographs. Candid moments, class photos, wedding portraits, Sunday schools, and graduations. The faces of families, of children, of mothers, husbands, lovers. Gone.
Acts of kindness and bravery are commemorated as well: an elderly Hutu woman named Zula Karuhimbi bluffed her local band of killers with nothing more than confidence and a reputation for being a crank. Seventy-one years old, Zula had given refuge to more than twenty frightened Tutsis in her rundown home, including infants. When the interahamwe militias showed up, armed with machetes and demanding she step aside so they could search her hovel on rumours she was harbouring Tutsis, she said, “Be my guest.” But be warned, she added. “I have supernatural powers.” The killers scoffed, but as an old woman living alone, Zula already had a disquieting reputation. She was known to work with traditional medicines. Was she also a witch? Probably not. But did they really want to take the chance? Zula, diminutive, defiant, looked the killers in the eyes, stared down any doubts they might have had, told them, “If you want to die, go inside. I have powers, and evil spirits will swallow you up.” Not one of the mob was brave enough to risk it. They swaggered off, vowing to come back later—but never did. The Tutsis hiding inside survived.
Dismas Mutezintare singlehandedly saved 400 Tutsi children and adults at an orphanage. Where is his Hollywood movie? A Muslim man named Yahaya Nsengiumva saved thirty. When asked why, he said it was simple: “The Koran tells us that saving one life is like saving the whole world.”
But the saddest room in all of Rwanda is the Children’s Room at the Kigali museum. If you were to roll all the pain, all the senselessness of what happened, into a ball the size of your fist and lodge it deep in your stomach, you will feel it here, in this room. It is calm and softly lit.
| Fabrice Murinzi Minega | |
| Age: | 8 |
| Favourite sport: | Swimming |
| Favourite sweets: | Chocolate |
| Best friend: | His mum |
| Behaviour: | Gregarious |
| Cause of death: | Bludgeoned with club |
There are no bodies in this room, no human remains, only the illuminated photographs of children lining the walls. And beneath each photograph, an introduction.
| Aurore Kirezi | ||
| Age: | 2 | |
| Favourite drink: | Milk | |
| Favourite game: | Hide-and-seek with her big brother | |
| Behaviour: | Very talkative | |
| Cause of death: | Burnt alive at the Gikondo Chapel | |
Here is a photo of a little boy running in short pants, his name is Patrick; the little girl in a pretty dress beaming at the camera is Aurore. Here is Chandelle on her birthday, Hubert on his bicycle.
| Fabrice Cyemezo | |
| Age: | 15 months |
| Favourite food: | Rice with milk |
| Favourite animal: | Cat |
| Enjoyed: | Making gestures |
| Favourite word: | Auntie |
| Cause of death: | Killed at Muhoro Church |
Looking back on the events of 1994, Rwandan poet and genocide survivor Félicien Ntagengwa penned words that often appear at memorials, above doorways, on altars: Iyo uza kwimenya / nanjye ukamenya / ntuba waranyishe. “If you really knew me, and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me.”
AS JEAN-CLAUDE AND CHRISTINE settled into their new life in Calgary, a baby boy soon followed. Jean-Claude was working as a meat cutter at the sprawling Cargill plant in High River, which made for a long commute down a winter highway in a rattling second-hand Hyundai.
“But they were paying me nine bucks an hour!” he told me with a laugh. “For an immigrant from Africa, nine bucks an hour right away? I thought, ‘This is good!’”
We were sharing ugali dumplings at a roadside café as Jean-Claude reminisced about his days in High River, half a world and a lifetime away, it seemed.
“This meat-packing plant, it was huge. Like its own city. Very clean, very efficient too. Cows came in one side alive and left the other side wrapped, sorted, packed, and ready to be shipped. Nothing was wasted. Me? I was fine until I visited the kill floor, where the cows are cut and drained. I saw them being pushed in through that little gate and the cows were pushing back, fighting to avoid it. It was terrible. They knew. It was very hard for me to watch because, you know, for Rwandese, cows are kind of like a treasure. Not sacred like in India, but sort of. We don’t eat them, we keep them. So for me, it was difficult.” Suddenly nine dollars an hour didn’t seem like very much. “I worked at that meat plant for three years. I still don’t eat hamburgers even now.”
Getting Jean-Claude to grab a beer and a burger had been pretty much out of the question back in Canada, even though I’d explained to him several times how beer and burgers were two of our national food groups. Now I knew why.
It was during his time as a meat cutter that Jean-Claude began volunteering at Calgary homeless shelters.
“I wanted to meet people. I was studying at the college, but my English was not improving as much as I wanted. It was strange. Working at the Cargill meat plant, there was no way you can tell you are in Canada. Almost no one was speaking English. During lunch break there was the Vietnamese table, there was the Filipino table, the Sudanese table, the Ethiopian table. One guy is from Congo, another one is from Haiti, another from Sierra Leone. And so on. No one was integrating; it was like they were in separate worlds.”
So he began volunteering at Mustard Seed, a downtown Calgary shelter.
“I was naive. I couldn’t see how anybody can be homeless in Canada. How can someone be poor in such a country like this? But at Mustard Seed I met many people, good people, some had bad luck, some had problems with drugs or abuse, some had been in jail. They all had a story to tell and I would listen, try to help.”
Jean-Claude managed to get one fellow, a former accountant who’d had a mental breakdown and become homeless, a job as a meat cutter at the Cargill plant, even driving him to the interview in High River.
“This guy, he said to me, ‘Jean-Claude, why should I bother, no one is gonna hire me,’ and I said, ‘Of course not! Not if you look like that!’ He was a mess. I told him he had to shave and shower and get cleaned up, and I got him a suit from Goodwill for his interview. He was a very smart man, and seeing him in a suit, he was like a different person. When he got his first paycheque he bought me lunch. He said, ‘Getting a paycheque makes you feel worthwhile, makes you feel like a human being.’ Later, I found out he has left the meat-cutting plant and is working as an accountant for a big company. He called me and he said, ‘Guess what!’ You know, Will, sometimes just a small thing can change everything.”
Jean-Claude went on to volunteer at Inn from the Cold, which provided families with hot meals and holiday dinners. They even helped kids with their homework.
“These events were very fun, like a family atmosphere. We even had movie nights in the basement of a community hall. There were other kids to play with, so they didn’t feel alone in their situation. For a moment you could see that these children are able to forget they are homeless or sad.”
Jean-Claude eventually left the Cargill meat-processing plant and signed on as a community resource worker for people with mental disabilities. “Helping with their banking, driving them to shopping or the swimming pool, that kind of thing. This work was very satisfying. I enjoyed it so much, but the pay was too low and I couldn’t support my family on it.” So after a lucrative but exhausting tour of duty in the Alberta oil patch—“Very tiring, very dirty, and I was away from home too much”—he began driving taxi instead.
“First I was a special needs driver, taking kids with disabilities. Was very rewarding, but I had to switch to regular fares. The hours were more flexible.”
He needed to take care of his own children while Christine studied for her certificate in practical nursing. And yet, even with this, he still found time to volunteer as a coach at our local soccer club. (Meanwhile, I feel good about myself if I drop a toonie into a Salvation Army tin at Christmastime.)
It was around this time that Jean-Claude also noticed something about his local neighbourhood. It had extensive subsidized housing for lower-income families and refugees, but not much else. “Children from everywhere,” as he put it. “With nothing to do.”
Many of the families had come to Canada from the same refugee camps in Sudan and Somalia that Jean-Claude had visited years before, or had escaped persecution in Syria and Ethiopia, violence in Colombia and Afghanistan, poverty in the Philippines. The parents were often working two jobs and had no time to think about how to involve their children in the community.
“So these kids, they were just hanging around. In the park or on the street, every night, every weekend. I wondered, when they go to school on Monday and the other children say, ‘Oh, I went skiing’ or ‘I went swimming,’ what will they say? When the teacher asks, ‘What did you do on the weekend?’ what will they tell her?”
So one Saturday, Jean-Claude dragged out a bag filled with secondhand soccer balls and plastic cones and began pacing out a field in their local park. The Saturday Soccer Club was born. It was free and it was fun and everyone was welcome, no matter their age or ability—but they had to be respectful and they had to take the club seriously. The boys and girls in the Saturday Soccer Club ran drills, practised scrimmages, worked on their passing, their shooting, their set plays. Soon he had more than a hundred children involved, with an entire team of volunteers overseeing it. Jean-Claude can be very persuasive, and before long he had FIFA-trained youth coaches volunteering their time, too. Other clubs donated shoes and shin guards, and a local car wash sponsored their jerseys.
The Saturday Soccer Club ran all year, indoor and out, and as talented players emerged they were snatched up by competitive leagues (which gladly waived their fees). Soccer is a sport that crosses international borders. Whether you are from Colombia or Egypt, Syria or Congo, Somalia or Sudan, everyone speaks the language, everyone knows the game.
Valerie Fortney, columnist with the Calgary Herald, wrote a feature article on the club, and soon the kids were mini-celebrities, appearing in the Calgary Journal, too, as well as on CBC and Shaw TV. The club has grown. It’s now called Soccer Without Boundaries and is in the process of attaining full charitable status (so if you’re looking for a place to make a donation, hint hint).
Jean-Claude was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for his work and was asked to join the Premier’s Council on Culture specifically to look at how to integrate new Canadians into their community through similar programs.
“And now,” Jean-Claude notes proudly, “when the teacher asks the kids, ‘What did you do on the weekend?’ they tell their teacher, ‘I played soccer. I’m on a team.’”
WE HEADED SOUTH FROM KIGALI amid the city’s morning crush. Everyone was yielding to everybody and nobody was yielding to anyone: a paradox worthy of Zeno. It was less a rush hour than an ongoing, imminent multi-car pileup that never quiiiite happened. Car horns bleating. Diesel engines roaring. Pedestrians dodging through. At one point an oncoming truck veered directly into our lane, lights flashing, horn sounding, before swinging back onto its side of the road. Head-on collision averted? Check. Muzungu in cardiac arrest? Ditto.
“He should have been more patient,” Jean-Claude advised.
A gurgling noise came from the back of my throat, which Jean-Claude took as assent.
“Exactly,” he said.
The motorbike bravado boys were out in full force, performing their usual acts of death-defying derring-do with a studied nonchalance. As we passed yet another young man with yet another young woman hanging onto him, Jean-Claude said, sort of wistfully, “It must be a wonderful job, driving a taxi-moto at that age. Never boring.”
We’d already noticed how, when they had a particularly pretty passenger on board, the boys would handle their bikes more jerkily than usual, gunning and braking in sudden lurches and stuttering false starts, causing the young women in question to squash up against them on the slow-down and then hold on even tighter on the acceleration.
“It’s not entirely innocent, is it?” I said, and Jean-Claude agreed.
Were I still a young man, unencumbered by notions of my own mortality, driving a motorcycle taxi up and down the hilly curves of Kigali would be a fine way to earn a living. There was apparently only one female taxi-moto driver in the city—the papers had done a story on her—and we did see the occasional old guy (by which I mean “over thirty”), but generally this was a young man’s sport. Who else would be mad enough to weave through oncoming traffic like that?
I’d also come to realize that Rwanda’s ubiquitous traffic police, paced out every four feet or so, were mainly ornamental. They stood on guard, ever vigilant, rifles at the ready—doing absolutely nothing. Even when we passed a truly spectacular snarl-up that was crying out for a bold stride and a sternly raised hand, nothing happened. Not that it mattered. Trying to control the flow of vehicles in Kigali would have been like trying to control a flash flood. And anyway, directing traffic didn’t seem to fall under their auspices. Case in point: the snarl-up I just mentioned. A giant backhoe had slipped off a flatbed truck and was now sitting half on the asphalt and half on the flatbed’s fallen gate. Leaning at a severely lopsided angle, shovel raised like the Karate Kid in mid-pose, it looked ready to topple over at any moment. Traffic had ground to a halt in both directions, and the backhoe’s operator had climbed in and was now—rather cleverly, I thought—trying to use the backhoe’s own digger to push the machine up, to pivot the rig back onto the truck. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working. If anything, it was causing the backhoe to teeter even more precariously.
Fortunately, a crowd of onlookers had gathered to provide the driver with helpful advice. Their suggestions went oddly unappreciated, though, to go by the operator’s muttered invective as he yanked first one lever, then another. The heavy treads of the backhoe were starting to chew up the asphalt. Surely, I thought, this is where Kigali’s traffic police will spring into action! This is what they’d been training for, waiting for! But no, they just watched like everyone else. Forget the machine guns, I thought. Give them whistles.
The traffic, like water, finally found its own way past, flowing through a nearby gas station parking lot as the crowd of onlookers grew ever thicker and ever more helpful.
The plan had been that Jean-Claude would drive in the cities and I would take over once we got on the highway. That scheme, concocted so confidently over road maps back home, quickly changed. Rwanda, as noted, is the most densely populated nation in continental Africa. There are 11 million people crowded into a country the size of Vermont, and at any one time 10 million of them are walking alongside the road you happen to be driving on. Including the highways.
Even as Kigali fell away, the pedestrians never faltered. The pavement was pullulating with them: men in shimmering suits, schoolchildren en route to class, women with woven baskets high on head, moving by with a consummate ease, and all of them using the highway like a hallway, walking beside traffic, into traffic, through traffic.
I had a sickening feeling in my gut. “Jean-Claude,” I said, “I can’t do it. If I get behind the wheel, I’ll kill somebody, I know it.”
“Don’t worry,” he replied. “I enjoy driving.”
I felt terrible for having welched on our agreement, though Christine would later laugh off my guilty apologies. “He was relieved you didn’t try to drive,” she told me. “He doesn’t like other people driving. He’s a terrible passenger.”
I still felt bad, though.
Villages in Rwanda tend to cluster around any excuse for a community—a local market, a rural intersection, a water pump, a slightly wider stretch of road—and although most were of the same “clay boxes packed in tightly” arrangement, the shops themselves were often painted in cymbal crashes of colour. This was a side benefit of Rwanda’s booming telecommunications market. Everybody in Rwanda, it seemed, from modest goat herder to titan-like business tycoon, owned their own cell phone, and several large service providers had staked their claim on Rwanda’s burgeoning IT sector—visually, as well. In much the same way that Pepsi and Coca-Cola provide signs for small-town corner stores back home, with their product name prominently displayed, Rwanda’s cell phone companies will happily paint any shop, anywhere, in any village, be it a butcher’s, an apothecary, or a beauty salon, so long as it’s adorned with their brand name and, just as importantly, decked out in their company’s colours: red for Airtel, blue for Tigo, yellow for MTN, and green for Tigo’s money-transfer service. Painted top to bottom, you will find solid-yellow beauty salons, blue bicycle repair shops, and green drugstores endlessly repeated in blocks of colour: red, blue, yellow, green; red, blue, yellow, green.
Rwandan villages used to be rather drab, Jean-Claude said. “Just brownish-red clay. Very dull and dusty.” But their shopping areas had now been transformed into cubist compositions, lively and bright. (I don’t know who is winning the business war, but Tigo seems to be winning the paint war. Blue was generally the preferred colour.)
Jean-Claude and I had MTN phones, so our team colour was yellow, though I do confess I preferred the rich red of Airtel, at least when it came to storefronts. If nothing else, the competition among Rwanda’s cell phone providers had been a boon for paint supply companies. Memo to self: Buy stock in Rwandan paints.
As we drove on, the grassy bogs of the southern marshes opened up in front of us. If you imagine Rwanda as a tablecloth, and picture a hand pushing across it, the north and west would be where the fabric folds in on itself, bunching up, forming pleated hills and highlands. The southeast corner of the tablecloth would be flatter, lower, less wrinkled.
We’d entered the papyrus swamps of the Bugesera, where some of the most prolonged and horrific massacres of the genocide occurred. Here, in the Bugesera marshlands, the killings stretched on and on into endless days of hunter and hunted, predator and prey. Even today, tillers turn up human bones in the muck.
The Bugesera is also where French journalist Jean Hatzfeld compiled his heartbreaking trilogy of testimonies gathered from survivors and killers alike: Into the Quick of Life, The Strategy of Antelopes, and A Time for Machetes, that last collection also published under the title Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak.
It’s a murky landscape, the Bugesera, lush and treacherous at the same time, a grassy wet terrain of hillocks and soft recesses, where thousands upon thousands of women and children fled only to be hunted down, tormented, tortured, chopped.
“The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural,” one of the killers, a farmer, later explained. “The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood. Grab a machete—that is what we do every morning. We cut sorghum, we prune banana trees, we hack out vines, we kill chickens … In the end, a man is like an animal: you give him a whack on the head or the neck, and down he goes.”
“We no longer saw them as human beings,” another killer recalled. “They were abandoned by everyone, even God.”
And though it’s difficult to imagine, those who took cover in the sparse forests above the swamps fared even worse. Exposed, trapped on all sides, they were easier to surround, easier to catch. On Kayumba Hill, they started out with 6,000 and ended with twenty.
The daily massacres lasted for weeks on end, became almost routine. The Hutu men would gather in their local town square or soccer field each morning, plan their day, arrange to flush out a certain area or to chase the Tutsis into an ambush, and would then set off in columns, singing.
“We could hear them coming,” one survivor recalled.
At night, after the day’s killings, the interahamwe and others would celebrate with home-brewed beer, driving minivans fluttering with flags up and down the village streets as though they’d won a soccer championship.
“They were slaughtering our cattle and having barbecues every night. We could hear their songs, could see the smoke rising up from the feasts they were enjoying while we crawled about in the mud digging up root vegetables in the dark.” When the wind shifted, the Tutsis in the swamps could catch the smell of meat being grilled.
Descriptions of the starving and ragged people who came out of the marshes after the RPF arrived and the killers had fled often emphasized their animalistic appearance. This was something the killers commented upon as well, even though, as one of the survivors noted bitterly, “We were not the ones who acted like animals.”
SUGAR CANE AND MARSHY PLAINS. Papyrus islands in a sea of reeds. A secretive river twists through; we caught glimpses of muddy water in the grass, snaking around this hillock and that. There is beauty here as well: sun-dappled Monet arrangements of lily pads; flamingos lifting off, improbably white against the green; pelicans taking flight; storks in still water.
The clay-hut homes we drove by looked spectral, seeping smoke from every crack, every open paneless window.
“Cooking fires,” Jean-Claude explained. “Gets very smoky inside. Lots of bronchial problems.”
We passed banana-burdened bicycles shepherded by gaunt men, faces thinly stretched, peddlers in every sense. Vignettes appeared and were gone: a procession of brightly wrapped women, gourds perfectly balanced, walking to their local market like a royal cortège. A little boy with a goat on a tether pulls—and is pulled in turn.
We have come looking for a pair of churches, at Ntarama and Nyamata. A red earth road branches off from the main highway, and Jean-Claude follows the ruts past one crossroads tavern named Le Calme Bar, another named Rendez-vous.
An old man offered us a broken smile, more gum than tooth in his grin. He was leaning on a staff and wearing a traditional floppy-brimmed hat that marked him as a Tutsi cattle herder. Had he survived in the swamps? In the hills?
When the killings started, Tutsis crowded into the small red-brick church in Ntarama, seeking sanctuary under its sheet-metal roof. This was God’s house. They thought they would be safe here, that the sanctity of the site would protect them. But they were wrong. The killers allowed the Tutsis to gather, encouraged it even. It would make it easier to kill them when the time came. There would be no need to run them down in the marshes, no need to track them through the boggy grass. In Ntarama they would be corralled into one spot, like livestock. Nor did they need ID cards to separate Tutsis from Hutu; in villages like Ntarama, everyone knew everyone. These were their neighbours.
Jean-Claude pulled over and parked, and we walked up a grassy path to where the church stood in a shaded grove of trees. On the front of the building, blister marks from the grenades were still visible. Sledgehammered holes in the walls showed where the killers had punched their way through the bricks, with scorch marks fanning upward from the openings, making the church look like a kiln. It brought to mind images of Auschwitz. Of ovens.
The people inside had fought back with what few weapons they had, with bricks and stones and their bare hands. The killers had grenades and machetes and clubs impaled with nails. Then the Presidential Guard arrived. Those few who managed to break through the circle fled to the marshes, where fresh horrors awaited.
Inside Ntarama church, a broken cross leans through a window. ID cards marked TUTSI, a handful of coins, a pair of eyeglasses, and a few discarded shoes were scattered in front of the altar. Caskets draped in cloth were lined up on the bench-like pews. These caskets held the symbolic remains of a hundred victims, representing just a small portion of the 5,000 who died here. Above the coffins the rafters were hung with the matted clothing of victims, a memorial more haunting than any statistic.
Behind the main building were the church kitchen and the Sunday school. Piles of debris. Flip-flops. Broken plates. A wall where the children were killed. “The child of a snake is still a snake!” Toddlers and babies-in-arms, battered into nothingness, followed by immolation. A large cooking pot, brittle from the fire, lay heaped amid the everyday aspects of life. Mouldering blankets, foam mattresses, a fallen kitchen cabinet, a child’s slipper, a hairbrush, a ladle—all of it rendered in grey by fire and dust. The bodies have been removed, but the rest remains as it was twenty years before. Outside, the rest of Rwanda marched ever onward, but here the past was ever-present. In the stillness, time had slowed to a trickle.
Before I left for Rwanda, I met with Lynn Gran. She was with the Nature Conservancy of Canada but had previously worked for Oxfam, which was among the first NGOs to enter Rwanda immediately after the genocide.
“No one wanted to go, so I volunteered,” she said. “To this day, I really don’t know why. I had a six-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter back in Canada.”
Lynn crossed into Rwanda under harrowing conditions and was taken to a church just like this one. When she arrived, the bodies were still piled up inside.
“I didn’t want to be there. It felt too personal. But I was told, ‘You are here to bear witness to what happened.’ The iron gates of the church were mangled—you can imagine the force used to blow it open and how it would have felt to be inside. When we entered it was dark, and I had to stand a moment to let my eyes adjust. The smell was overpowering. Bodies were heaped everywhere, in the pews, on the floor, with their clothes decomposing. As I moved through the dark, I tripped, and when I looked down it was a woman’s leg. I started to cry. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop.”
There were children’s toys and human heads on the altar.
“They’d beheaded them and then lined them up and left them there. I’m not a religious person. Spiritual, I suppose. Not religious. But when I was in that church, I knew.”
“Knew what?” I asked.
“That I was in the presence of evil.”
THE HUB TOWN for the Bugesera region is Nyamata. Once a grim spot with a grim reputation—dripping on the edge of malarial swamps in the wet season, choking on dust and drought in the dry—Nyamata today is a city revived. Many of the marshy meadows have been reclaimed. The major roads are paved, and trade is humming.
Nyamata may have the widest main street in Rwanda. It forms a spacious boulevard lined with shop fronts and idling buses, with taxi-motos and their lower-end bicycle equivalents. Loud ad hoc market negotiations flared and faded. Escalating arguments, sudden laughter. Women splitting the crowds, moving through, baskets on head, babies on back. Twenty-four-hour gas stations chugging out petrol, pharmacies and finance centres, taverns and beauty salons, cobblers and charcoal vendors, butchers and bakers and—somewhere in there, I’m sure—candlestick makers, or kerosene sellers at least, which would be the Rwandan equivalent. We parked and waded through the streets, past the Heroes Pub and the Red Lion Tavern, the internet cafés and auto-parts emporiums—all sporting fresh paint—down to a soft bower where the girls sashayed and the young men ached.
There were rows of lively little taverns, all leading to the same small square with its plaque reminding us that in Rwanda you cannot escape 1994, even on a boy-beguiling promenade or a sit-and-stretch park bench. This town—this park—was once a hub of a different sort, the epicentre of Bugesera’s genocidal pogroms, a focal point and meeting ground for the killers.
We could hear them singing as they gathered, singing and beating their drums as they came toward us. One day they followed one path, the next day another. They grew silent only when they were about to attack, as they did not want to give away their positions.
The killers burned even the photo albums after they’d looted a house, wanting to erase not only the people who had died there but any trace that they had ever existed. Had the RPF advance been delayed even a week longer, it is likely there would have been not a single Tutsi left in the Bugesera—and no witnesses either.
Today, convicted killers wander the streets of Nyamata freely, as they do elsewhere in Rwanda. A presidential pardon released thousands of lower-ranked génocidaires from prison, for reasons not so much of mercy as mathematics.
In the aftermath of the genocide, an International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was set up in neighbouring Tanzania to prosecute the key figures involved in the genocide. Colonel Bagosora, for one, was captured in Cameroon trying to cash traveller’s cheques he’d looted from the Rwanda state treasury. He was then transported to the ICTR, where he was charged and convicted in the murder of the ten Belgian peacekeepers, as well as in the death of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and others. (He was also indicted for the assassination of President Habyarimana, but the evidence wasn’t conclusive enough for a conviction.)
The overwhelming majority of cases, though, were tried in Rwanda. More than 120,000 people were held in squalid, unsanitary conditions in a prison system designed for 15,000. Rwanda’s decimated judicial system was overwhelmed. At one point, it was estimated that it would have taken 200 years to process all the cases before the courts.
It soon became clear that to execute everyone responsible would have required a genocide of its own. During the RPF advance, thousands of people accused of being involved with the killings had been summarily executed in extra-judicial killings (which led to at least 400 RPF soldiers being arrested), and in 1998 twenty-two of the Hutu Power ringleaders were marched out to face firing squads. But passing a death sentence on 120,000 people? That was not an option. Instead, Rwanda did something remarkable: it abolished capital punishment and reinstituted traditional gacaca or “patch of grass” courts instead, wherein the lesser accused and their victims’ families would meet face-to-face under the direction of locally chosen judges. Punishment would be decided by the community, and confession and repentance would mitigate sentencing. The goal was truth and reconciliation; it was an imperfect solution to an almost intractable problem.
In 2003, President Kagame went even further, signing the first in a series of sweeping presidential decrees that would see more than 30,000 rank-and-file génocidaires released. Often only contrition, “re-education,” and regular community service were required to make amends for their crimes—much to the anguish of survivors, who were now forced to live alongside the men who had killed their families or done horrible things to them and their loved ones. These survivors are re-traumatized every time they pass one of their former tormentors on a cattle path or run into them at the market or in a bar, drinking banana beer in the darkened corners, watching.
In Nyamata, the church lies in a quiet area on the outside of town. It’s larger than the one in nearby Ntarama, though it shares the same modest brick-wall and sheet-metal-roof design. As in Ntarama, thousands of frightened people crammed themselves into the church here when the madness began. Like those who had sought refuge at Ntarama, they thought the killers wouldn’t attack a house of worship. And like those who sought refuge in Ntarama, they were wrong.
Inside the shadow-box interior: an altar cloth draped in the sepia stains of dried blood; a baptismal font pocked with bullet holes; a punctured ceiling letting in spikes of sun with Mary in the half-light, hands held out somewhere between embrace and surrender. Our Lady of the Sorrows.
At Nyamata, the clothes of the victims have been left on the pews. Mounds of mouldering cloth, twenty years later: it is a visceral image, a fist constricting around your heart. A heart wrapped in thorns. The taste of rust permeates. Scattered across the altar are the rosaries and hymnals of the dead, and everywhere, those death-sentence identity cards marked TUTSI.
Behind Nyamata church, in underground crypts that smell of earth and old root cellars, the recovered skulls and accompanying bones of 10,000 dead have been exhumed and are now lined up on shelves. When you descend the narrow stairs into the claustrophobic confines of these vaults, you expect it to be eerie, but it isn’t. It’s not fearful. It’s sad, devastatingly so. It’s a sadness deeper than hymns, heavier than dirt, as numbing as novocaine.
Standing in the sunlight again, Jean-Claude and I were quiet for a long while.
I didn’t know what to say, and when Jean-Claude finally spoke, his voice sounded distant and faint, like someone on the other side of a wall. “The new airport they’re building, it will be near here.”
I nodded.
“It will be better. When it’s finished.”
I nodded again.
We’d seen signs of the coming boom on our drive in: pre-emptory hotels in place, incongruous four-lane thoroughfares running through banana plantations. Once the Bugesera International Airport opened, this region would become a key commercial zone, charged with energy. As we drove back through the falling dusk toward the lights of Kigali, all I could hope was that once the businessmen and tourists began pouring in, to be shuttled by sedan and air-conditioned coach from Rwanda’s sleek new airport to the conference centres in the capital, some of them would find the time to make a small detour to the churches nearby at Ntarama and Nyamata, to stand awhile among the ghosts of Rwanda’s past.