1994

Please note that VSO is in no way connected with or responsible for the content, comments and observations in this blog: these are solely my own in a personal capacity.

There’s a guy I work with in the district, nice guy, don’t get to see him often because, like most of the workers, he lives in Butare and I am one of the few living in the village itself. But when I was walking back to my hotel last night in Butare around ten o’clock, I saw him coming out of the Faucon and we went for a drink and a chat. His English is reasonable (and he can always switch to French if he is stuck) and he likes to have the chance to speak it, but what he wanted to tell me was his story about the genocide.

He grew up in an area called Bugesera, possibly the most unpleasant corner of Rwanda – hot, dusty, not very fertile and, in the 1950s, ridden with tsetse flies and wild animals. In 1959 large numbers of Tutsi families were driven out from where they lived and forced to go and live in Bugesera, his parents among them (this is actually the very first time a Rwandan has used either the word ‘Hutu’ or ‘Tutsi’ to me). The attacks continued all the time they lived in Bugesera – his vivid childhood memory is of one of his parents always staying awake through the night to watch out for those who might attack the house.

He was the sixth in a family of nine, and was in secondary school in 1994 when the genocide happened. Five of his siblings – four sisters and a brother – and his two parents were killed, he and two brothers and a sister escaped. ‘It was just pure chance’ he said ‘where each of us happened to be on that day’. His father had actually got away but headed back to the house to get some food when he was attacked by men with machetes and bows-and-arrows. They left him for dead but he lived long enough to be brought to hospital where his son visited him before he died. When he asked his father who had attacked him, his father refused to tell him. ‘He told me that, as a Christian, it would be wrong to tell me something that would make me hate, so he died without telling me.’

A few years later, his sister, who had witnessed the attack, told him who the guilty man was and they went to the authorities and he was put on trial but released for lack of evidence. The court said there could not have been any eyewitnesses because the accused man would have killed them too if they had been there. The man continued to live in the village – my friend saw him almost every day. He used to lie awake wondering how he could get justice, or revenge, but the man died a few years ago so now there is nothing they can do.

When the family – or what was left of it – moved back to Bugesera they found that the local council had built social housing on their farmland. They were given other land in compensation, land abandoned by people who had fled to the Congo after the genocide. However, a few years later they returned and demanded their land back. They said to my friend: ‘ Remember how many people we killed when we didn’t even have an excuse to kill them. With you, we have a good excuse.’ So they went to the council and asked to have their land allocation changed again and now they only have a small piece of land but he still hopes to do something with it someday.

He and his siblings were raised by a grandaunt and a second cousin in Bugesera, all that survives of their family. One brother is a military officer, one a moto driver, his sister is a psychologist who works on trauma counselling in Kibungo but still comes back to Butare every weekend and he works with me in Gisagara District Council. Tomorrow he is going to Bugesera where he will meet the rest of his siblings at a ceremony for interring a body recently found in his home area.

He seemed both glad to talk but at the same time found it very difficult (having to translate almost everything into English probably didn’t help) – we kept breaking off to talk about football or beer or holidays before he would return to the narrative of his life. He is still haunted by memories but also by a feeling that the injustices are perpetuated. He feels that people often fear or resent him as a genocide survivor, for the assistance he got from the state, for the knowledge he might carry of who the guilty are, or just the plain guilt of those who survived the genocide unscathed who know what happened to his family and are uncomfortable with it.

He is a really nice guy, friendly and outgoing, the first Rwandan to hug me (which came as a bit of a surprise at the time, to be honest) and almost, though not completely, lacking in bitterness and resentment of what has happened to him. I suspect this won’t be the last such conversation we will be having.