Genocide Memorial Day

This is a long one, but do read it through!

The usual confusion attended the preparations for today – yesterday at work I was asking where was everyone going or which ceremony would they be attending and no-one seemed sure. So I figured I would either be told where to go or I would go to the local one in my sector. One of my good friends at work, Sylver Chris, was going to the ceremony at Kabuye where I had been last year and there was one outside my local church where 2,500 people were massacred and are buried in a mass grave opposite the church’s main door. This last would have been the most local and where the people I live amidst would mostly be going but I have to admit I was a bit nervous of being there with no-one I knew well (all the friends I have made are work colleagues and they virtually all live in Butare, not the village).

Anyway, I heard that the official District ceremony was being held in Save sector beside a lake. The government had announced that all official District ceremonies were to commemorate those killed and dumped into lakes and rivers, many of whose bodies were never found. I rang my faithful moto driver Alexis – he hadn’t been going to work that day but agreed to take me in to Butare to meet my colleagues if we could go really early in the morning: he said he’d pick me up at 0640. I felt a bit bad as he obviously wasn’t comfortable about working on that day but …

Today morning I woke up even before my 0520 alarm went off – NOT a day to be late! I boiled TWO kettles to have a thorough hot shower and had a big breakfast – you never know at the best of times when you will get a chance to eat again and today promised to be even more unpredictable than usual. It was an absolutely stunningly beautiful morning, clear already at 0600, all the peaks visible as far away to the north as Nyanza but all the valleys in between them still swimming in mist. At 0615 Alexis rang to see if I was ready. Panic – I had one sock on and my dressing gown! Luckily, he was just leaving his house and wanted to be sure I was going to be ready for him!

Threw on my suit (dry-cleaned the previous weekend in Kigali, then stuffed into my rucksack and then hung up here hoping the creases would fall out) and put my tie in my pocket – Rwandans really dress up for these occasions and you do not want to be seen to be showing disrespect. Threw an umbrella, poncho, Palm Pilot (reading material) and notebook into my small backpack and wandered outside to wait for Alexis.

It was still only 0630 and everything was really quiet – which is not usual, things kick off here around 0530 and by 0630 the street would be quite busy. I stood among the coffee bushes beside our house looking again at that beautiful view, the mist now burning away and the mountain peaks becoming clearer. The only people about were an elderly man who came wandering up through the coffee bushes from the valley below and greeted me with the usual ‘Amahoro’ that older people use in preference to ‘Muraho’ or ‘Mwaramutse’ (‘Amahoro’ means ‘peace’). Up the road one of my elderly neighbours was sweeping the area in front of the house and waved to me. I wondered what they were thinking – the older people here in this area were almost all living here during the genocide and some of them came here as refugees from Burundi in 1972 when 200,000 – 300,000 Hutus were killed following an attempted coup against the Tutsi government there.

A little further up the road, a dog was playing with her puppy in the middle of the road. Dogs are common in my village and I rarely notice them anymore, though my visitors always remark on them – elsewhere in Rwanda, dogs are scarce and distrusted. Virtually every dog in the country was killed after the Genocide as they were feeding on the dead bodies and people feared they had developed a taste for human flesh. But this morning, with memories of all I had read and seen running through my head (and, to be frank, feeling more than a little nervous about what lay ahead), they didn’t seem as playful and innocent as usual.

Alexis turned up at 0640 on the dot and, apart from one or two pleasantries at the beginning, was silent throughout the trip. However, as I paid him, he told me to be sure to ring him if I found myself stranded in Butare after the ceremony, there being no public transport today and few or no moto drivers working.

So, here I was in Butare at 0700. I wandered up the town and ran into my chargé, Alexis, and two other co-workers. A few places were still open and buses running but everything was due to shut down completely at 0800, which it did. And so we stood around, silently, no-one knowing exactly how we were supposed to get to the site. I glanced through a copy of the Guardian Weekly and wandered up and down the pavement, too wound up to sit down in the bus office like the rest. Then I heard shouting in the distance. Further up the road, near the Matar Supermarket, a thin middle-aged man, barefoot and in ragged, filthy clothes, was shouting incoherently at no-one, stopping after every three or four minutes to catch his breath before launching into another passionate diatribe against whatever. I wasn’t the only one feeling nervous about him, as I could see from the faces and demeanour of other passers-by but he stayed up the far end of the street.

Around 0830 a bus appeared and we got on. And sat there. As we sat, I noticed over the roof of the Hotel Faucon, where I had been standing, a massive black cloud had appeared and was bearing down on us quite quickly. Within two minutes, we were in the middle of a torrential downpour, it was dark and a river was pouring down the main street, while the few people caught in the open scattered under awnings and doorways. One bicycle shot down the main street, a man pedalling frantically and swerving madly, his little son hanging onto the back for dear life and laughing hysterically! Away to the north, where we were headed, the clouds were wispier but I could see their beefier, angry cousins muscling up behind them. Not a good omen.

And so we sit there, the rain hammering on the roof like a machine-gun, most of us wearing our purple scarves (symbol of commemorating the genocide) and arguing as to whether we should head off or wait longer. I’ve now been in Butare two hours and have succeeded in boarding a stationary bus. It is a measure, it occurs to me, of how well I have acclimatized to Rwanda that this doesn’t really bother me at all, even knowing it may be another two hours before we actually ever get anywhere.

Half an hour later we are parked in a different part of town where some other district workers may be coming to join us. And eventually they do and we actually set off for the site at 0950! It is very near Butare but accessible by a small muddy track on which a bus has got stuck while trying to come up. Our driver gets out with a real no-nonsense expression on his face and, within two minutes, the unfortunate driver of the other vehicle is reversing all the way back down while our guy drives down within about three feet of the other car’s front bumper! Eventually we pass him and drive/slide the rest of the way down with a sheer drop on our right hand side. Certainly took my mind off the other things that were worrying me!

So, here we are. Now what? Well, apparently the large tent that had been set up that morning was in the wrong place, too far from the room that would be used for those who needed medical attention during the day. So about thirty men picked the whole thing up bodily and intact and marched it about 100 metres and re-erected it. Quite impressive actually. Meanwhile I am trying to figure out how to put my triangle of purple material around my neck – it seemed a lot smaller than everyone else’s and I have a large neck! Managed it eventually but was convinced I looked stupid (I did try to take some pics of myself with my phone and then prayed that I didn’t actually look like that). There were still surprisingly few people around, a fact that worried the colleagues with me, but there were three other abazungu that I had never seen before (turned out later that two of them were trauma counsellors, never found out who the third one was).

By about 1100 people began to stream in. The town of Save is over the hill from the lake and a procession of people ran along each of them, many of them carrying brightly coloured umbrellas against the blazing sun (yes, blazing sun – that’s Rwanda for you; by now it was stiflingly hot), four multicoloured snakes slowly winding their way towards us. Police took up positions beside the lake to intercept anyone who might try and throw themselves in, including one tiny little policewoman carrying an enormous automatic rifle, the only armed police officer I could see.

As we waited, Alexis told me more about what had happened here. The lake (‘reservoir’ would be a better word) had been created years before the genocide by a missionary (called ‘Disha’ I think) to irrigate the nearby rice fields. In 1994, hundreds, maybe thousands, of men, women and children were herded here and killed. Most of them were tied up or tied to each other and then thrown into the water. Others were held while their children were tied together and thrown in and then allowed to jump in after them and try to save them. The few who crawled out were butchered and their bodies thrown back in. Unlike other massacres, such as at Kabuye, there were no known survivors others than those that had managed to escape on the way: in other cases, where people were hacked or bludgeoned to death, some survived because they were not actually dead or were simply buried so far under the bodies they were missed. But it’s quite a big lake, there was plenty of space for everyone to drown.

Later, some bodies were recovered but, given the nature of the chaos and the length of time it took for recovery efforts to start, many of the bodies had sunk to the bottom of the lake and were never recovered. There is always talk of draining the entire lake and recovering the remains but it would be a mammoth task and no-one seems to believe it will ever happen. I spoke to one woman who was introduced to me as the head of an organisation called (I think) ‘Les Escapes’, representing those who had lost their families or their parents in this massacre – her husband and all her children are somewhere at the bottom of this lake.

When the procession arrived (all four snakes having amalgamated into one giant snake) singing a hymn, we all stood and then the actual ceremony began. First there was a throwing of bunches of flowers and flower petals into the lake which, I was slowly beginning to realise, was one huge tomb. The Executive Secretary, Eugène, beckoned me over and told me I was to take part in this too. As I went over to the lakeside, a small, pretty but blank-faced girl in a traditional Rwandan outfit held out a peace-basket full of wonderfully-scented flower petals. It smelled just like a woman’s perfume and, after I had sprinkled them over the lake and was walking back to my seat, I could still smell the perfume on my hand as if I had just caressed someone’s cheek.

Last year I attended the ceremony at Kabuye where 40,000 perished in appalling circumstances but, for some reason the underground mass tomb on the hillside didn’t have a huge effect on me. Looking at the beautiful lake, lying between the sweeping hills on a beautiful sunny day, sitting with my friends and colleagues, smelling the faint traces of perfume on my hand, looking at the crowd of men, women and children gathered round me and realising just what lay below the surface of the calm, green waters – it was the first time I really felt the full horror of it all. For a while, every woman or child I looked at I could see tied up, ready to be tossed or rolled into the lake’s waters until the entire surface became covered in struggling or still bodies.

And then the screaming started. The first speaker was a young man, the only survivor of his family. He told (I think as it wasn’t the kind of account that Alexis could translate literally) of how he watched from a hiding place as the rest of his family were tied up and thrown in, and he named those who he saw doing it. As he was halfway through, a woman on my right started screaming and threw herself on the ground – this is a common occurrence at these ceremonies – and was carried by four people over to the nearby tin hut that had been set up especially for people needing attention. As I looked around, I realised that it wasn’t just me that was feeling jittery: so were a large proportion of the people around me. I figured they would be used to this kind of thing by now, but I realised that inside everyone around me the same feelings of loss, hurt, anger and grief were struggling to get out and were barely being kept under control. And, of course, for years upon years, this ceremony had been held at Kabuye, in a relatively familiar setting with a proper grave and with a strong religious component. Here, there was no escaping the raw immediacy of what lay in front of you and, for the first time, I noticed how many people in the crowd had contrived to sit so that they weren’t looking directly at the lake.

Over on my left, one of my colleagues from work (one of only three survivors of his family) was wiping tears from his eyes with his purple neck-scarf. In front of me a nun was sitting, plump, aged about thirty-five, blue habit and white head-dress. Her fists were clenched hard, the nails biting so hard into her palms I expected to see blood running down. Every few minutes she would jerk her head up as if she were going to scream and then, with an effort of will so strong you could actually feel it, she would force her feelings, and her head, back down. On each side of her, her sisters kept an eye as unobtrusively as possible, ready to jump in and help, or else try and stop her in case she bring embarrassment on the order by a public show of grief.

All through the ceremony, a steady stream of people are carried to the hut, some sobbing quietly, some screaming, some stupefied or unconscious. Being a tin hut, the screams of those who continue after they have been brought in reverberate, sometimes almost drowning out the voices of those speaking outside. Strangely, when we stand for a minute’s silence at midday, they fall quiet, only some quiet sobbing and one woman talking to herself breaking the silence.

Then we switch over to a radio broadcast – it is supposed to be the president but the radio, or whatever, like everything else in Rwanda, is running late. We are treated to a choir, a folk group and various other strange musical offerings, none of which sound particularly Rwandan and all of them delivered through a poorly-tuned radio placed next to a defective microphone hooked up to an antiquated speaker system set at ultra-loud. People were getting bored now, checking on their mobile phones, trying to fight off sleep (as I was myself, it was incredibly hot). And then I heard the most appalling noise, far different from the screams earlier – like someone’s throat being ripped out, a howl of sheer and utter desperation that didn’t sound even remotely human. Everyone froze and, as I looked around, I could see a wave of that same unspeakable sorrow wash over everyone around me, a mini-tsunami of anguish and pain. Some people winced, some wept, some jumped to their feet, some buried their faces in their hands, others just looked grim and sat there impassively. The inhuman screams continue, without a break, fading gradually as the woman is carried away, not to the recovery hut but towards the main road as someone has already called an ambulance.

The master of ceremonies had had the presence of mind to switch off the radio when this happened; now he switched it back on but realised we were still quite a way off the president’s speech, so decided it was time for the ‘religious bit’. This turned out to be two quite brief prayers (well, brief by Rwandan standards) – one by an elderly pastor, delivered with verve and gusto and much waving of a battered black bible, the other by a Catholic priest which was a succession of prayers with a sung response which was rather nice and helped to calm down the atmosphere.

The it was back to the radio – apparently the President’s speech was near but we had some more music, ballads about the genocide which I can only describe as a Rwandan version of a cross between Clannad and Enya. Through this all, more women being carried through, wailing and screaming, a few emerging later, drained, subdued, often embarrassed. A woman in the front of the crowd directly opposite me suddenly collapsed, moaning and thrashing her arms about. I noticed how efficiently the people around her dealt with her – one woman wrapped a loose piece of material around the lower parts of her legs so she would not be exposed while being carried while two men gripped her arms, pinned them to her body and lifted her off the ground. As they did so a fourth woman quickly removed her shoes so they wouldn’t fall off and be lost, then turned around to pick up the woman’s other possessions and followed her into the hut.

And then it was time for the President’s speech, a large part of which was in English, to my surprise. It was a good speech – Alexis translated the Kinyarwanda parts virtually verbatim (and I have to stop here and say how impressed I am by Alexis’ English, which was virtually non-existent when I came and now he is doing simultaneous translation from Kinyarwandan into comprehensible English - outstanding!) and it was good stuff, typical Kagame. He spoke of remembrance and of forgiveness…. For those that wanted to be forgiven. He spoke of being ready to co-operate and work with those who wanted to help, but if anyone wanted a fight, the Rwandans would give them a fight they would never forget. “We use our anger to give us the strength to build our future, to build the Rwanda our people deserve.” Some fairly blunt comments about criticisms of freedom of speech and a few shots at the putative opposition presidential candidate, Victoire Ingabire. Finished with a phrase that had me thinking – ‘my commitment to Rwanda is a life-long one’.

And that was it. I went down to the edge of the lake for a last look, standing among the eight girls in the traditional costumes, each of them (I now knew) a survivor of a family most of whom had died here. There is something deeply upsetting about a beautiful setting where something terrible has happened – you look at the calm water, with ripples where fish are moving about, the wooded shores, the steep terraced hillsides covered in yellow flowers, sorghum, avocado trees and winding red paths and to your right the long valley of rice fields stretching into the distance until the valley curves to the right and vanishes. And you try and imagine what it was like on that evening in April sixteen years ago, and equally hard try not to imagine it.

And now it is 2236 and I am sitting at my laptop trying to put this into words and I am crying, crying for the first time that I can remember in I don’t know how long. And I am crying because for the first time I could feel, feel within me the hurt and loss and pain and anguish of my friends, the people I have come to know and love since I came here.

And I am crying because I still don’t understand, can’t understand, will never understand what happened here, no more than the Rwandans themselves understand.

And I am crying because I can still see the blank expression in that girl’s eyes when she handed me the flowers to throw on her family’s grave.

And most of all I am crying because I can still smell the perfume on my hand. And I don’t know why that makes me cry, but it does.