Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  Mukamana explained, “Traumatized mothers are harsh and cold to their children, even abusive. The children know that their mothers don’t love them, but they don’t know why. They speak and their mothers don’t listen to them; they cry and their mothers don’t comfort them. So they develop strange behaviors. They themselves are cold and restless. Because they receive so little love at home, they go out on the street and follow strangers.” Many of these children have been given darkly evocative names: one child was named Inkuba, or War. Another was Little Killer after his father; another, Child of Hate. Alphonsine Nyirahabimana, who also works with this population at Avega, said, “I have always wondered how any of these mothers can love their children. For some, Christianity has played a big role, and they succeed by praying. Others see the bright part of their situation; one said, for example, ‘I was raped and my family was murdered and I have this child who came out of horror, but at least I don’t have HIV.’ But most are without family, desperate, and hopeless. They come to Avega and talk to one another. No one can forget what happened to them, so they might as well remember together.”

  Some women form associations and stand up for their rights. Some have gained enough strength from this group identity to compensate for their loss of traditional social position. Professor Célestin Kalimba, head of the history department at the National University, said that a new Rwandan feminism has been among the accidental side effects of the genocide. “So much of the male population is either dead or in jail,” he said, “and women have to step into major roles. Post-genocide, women can inherit property, which was not possible before. Before, men had multiple wives. Now they sign a contract in the church when they marry, swearing that they will be monogamous. The situation for women is better now than it has ever been in Rwanda.” Some mothers who endured forced pregnancy have struggled toward a new society—if not for themselves, then for their castigated children.

  Most encounter only disenfranchisement. One woman explained to me that a man came and killed her family, including her husband and three children; took her in sexual slavery and kept her for three months; then fled when the RPF forces came. She gave birth to a son, and though she developed AIDS, her son remained healthy. Rwanda has few social networks outside of family; you need relatives to survive. Knowing she would soon die, she worried that her son would be all by himself, so she tracked down the father of her son in jail and decided to foster a relationship with him—so her son would have someone after she was gone. When we met, she was making the father daily meals and taking them to him in the jail. This man had raped her and slaughtered her children. She could not speak of what she was doing without lowering her eyes and staring fixedly at the floor. No new Rwandan feminism had touched her life.

  * * *

  In Kigali, I met with Beatrice Mukansanga, who had a face like a Picasso mask, and Marie Rose Matamura, who was young and sweet looking. Mukansanga had no clear memory of what happened to her in 1994; she remembered being repeatedly raped and waking up pregnant in a hospital some weeks later, but she didn’t know how she had spent the war. Sometime during the genocide, her leg was chopped off. Her husband and two children had disappeared in the genocide, “all lost, all gone,” she said. At the end of the atrocities, she was pregnant and HIV-positive, but did not know who her rapists were. She said, “The baby died in me and was removed.” Whether she had induced the miscarriage was unclear. When she went back to her town of Nyanza, she found that everybody she had known was killed, so she came to Kigali. “I have a terrible time at this time of year, around the anniversary of the genocide, at the start of the rainy season,” she said. “I have horrible nightmares. I am living always with the feeling that I will die at any time.” She was angry that government health programs were available only to those with connections; she had developed full-fledged AIDS, but when she tried to obtain medication, the health workers laughed at her. “They help those who are well enough to help themselves,” she said, “and leave the rest of us to die.”

  At thirty-four, Marie Rose Matamura narrated the events of her life in an even monotone, with an air of complete resignation. When the genocide began, she fled to her church, but militias soon arrived and, with her priest’s consent, killed almost all the people gathered there. She and her sister escaped only to be seized by a Hutu man from the Interahamwe who claimed them as his wives. Many militia would force women into sexual slavery, cynically using the word wife to euphemize a multitude of sins. There were no marriages, and there was no guarantee of protection. All the term meant was that these women had been taken on as the object of repeated sexual assault and lived in a man’s quarters. Matamura’s acquiescence to her captor did not obviate her hatred of him. “He would just go walking around the neighborhood raping the ladies,” she said. “At any time he could force me to accept his friends; I was raped by many others. He told me that he had given me HIV so he didn’t have to waste time killing me.”

  Matamura’s captor fled when the Tutsi forces approached; weak and desperate, Matamura and her sister, both pregnant, remained in his house. Matamura’s sister died of AIDS on Christmas Day 2001. Matamura took on her sister’s son and has brought him up with her own daughter. Matamura had begun to develop skin lesions and feared that her neighbors recognized them as a symptom of AIDS; she was too afraid to have the children tested for HIV. “I don’t know who will take care of the children when I die,” she said. “I go from door to door, asking people if they have dirty clothes to be washed. I braid hair for rich Hutu women with husbands. I feel so sad that I will die—not sad for myself, but for the children. I, with my incurable disease, am the only one they have.”

  Matamura described trying to protect her children. “For me, the world is just full of hatred, and I am always afraid; I just want to lock myself in the house and see no one. But I make sure the kids are not worried. I don’t want to have them asking me why I am so sad, so lonely. The boy has a hot temper, but I make a particular effort with him because he must feel that I am his mother now. I can see the picture of Hutu militia in their faces, but I can’t hate my own child or my sister’s, though I never forget where they came from. They ask me sometimes, ‘Who is my father?’ and I tell them that they don’t have a father, that they never did. Someday, I will have to tell them the truth. I think all the time about how I will do it and make up the speeches. I will tell them how to behave correctly and what to do if someone tries to rape them. I fear what they will become with me. I fear what they will become after that, without me.”

  * * *

  Marianne Mukamana had a good life before the genocide. She loved her husband, a construction worker, and their daughter, who was then five years old. Early on, the génocidaires came for her husband. They said, “We will kill him and then return for you.” She never saw or heard of him again. She tried to run away with her daughter but had no place to run, and neighbors, fearing for their lives, refused to give her refuge. Hoping to save her daughter, she went in despair to the military base and said, “I am here for you to do to me what you want,” and because she was beautiful, they took her as a sex slave. Over the weeks that followed, she was kept at the base and raped constantly and by many different men. They told her that she would end up being killed. When the RPF arrived at Kigali, her captors took her on a massive forced march to Gisenyi; when the RPF finally took Gisenyi, she was set free and headed back to Kigali with her five-year-old.

  All of her family was gone save two brothers. When she realized she was pregnant, she planned ways to get rid of the baby. “I wanted to throw her away when she was born,” she recalled. She was now HIV-positive; the child was, too. In the years that followed, Mukamana often felt a surge of loathing when she looked at this daughter, who was a constant reminder of what Mukamana desperately wanted to forget. She could not love this second daughter as she loved the first. She fantasized about finding the child’s father and giving her to him, but she had been raped so often that she didn’t even know who the father w
as, and the candidates had in any case disappeared with the rest of the Interahamwe and were probably either dead or in Congo. “And thank God it wasn’t a boy,” she said, “because that love would have been even harder. Boys inherit property at twenty-one; since girls have no rights, they pose fewer problems.” But she resolved that she would teach herself to love her two children the same. “Another heart came in me,” she explained. “She was my child, the seed of my womb, mine also, and I felt I had to take care of her for a while.” When I met Mukamana, she told me that she felt exactly the same about both her daughters. But she said she would still like to give the younger one away.

  The two girls often faced confusion. The elder one was pure Tutsi and looked it; the younger had dark coloring and Hutu features. Neighbors said that they couldn’t possibly be full sisters, but Mukamana kept the truth from them. “Meanwhile, I try to harmonize these two children, to make them as much alike as I can,” she explained. “And I tell my younger daughter that she is a Tutsi, not to pay attention to the people who tell her she is Hutu. I try to talk to them a lot like that, to make them feel loved.” The older girl still spoke of her father. “I remember that day people came to our house and he went away,” she said. “And he never came back. I saw him going but I never saw him returning. Where could he have gone?” The younger girl asked all the time, “Tell me about my father,” and even, “Why are you alone, and not with my father?”—but Mukamana kept silent. And the younger girl would say, “One day, I will meet my father.” These remarks suggest that they knew they had different fathers, but they didn’t know why that was a taboo subject with their mother.

  The two girls were competitive for their mother’s love. The tradition in Rwanda is that the youngest child is the most beloved, and for Mukamana it was hard to embody that expectation. “I will die of AIDS, and my older daughter will be left alone,” she said. “The reason is in the rape that made my younger daughter. How to know that without being angry? But both are mine. And as my younger daughter grows up, I can look at her most of the time without rancor. It gets easier with the passage of the years. I try not to think of the past, because I am afraid of it, and I also don’t think of the future, because now I know better than to have dreams.”

  * * *

  Small, wide-eyed, mousy, and sad, Marcelline Niyonsenga maintains the posture of an importuning child, looking up anxiously as if waiting for someone’s permission to go on living. She was nineteen when the war began, visiting family in Kigali when their house was attacked. Her uncle and brother were killed, and she was left with her uncle’s child. The next day the militias came back and took Niyonsenga out of the house. She escaped and found a family with whom to hide. The head of that household threw out his wife and forced Niyonsenga to become his sex slave. She stayed hidden all day, creeping out at night to find water, always afraid of being killed. After two and a half months, the man announced that he was tired of her and threw her out. She was gang-raped and reluctantly found refuge with a businessman who took her to Congo. When she learned that the war was over, she begged to go home, but she was pregnant, and her husband had decided to keep her and the child, saying, “Tutsi woman, if I let you go, you will tell the story of how I took you, and I and my family will be killed.” She waited months for a day when he was away on business. She grabbed three thousand Congolese francs (about $5) and persuaded a taxi driver to take her to Rwanda, where the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees took her in. Her damaged uterus had to be removed after the birth of her daughter, whom she named Clémence Tuyisenge.

  Since the war, Niyonsenga keeps house for her brother, who lost his wife. She wanted to bring up her brother’s son and her daughter together, but her brother wouldn’t let Niyonsenga’s AIDS-infected daughter into his house, so the little girl lives with Niyonsenga’s mother. Niyonsenga sees her once a week, sacrificing living with her daughter in order to care for her brother and his son; they are men and must have someone to attend to their needs. At least her brother did not abandon her, Niyonsenga said; sometimes, he even gave her money. Whenever Clémence was sick—and she was often sick with opportunistic infections—Niyonsenga remembered where the child came from. And when Niyonsenga herself was sick, she thought of the man who infected her. Clémence’s body already had erupted in blisters her mother called “pimples.” Whenever Clémence became feverish, her grandmother would bring her to Niyonsenga, who would take her to the hospital. When they were both healthy, Clémence and Niyonsenga would laugh together. When Niyonsenga was sick, Clémence would curl up next to her. On balance, Niyonsenga felt it would be preferable for her daughter to predecease her, and yet she is also deeply reliant on the companionship her daughter affords. “People pity me because I have this enfant de mauvais souvenir, but she is the light of my life,” she said. “To be slowly dying like this without even the comfort of a child would be a thousand times worse. I am dying, but I am not alone.”

  * * *

  The deadness that afflicted many of the women I interviewed had not touched Alphonsine Mukamakuza; she would be laughing one minute and racked with sobs the next, constantly fiery with emotion. She lived in a mud hut on the outskirts of Kigali, furnished incongruously with an airplane seat and two broken wooden chairs. The only light came through a crack between the roof and the wall. In spite of this poverty, she was impeccably dressed in a long cotton print dress and matching head wrap. She did not want her neighbors to know for sure what she felt they had already guessed, that her son was a child of rape, and so while we talked, her nephew stood guard outside, chasing off would-be eavesdroppers.

  Mukamakuza was twenty when the genocide began. She thought that the barbarism had broken out only in her village, so she fled to relatives in a neighboring village. The killing had started there, too, so she and her relatives decided to seek refuge across the border in Burundi. They were near their destination when shooting broke out. Mukamakuza kept running as the rest of her family was gunned down behind her. She bolted into a house, where an old woman said, “You are safe here. I will hide you.” That night, the old woman’s son came home, saw this beautiful woman, and told her that he would make her his wife. For three weeks he raped her repeatedly, telling her that her death was coming soon. She did all she could to stay in his favor; he was both her enemy and the man without whose attentions she would surely have been slaughtered. He brought around other Interahamwe who sometimes raped her while he watched.

  A month after the end of the genocide, Mukamakuza realized that she was pregnant. After her son, Jean-de-Dieu Ngabonziza, was born, she tried to give him to her brother, but he would have none of it. She took Jean-de-Dieu with her into a new marriage, but made sure he knew that he was an unwelcome burden, beating him mercilessly and occasionally throwing him out of the house. If they went out in public, she would say, “Call me your aunt. Never call me your mother.” Meanwhile, her ostensible consort beat her day and night. He said, “If you want to be with me, get rid of that child. I don’t want to see him.” Finally, she summoned the courage to leave and moved to the slum where I found her. “And then,” she recalled, “I saw that my boy was all I had. And sometimes he would laugh, despite everything, and it was when he laughed that I began to love him. But he does not look like me, and when he does something wrong, it reminds me of those rapes. He goes to school, and I hope he will learn there about the war. In the end I will have to tell him about his origins, and there will only be more tragedy for us.”

  * * *

  Christine Uwamahoro’s proud, erect carriage was not typical of the violated women I met in Rwanda. She was eighteen and living in Kigali when the killing started. “Secretly or publicly, it didn’t matter which, the militias would break into the house, and while one was stealing, the other was raping, and then they would switch. They would give us all kinds of orders: put up your hands, kneel down, stay where you are. One held me up at gunpoint and said, ‘Undress and lie down, or I’ll kill you.’ But he didn’t kill the family. He c
ame back again and again, and each time he raped me, and then my father gave him money to go away. I was saved by God’s grace.”

  The family finally fled, but soon came to a bridge with a roadblock. They sat by the side of the road for two hours, waiting and watching as other people were slaughtered. As dusk fell, one of the Interahamwe approached with a murderous look. They ran, but Uwamahoro’s mother faltered, and Uwamahoro’s brother went to help her. Over her shoulder, Uwamahoro saw them both being chopped up with machetes. Uwamahoro herself got a gash in her arm, the scar of which is still visible today; she isn’t sure whether it came from falling or whether she got slashed with a knife, because her memory of the whole episode is so blurred. Uwamahoro and her father managed to walk sixty miles to the city of Gisenyi, hiding by day and stealing quietly along the road by night, but the killing had spread there, too, so they walked another few miles into Congo.

  On this final leg of their journey, they met another band of Interahamwe. “Look!” someone called. “They are Tutsi! They must die, by any means!” They hid for a day in a large bush with two other families; they feared a crying baby with one of them would attract attention, but the baby had tuberculosis and died while they were huddled there. Uwamahoro’s arm had become infected and was swollen and painful. They finally reached Goma, where they waited out the war. Uwamahoro feared that she had become infected with HIV, but couldn’t bear to find out and still doesn’t know. She had been advanced in her studies, but she never returned to school. She hated finding out she was pregnant, and she hated the baby and gave her to her father so she would not have to see her. Even ten years later, the child’s existence filled Uwamahoro with sadness and reminded her that her life was ruined; though Uwamahoro visited her sole surviving sister every day, she visited her daughter once a month at most. The little girl is angry and hot tempered, Uwamahoro said. Whatever the girl wants, she wants it now, right away, and if she doesn’t get it, she flies into a temper and will refuse to talk for two days at a time in her rage.