by John Freeman
Ninja half bounced, half slouched into the room in his yellow-and-blue football shirt and black shorts. Real Madrid was his favourite team, he said, but he also liked Liverpool. He spoke confidently and looked me in the eye. An air of unchannelled aggression hung about him, like a delinquent boxer before a fight. He was polite but I felt that at any time his mood might change. He preferred karate to football, he said, but didn’t like fighting. Sometimes when I asked a question, his gaze wavered, and his eye slipped from side to side. I got the impression he was lying. He shifted in his seat. This was a restless, angry boy.
‘I don’t know who my father is,’ he said. In fact, he knew exactly who his father was. Although his mother had not told him his father’s identity nor how he was conceived, others in the village had ensured that he knew.
‘When I’m asked to name my father I get a certain anger in my heart,’ he said later. ‘My father’s family don’t like me.’
Suffering had robbed his mother of mercy.
‘I didn’t love him when he was born and I don’t love him now,’ she told me when he had left the room.
Epiphane was a frail, tiny woman but she used to beat Ninja, she said, because he reminded her of his father and the other men who had raped her. Utabazi, the name she had given him, means ‘he belongs to them’. Now that he was eighteen she wished he would leave home, because she felt people, including her only surviving sister, avoided her because of him. They called him ‘son of the snake’ and interahamwe. He was a curse. The only useful thing he did was protect her when the men shone torches through her windows and threw stones at the house at night.
‘What men?’ I asked.
‘I think it’s those I witnessed against in gacaca,’ she replied. ‘I have nothing to steal so it can’t be robbers, but those people wish we were dead. They always say if they had killed us all they wouldn’t face the problems they’re facing now.’
Intruders had killed a neighbour, Anne Marie, just a few days before I visited the village. A genocidaire against whom she had testified in gacaca and who had recently been released from prison had been arrested.
Epiphane began to cry. She had no choice but to live with the men who had raped her, the son who acted as a perpetual reminder of her torment and the families of those who had killed her parents and siblings.
‘We talk with their families to show we’re all right, but we’re not really all right,’ she said. ‘We have no wounds you can see, but our injuries are inside. Our hearts are rotten.’
A baby, a basket, a hoe, a yellow plastic jerrycan, firewood – everyone walking along the roadside as I drove south from Butare was carrying something on their back or their head or in their hands. One small child had such a huge pile of fodder on his head that all you could see was long spears of grass proceeding on tiny legs. This was the Rwanda I had known before – poor, industrious, struggling. Development, according to the government, was the answer. President Kagame often said that poverty not hatred pitted Rwandans against each other. One school of thought even ascribed the genocide to competition over land and resources, a Darwinian struggle for survival in the most densely populated country in Africa. I turned into the hills. The dirt roads had much improved, thanks to the government policy of getting those imprisoned for genocide, in their distinctive pink prison uniforms, to level and grade them, the idea being that those who had destroyed the country should now rebuild it.
I stopped at a red-brick clinic, which had been renovated with aid money. Staff told me it was well stocked with drugs. Before the genocide, few Rwandans had adequate access to health care, but the government has recently introduced an insurance system. The staff said 90 per cent of people could afford the nominal annual charge while the poorest qualify for a subsidy. A few miles further along we came across a coffee-processing plant. At the top of a slope, a dozen women in brightly coloured wraps and headscarves were sorting through coffee beans laid out on long trestle tables. The owners, two brothers who had grown up in exile in Burundi and whose parents had brought them to Rwanda after the genocide, told me they had built the plant two years earlier. Business was good. They had the perfect combination of skills, one having studied business in Bangalore, the other agriculture in Butare. They employed forty permanent staff. Most local farmers cultivated a few coffee bushes and now there was somewhere to bring the beans, payment depending on the distance they had travelled.
There was nothing to criticize here – the coffee plant was providing jobs and livelihoods – but I found myself thinking how different the brothers looked from everyone around us. Diaspora Tutsis, the people who run politics and business in Rwanda, are bigger, stronger, healthier, better educated, more prosperous, more confident than survivors or killers. For them, Rwanda after the genocide was a land of opportunity, a place to build the life their parents had been forced to abandon when they fled after Independence. They were the only ones with the psychological strength to pull Rwanda out of the mire. Everyone else was too weighed down by memory, loss or guilt.
It was market day in the village of Nyakisu. Stallholders were laying out plastic plates, blocks of soap and batteries, all the basics of life in rural Africa. In the bar across the red dirt street, a few men were sitting on benches drinking Primus beer from the bottle. Viator Kambanda was riding through the village on a borrowed bicycle painted red, green and yellow with the legend: gikurundu, meaning ‘something beloved’. A cobbler by trade, he said most people in the area were too poor to bring him their shoes to mend. His own were made of plastic, repaired with crude stitches. His two sons had dropped out of school and had no work; a daughter had drowned when the river flooded. He wanted to go to Kigali to look for work but couldn’t because the authorities wouldn’t give him an ID card. Life was especially hard for him, he said, because he had spent nine years in prison and was yet to complete his community service.
He didn’t want anyone to see us talking, so we agreed to meet half an hour later at a glade of eucalyptus trees above the village. Dappled sunlight streamed through the branches as we sat on the grass.
I asked a few introductory questions before probing his role in the genocide.
‘It was my first time to kill so I was scared,’ he said. ‘Her name was Kandida Nyiramakonze. She was my neighbour.’
He had run with the pack, just one among a horde of killers.
‘There were many Tutsis in a group. I called her name and told her to sit down. Then I hit her on the head twice with a big stick and she died.’
A small cream-and-purple orchid was growing amid the coarse grass. A yellow butterfly flitted past. Viator spoke in a monotone. It was hard to tell if, like Rose, he had told the story so many times it no longer had the same emotional resonance for him as for the listener. He had been released after confessing and expressing remorse at a gacaca trial in 2008. I asked why he had killed Kandida.
‘I wanted to save her so they couldn’t kill her in a worse way or even rape her. Someone else killed her husband and four children.’
Children walked past on the road above, shouting and giggling. I looked across the valley to the next hillside, clad in a dozen shades of green, studded with little red houses with drainpipe roof tiles. White clouds stacked up in a bright blue sky. It was like a child’s painting of an idealized countryside.
‘It was not easy because you would see a person cutting someone with a machete when you might have been with the victim the evening before,’ said Viator. ‘I was not angry at the Tutsis. We lived well together before. I even loved them, but our leaders encouraged us to kill.’
A friend in Kigali – one of those tall, confident diaspora Tutsis who had moved to Rwanda after the genocide – had told me a few days earlier there were four stock answers to the question ‘Why did you kill?’
– God left during the day and didn’t come back at night.
– The devil got into our souls.
– Our leaders forced us.
– If I hadn’t done it I would ha
ve been killed.
‘No one will ever say, “Because I hate the Tutsis,”’ Viator said.
I asked him if hatred was still an issue in Nyakisu.
‘If we’re alone we can say what we like – I could even say bad things about a Tutsi,’ he said. Talking in a public place was quite different.
‘You can’t say those words,’ he said. ‘They’ll just kill you.’
‘Which words?’ I asked.
‘Words like, “Let’s finish the job.”’
‘Do people want to say those words? Do you?’
He stared into the distance and said nothing.
‘People here are ignorant,’ he said after a long pause. ‘If we had known there was no Hutu and no Tutsi we wouldn’t have done the genocide. But those feelings are still here.’
The villagers elected monitors who were required to report to the authorities if anyone said anything that could be designated ‘genocide ideology’. Viator described how they would listen in on people’s conversations, take notes and call local officials if they heard anything suspect.
‘We’re really scared of those spies,’ he said.
He thought the survivors in Nyakisu were doing fine – they had free health care, their children got free education, and some had been given houses. It was people like him who were really suffering.
‘We, the people who were arrested, they hate us so much,’ he said. ‘Even the Hutus who didn’t participate hate us. They just wish we would go back to prison.’
Is nineteen years a long time? Rose was a young woman of twenty-three at the time of the genocide. Epiphane, Ninja’s mother, was twenty-seven. Viator had been thirty-five. Nearly half a lifetime had passed since those days, but maybe it’s still too soon to let people say everything they keep in their hearts, to let out their pent-up hatred and fear. The sneaking and spying, the ban on ‘genocide ideology’ at least keeps a lid on it, apart from the occasional murder of a sad, raped woman. Or maybe that’s the problem, all the things unsaid, the barely contained anger and guilt that smoulder beneath the surface.
‘Anyway, Rwandans are like that,’ said another man I met in Nyakisu who had recently been released from prison. We were talking in a small room where no one could hear. He strenuously denied that he had killed anyone, all the while jiggling his hands, picking up my tape recorder and putting it down again, tapping his feet in a kind of St Vitus’s dance.
‘Rwandans are circumspect, they whisper behind their hands,’ he said. ‘We hide things.’
In Kigali I had a drink with my diaspora Tutsi friend.
‘Rwanda is a nation running away from its history,’ he told me. ‘We say: “The ploughman never looks back.”’
While the government controls language in an attempt to rework the nation’s sense of self, he was hungrily seeking out books by foreign anthropologists and historians who have analysed the power structures of the past and explained how the division between Hutu and Tutsi came about. After studying genetics he had concluded that the distinctions between races and tribes were tiny. To him the answer was to acknowledge identities and then dismiss them as unimportant.
‘Let’s demystify the whole Hutu–Tutsi thing with scientific facts and open discussion,’ he said. ‘As long as it’s spoken behind in tones then it is incubating hate. Let people know that Hutu and Tutsi all share 99.97 per cent of DNA as humans, and these are artificial terms.’
Transparency is antithetical to Rwandan culture as I understood it. Political power depends on circles of influence that have nothing to do with ministries or departments or official titles.
‘The problem is that we have informal and illicit power structures,’ said my friend (I’m withholding his name for a reason – talking about such things can get you into trouble in Rwanda). ‘That’s how you hear that so-and-so is powerful but has no official position. There’s no real party system or career path.’
In the past, the legitimacy of the king was established by his power over the rain, so he needed reliable rainmakers. President Kagame’s dwindling circle continues to make the rain – it’s a system of patronage, but the life of the average Rwandan has undoubtedly improved, and the government is efficient. The World Bank pumps out statistics to prove success and I have the evidence of my eyes: roads, clinics, schools. There is much talk of changing the constitution so President Kagame can run for office again in 2017. I suggested to a few people that in a society where the majority slaughtered the minority, democracy is difficult, but was assured that Hutus would vote for Kagame. He has delivered a better life. He has brought the rain. And he has ensured there is no credible opposition.
On my last day in Butare, Rose took me to see another of her projects. The governor had asked her to lead his programme of reconciliation and unity, and she had gone at the task with her customary enthusiasm. We drove to Akabakobwa, a forested hill twenty minutes’ drive from town. The rain had cleared, and the smell of freshly turned earth was in the air. As we walked through the trees I could hear the sounds of hacking, chopping and slashing. We emerged from the forest into an open field to see some four hundred people using axes, hoes and machetes – the implements of genocide – to clear tree stumps. Women, some with babies tied on their backs, dug around the base while men, dripping with sweat, attacked the roots. I watched the shadow of a machete moving across the red earth as a young man in a white T-shirt and rolled-up jeans set about his task.
Back in 1994, on 22 April, local officials told Tutsis to gather at Akabakobwa promising they would be taken to safety, probably in another country. Hundreds gathered, maybe thousands. Who knows when the Tutsis realized that this was not deliverance but a trap? None lived to tell the tale. Cold and wet, carrying their few belongings, they must have huddled together, confused and terrified, children wailing, no one knowing what would happen. The interahamwe hid in the banana groves and maize fields, until they had surrounded their prey. Then they fired at the hill. Once they were satisfied that the Tutsis were dead or fatally injured they closed in to finish off their victims with grenades and clubs. They left the bodies to rot. Two years later a local official planted eucalyptus trees on the site, the forest designed to hide and not to commemorate the dead.
It is a tradition in Rwanda that people should do community work, known as umuganda, one day a month. They labour together to clear ditches, tidy the village or plant flowers on traffic roundabouts. During the genocide, umuganda included killing – local officials told Hutus it was their civic duty to murder their Tutsi neighbours. Rose’s community labour project was to disinter the bodies of those who had died at Akabakobwa, so they could be reburied with dignity. A memorial, concrete pillars rising from the ground and rust-red struts in place for the pitched roof, was under construction at the top of the hill. In Rwanda there is no tomb for the unknown soldier, but dozens for unknown civilians.
Rose had been on a course organized by a German aid agency that had got her thinking about the relationship between survivors and killers. The first thing she had to do was overcome her own inability to talk to Hutus. Prayer had helped – she was a devout Christian – and then the thought that pain and anxiety were not the preserve of victims.
‘It’s not only survivors who have trauma but also perpetrators,’ she said. ‘One tried to commit suicide three times because he didn’t want to live with the people to whom he did bad things. We were taught how to take care of them.’
Over a period of months, she had persuaded perpetrators to pay compensation to their victims for property destroyed or stolen. Gradually, she said, some degree of trust had been established. This project was the result. I was watching killers and survivors working together.
I stood on the crest of the hill looking out over the rice fields planted in the valley below, and the slopes beyond covered with banana, maize and millet. Everything was green and lush from the rains, as it must have been nineteen years earlier. Five small boys with firewood on their heads stood watching the adults working; a few wome
n were sitting on the ground in the shade of some saplings to breastfeed their babies. The landscape that had held such terror had become benign, even bucolic. In those days, banana groves were cover for the killers, millet patches places where interahamwe would take Tutsi women to rape them. Now they were just fields of crops, flourishing in good rains.
I thought back to 1994 and how I had paced about my house in Kigali listening to the rocket fire and the rain. How little I had understood; how much has been revealed in the subsequent two decades. Most of the leaders of the genocide have been arrested and tried at the ICTR. Academics, journalists and human-rights workers have written thousands of reports and books. Films have been made, documentaries broadcast, and a genocide museum built in Kigali. There are projects to identify each and every victim.
But in the hills of rural Rwanda, the unrepentant and the unforgiven are living alongside the unhealed. They abide by rules – spoken and unspoken – governing what is sayable and what is taboo. You could take umuganda at Akabakobwa – the rows of killers and survivors sweating alongside each other – as evidence of hope, proof that Rwandans can now establish a shared memory.
Or you could see it as something else entirely, a ritual of reconciliation masking far deeper feelings of anger and pain, proof that Rwandans – Hutu and Tutsi, perpetrator and victim – might live together for decades to come without betraying to each other what they feel inside.
GRANTA
* * *
