Granta 125: After the War (3 page)

‘Before, I used to cry when I told my story and sometimes I couldn’t finish,’ she said. ‘I had many things inside me. I could take a piece of paper and write everything. Many people encouraged me to talk because they saw how talking helped me.’

Rose had mended her broken life through bearing witness.
Rejecting shame and silence, she had testified at courts in Canada and the US, where
genocidaires
from Butare had fled, as well as at the ICTR in Arusha and at
gacaca
. She was especially valuable in legal cases because she had witnessed far more than most survivors. As the genocide unfolded, a local official called Pascale Habyarimana had decided that not only should she be his to rape at will, but also that she should provide some kind of warped validation to his intent. He had put her in the back of his car, driven her to where her fellow Tutsis were being tortured and murdered and forced her to watch.

‘I want you to see everything,’ he had said. ‘Then when I kill you, you can go and tell the Tutsi god that Hutus are strong and have power.’

R
ose and I drove along rutted roads, splashing though puddles in the potholes. It was just before midday and children were streaming home from school in their royal-blue uniforms and green plastic sandals. They had been born more than a decade after the genocide; theirs was the generation that was meant to know nothing of Hutus and Tutsis. She was taking me to Mukura, her home village, where she had formed a supportive community of women who had been raped.

In the years following the genocide, widows found themselves isolated in remote villages, often the sole survivors living among those who had killed their families. Haunted by memory, too weak and traumatized to earn a living, they were unwelcome envoys from a time that others want to forget, deny or exploit. Rose showed me a dozen cream-coloured cement houses that she had persuaded the government and non-governmental organizations to construct in Mukura. The women found that living together as a community eased the pain of survival.

Life in rural Rwanda was brutal even before 1994. As a girl, Rose said, she had dreamed of a life in the convent but that had been impossible. I asked why.

‘My husband loved me for a long time so one night he just took me,’ she said. ‘It’s a traditional way of marriage but it’s really like rape. It meant I couldn’t become a nun.’ She spoke as if to kidnap a young woman and assault her was normal, and in a way it was. So many terrible things had happened to Rose that forced marriage was nothing.

In fact, she had grown to love her husband, Innocent, and had been happy when their three children – two boys and a girl – had come along. Although she hadn’t finished her secondary education, she taught literacy. The genocide destroyed all that. Pascale Habyarimana, her rapist, forced Innocent, who was a construction worker, to build him a house. He raped Rose in front of her husband and then killed him in front of her. He threw her two sons to the dogs outside, but she rescued them and hid them in giant traditional milk pots. The details of her story were almost too grim to listen to: girls tortured, men skinned alive, her own toddler daughter strangled with a rope and dragged along the road.

‘For a long time I didn’t want to see any Hutus,’ she said. ‘I wanted them all to stay in prison. And I hated all men.’ She wouldn’t allow male doctors to examine her, nor could she bear the idea of being touched by a man. Habyarimana had forced her to milk his cows – she still couldn’t drink milk. Unable to sleep, for years she had no peace. But eventually Rose found that hatred itself was the heaviest burden.

‘A time came when I realized that I had two sons so I couldn’t hate men because I couldn’t hate my two boys,’ she said. ‘Now I’m better. I told them everything and they have heard me giving testimony. They say all men are not the same – do you think Kagame is bad? Or our dad? Or your father? They are good men. Kagame helped us. You’re free and considered as a human being. Now I am beginning to think they are right …’

Few of the people I met could reflect on their feelings and remake their lives as Rose had done. In the nearby village of Kibilizi I met a group of women who had given birth to children conceived
of rape. Their counsellor, Marie Josee Uweye, herself a survivor, had written an academic paper in which she quoted the mothers and their children:

Marie Josee took me to meet Epiphane Mukamakombe in the half-built adobe house where she lives with her son.

‘It used to be the best in the village,’ she said. ‘But my father had a reputation for disliking Hutus so it was the first to be burnt down.’ She was rebuilding but didn’t have the money to complete it. Her son, Olivier Utabazi, otherwise known as Ninja, had written in pidgin English,
NO GOD NOT LIF
, on one wall. On another, he had stuck up posters of Tom Close, a popular Rwandan singer, and Miss Rwanda 2012. She wore a strapless red dress and a fixed smile. There was no electricity and the plastering around the window was crumbling.

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?’

‘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.