Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust (7 page)

How ironic that I was the one left to tell our family story.

CHAPTER 2

Standing Up

“
T
utsis
^,
stand up!”

Half a dozen chairs scraped backward across the floor as six kids in my fourth-grade class jumped to their feet. I didn’t have a clue what was happening, since I’d always attended my mom’s schoolhouse. Now that I was ten years old, it was my first day at the school for older kids, and I was confused by the commotion. I’d never seen a teacher take ethnic roll call before.

“
All
Tutsis stand up now!” Buhoro, our teacher, yelled. He was checking off names from a list with a big pencil, then stopped and stared directly at me.

“Immaculée Ilibagiza, you didn’t stand up when I said Hutu, you didn’t stand up when I said Twa, and you’re not standing up now that I’ve said Tutsi. Why is that?” Buhoro was smiling, but his voice was hard and mean.

“I don’t know, Teacher.”

“What tribe do you belong to?”

“I don’t know, Teacher.”

“Are you Hutu or Tutsi?”

“I-I don’t know.”

“Get out! Get out of this class and don’t come back until you know what you are!”

I collected my books and left the room, hanging my head in shame. I didn’t know it yet, but I’d just had my first lesson in Rwanda’s ethnic divide, and it was a rude awakening.

I ran into the schoolyard and hid behind some bushes to wait for my brother Damascene to finish class. I’d been fighting back tears, but now I cried until my blue uniform was soaked through. I didn’t understand what had just happened, and I really wanted to go back to class and ask my best friend, Janet, to explain it to me. She’d stood up when the teacher called out the name Hutu—maybe she’d know why our teacher was so mean to me. But I stayed crouched in the bushes until Damascene found me there, still whimpering.

“Who hurt you, Immaculée?” asked my big brother, with all of the authority of his 13 years. Damascene had always been my greatest defender, ready to go to war if ever anyone slighted me, so I told him what Buhoro had said.

“Buhoro is not a nice man,” my brother said, “but don’t worry about it. Next time he does the roll call, just do what I do: Stand up with your friends. Stand up when your friend Janet does.”

“Janet stood up when he called out Hutu.”

“Then stand up when they call out Hutu. If that’s what our friends are, then that’s what we must be. We’re all the same people, aren’t we?”

I had no way of knowing then, but Damascene was as clueless as I was about tribalism in Rwanda . . . which was odd, considering that we were among the best-educated kids in the area. Every day after school, my brothers and I were allotted just 90 minutes of free time before being summoned to the living room to do our homework under Mom’s supervision. Dad took over an hour before dinner, setting up a classroom-sized blackboard in the middle of the room. He handed out pieces of chalk and grilled us on math, grammar, and geography.

But our parents didn’t teach us about our own history. We didn’t know that Rwanda was made up of three tribes: a Hutu majority; a Tutsi minority; and a very small number of Twa, a pygmy-like tribe of forest dwellers. We weren’t taught that the German colonialists, and the Belgian ones that followed, converted Rwanda’s existing social structure—a monarchy that under a Tutsi king had provided Rwanda with centuries of peace and harmony—into a discriminatory, racebased class system. The Belgians favored the minority Tutsi aristocracy and promoted its status as the ruling class; therefore, Tutsis were ensured a better education to better manage the country and generate greater profits for the Belgian overlords. The Belgians introduced an ethnic identity card to more easily distinguish the two tribes, deepening the rift they’d created between Hutu and Tutsi. Those reckless blunders created a lingering resentment among Hutus that helped lay the groundwork for genocide.

When the Tutsis called for greater independence, the Belgians turned against them and, in 1959, encouraged a bloody Hutu revolt, which overthrew the monarchy. More than 100,000 Tutsis were murdered in vengeance killings over the next few years. By the time Belgium pulled out of Rwanda in 1962, a Hutu government was firmly in place, and Tutsis had become second-class citizens, facing persecution, violence, and death at the hands of Hutu extremists. Many tens of thousands died over decades when massacres were common occurrences. While the violence was cyclical, discrimination was ever present. The ethnic identity cards the Hutu government adopted from the days of Belgian rule made the discrimination more blatant, and much easier.

But these were history lessons our parents didn’t want my brothers and me to learn, at least not while we were young. They never talked to us about discrimination or killing sprees or ethnic cleansing or racial identity cards—those things weren’t part of my youth.

Everyone was welcome in our home, regardless of race, religion, or tribe. To my parents, being Hutu or Tutsi had nothing to do with the kind of person you were. If you were of good character and a kind human being, they greeted you with open arms. But my parents themselves had some horrifying experiences at the hands of Hutu extremists . . . and looking back, I can even vaguely recall one of them.

I was just three years old and didn’t understand what was happening, but I remember fire lighting up the night sky as my mother held me tightly in her arms and we ran from our home. It was during the 1973 coup, when many Tutsis were persecuted, driven from their homes, and murdered in the streets. In our region, Hutu extremists were torching Tutsi homes one after another. My entire family stood together looking down at Lake Kivu as the fires leapt up the hill toward us. We fled to a neighbor’s, a Hutu and a good friend named Rutakamize. He hid us until the killings and burnings stopped. When we returned home, all we found was a smoldering ruin.

My mother and father rebuilt our house and never discussed what happened, at least not with us children. And even though they’d been targeted in similar anti-Tutsi violence in 1959, I never heard my parents say one disparaging word against Hutus. They were not prejudiced; rather, they believed that evil drove people to do evil things regardless of tribe or race. Mom and Dad ignored the social and political reality they lived in, and instead taught that everyone was born equal. They didn’t want their children growing up feeling paranoid or inferior because they were born Tutsi.

SO IT’S NOT DIFFICULT TO SEE WHY I WAS SO CONFOUNDED when my teacher, Buhoro, lashed into me for not knowing my tribe.

Damascene draped his arm around my shoulders that day and walked me home. We both sensed that we’d been touched by something bad, but we didn’t know what it was. At dinner that night, I told my father what had happened. He became quiet, and then asked me how long I’d sat crying in the bushes after being ordered from the classroom.

“Almost all day, Daddy.”

My father put down his fork and stopped eating—a sure sign he was angry. “I will talk to Buhoro tomorrow,” he assured me.

“But, Daddy, what tribe am I?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that now. We can discuss that tomorrow, after I talk to your teacher.”

I wanted to ask why he wouldn’t tell me right then what tribe I belonged to, but we weren’t supposed to question our elders. He was my father, and if he was being evasive, I figured that he had good reason. But I was frustrated—I couldn’t understand why everyone got so upset when they talked about tribes!

Dad spoke to my teacher the next day, but he didn’t tell me what they discussed or what my tribe was, as he’d said he would. I didn’t find that out until the following week, when Buhoro held tribal roll call again. My father must have shamed him, because he spoke to me in a much sweeter voice when he summoned me to his desk before roll call.

“Immaculée, stand up when I call out ‘Tutsi.’”

I smiled as I walked back to my seat, thinking,
So I’m a Tutsi. Good!
I had no idea what a Tutsi was, but I was proud to be one anyway. There were so few of us in class that I figured we had to be special—besides, the name sounded cute and was fun to say. But I still couldn’t see any real difference between the Tutsi and Hutu tribes. The Twa were pygmies, so their smaller stature made them easy to recognize. But since hardly any Twa came to school, I saw very few of them.

The differences between Tutsis and Hutus were more difficult to spot: Tutsis were supposed to be taller, lighter-skinned, and have narrower noses; while Hutus were shorter, darker, and broad-nosed. But that really wasn’t true because Hutus and Tutsis had been marrying each other for centuries, so our gene pools were intermingled. Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language—Kinyarwanda—and shared the same history. We had virtually the same culture: We sang the same songs, farmed the same land, attended the same churches, and worshiped the same God. We lived in the same villages, on the same streets, and often in the same houses.

Through a child’s eyes (or at least through
my
eyes), we all seemed to be getting along. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times my Hutu friend Janet and I ate dinner at each other’s houses. As a young girl, the only time I was reminded that there were different tribes in Rwanda was when I stood up in class once a week during ethnic roll call. It was an annoyance, but it didn’t bother me too much because I had yet to discover the meaning of discrimination.

That is, until I wanted to go to high school.

When I was 15 years old, I finished eighth grade second in my class of 60 students. I had an overall average of 94 percent, just 2 percent lower than the top student—a Tutsi boy—and far ahead of all the other students. It was more than enough to ensure a scholarship and placement in one of the best public high schools in the region. I went home at the end of the term dreaming about my new school uniform and wondering what it would be like to live away from home in a fine school where all the classes were taught in French.

After high school I planned to go to university, and after that, who knew? Maybe I would become a pilot, a professor, or even a psychologist (by this point, I’d pretty much given up my childhood idea of becoming a nun). My parents had taught me that with hard work and determination, even a girl from a little village like Mataba could become someone important.

How was I to know that my ambitions were just a silly girl’s dream? I didn’t know that those weekly roll calls served a sinister purpose: to segregate Tutsi children as part of a master plan of discrimination known as the “ethnic balance.”

This was a plan pushed by Juvenal Habyarimana, the Hutu president who seized power in the 1973 coup. He proclaimed that the government must “balance” the number of school placements and good civil-service jobs to reflect the country’s ethnic makeup. Because Rwanda’s population was roughly 85 percent Hutu, 14 percent Tutsi, and 1 percent Twa, most jobs and school placements went to Hutus. What the plan really did was keep Tutsis out of high school, university, and well-paying jobs, ensuring their status as second-class citizens.

The true meaning of the ethnic balance was brought home to me a few weeks before I was to start high school. A neighbor dropped by as my family was sitting down to dinner and told us that my name wasn’t on the list of scholarship students that had just been posted in the village hall. Despite my top marks, I’d been passed over because I was Tutsi—all the available places had gone to Hutus who’d earned much lower grades. The Tutsi boy who’d had the highest marks was also passed over because of his tribe.

My father pushed his chair away from the table and sat with his eyes tightly closed for the longest time. I knew that my parents couldn’t afford to send me to a private school, which would cost ten times more than public high school. Both my older brothers were away studying, and money was tight. Besides, private high schools in Rwanda were terrible compared to the well-funded government-run public schools. The teachers were not as qualified, the curriculum was inferior, and the buildings were ugly and uninviting.

“Don’t worry, Immaculée. We’ll find another way for you to study,” my father finally managed. He excused himself from the table and went to his room without finishing his meal.

“Don’t give up hope,” my mother said, hugging me. “We’ll all pray about this. Now eat your dinner.”

After supper I locked myself in my father’s study and cried. I’d worked my heart out in school, only to have my dreams of a higher education dashed. I shuddered to think of what was in store for me. I’d seen how single women with no education were treated in my society: They had virtually no rights, no prospects, and no respect. Without even a high school education, I’d have no option other than to wait at home for some man to come and claim me as his wife. My future looked bleak, and I was only 15 years old!

The next morning, my father wasn’t at the breakfast table.

“He’s trying to work a little miracle,” my mother explained. “He’s gone to look at some private schools to see if he can get you enrolled.”