Granta 125: After the War

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ISSUE 125: AUTUMN 2013

F
or years, the rainy season would bring up bodies that had lain where they were slaughtered. You might see clothes floating in a flooded field or stumble across a leg bone or a child’s skull, half covered in mud. Nowadays, the rain lifts memories to the surface. It beats down on iron roofs like a manic drum, conjuring demons that Rwandans suppress for the rest of the year. Pastors, counsellors and doctors open their doors to find people they haven’t seen for months complaining of non-specific pains and worries, sleeplessness and headaches. Rain pitches them back to the second week of April 1994 when the sky opened up like a vast cataract and the killing began.

My own memories of that week are fragmented, like a reel of old film with frames missing. I can see a truck loaded with bleeding bodies driving at speed through the gates of a hospital in Kigali. Torrential rain washes blood across the yard and down the drains. I remember thinking: this is not a metaphor – the gutters are running red with blood. At first I believed the images would last forever, but memory is a tricky thing and the pictures in my head have shifted. Inside the ward I can see a woman holding a baby whose arm has been chopped off with a machete. Or is it a leg? She is wandering around trying to get a nurse to pay attention but the hospital is so full of grievously injured patients that no one is listening. Some frames remain clear and frozen despite the passing years: flies buzz over four women with their throats cut outside a clinic in the Kigali suburb of Gikondo. A soldier leans on his AK-47 on the path outside my house. Tracers arc through the night sky, the gunfire stops, the rain eases and there is silence.

I was living in Kigali when the massacres started, working for UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund. Having previously been a journalist, I began to report for newspapers and radio but it was not like other assignments where you go in search of the story – the story erupted around me. In the years that followed I spent many months in Rwanda; each time I left I found it harder to return. I was mired in that week, unable to subsume my feelings of guilt for having witnessed the horror without immediately understanding what it meant and why it was happening. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives were lost before I realized that I was witnessing not simply mass murder but genocide.

T
his spring I went back to Rwanda for the first time in a decade. The capital has changed from the small, shabby, low-rise city I knew in the 1990s. The twenty-storey Kigali City Tower is a symbol of a ‘new Rwanda’ touted by the government and enthusiastic aid donors. According to the website, the tower stands not only for ‘aspiration and power’ but also for ‘hope in a city rapidly becoming one of the most prosperous, cleanest and fastest-growing metropolitan centres on the African continent’. Billboards advertising a mobile network feature a handsome, smiling young man in a blue suit sporting the latest smartphone with the legend
STOP COUNTING SECONDS
,
START GROWING BUSINESS
.
The central roundabout, previously adorned with a peculiarly horrible sculpture that looked like a pile of concrete coffins, is fringed with neat flower beds surrounding a blue-and-white-painted fountain sponsored by another mobile-phone company. Kigali has a sense of order rarely found in African cities – the government has famously banned plastic bags and I was told you can be fined for driving a dirty car.

I set out to find François Kalikumutima. He had been among several UNICEF staff who had rung to ask me for help while soldiers and gangs of killers, armed with machetes and nail-studded clubs, roamed the streets of Kigali. The murderers were extremists from Rwanda’s majority ethnic group, the Hutus. Their targets were the
minority Tutsis, and anyone who stood in their way. A smooth new highway leads from the city centre to the suburb of Nyamirambo, where I found him, retired but still living in the same small red-brick single-storey house where he had been nineteen years earlier. Twin babies in pale aqua-coloured Babygros – the unexpected fruit of a late third marriage – lay toe to toe on the sofa, gurgling happily. François, a plump, short man with splayed teeth, now in his mid-sixties, bumbled around, confused about who I was and why I had come – he had spoken to so many people in those terrible weeks, he said, and asked so many foreigners for help, he couldn’t remember what he had said to whom.

As a Hutu, François had not been in direct danger, but soldiers who were terrorizing the suburb shot dead his next-door neighbour, a Belgian whom he knew only as Monsieur Albert. (The Hutu government of the time blamed Belgium, the former colonial power, for many of the country’s ills.) The body had begun to smell and François rang me in some distress to discuss his dilemma: leaving the body to rot was unbearable, but burying it might provoke the killers to accuse him of befriending Monsieur Albert. He was especially worried for his son, who was officially a Hutu – the designation passing through the father’s line – but was tall like his Tutsi mother. He had tried to call the Belgian Embassy but they were not answering. François had a strong sense of the way things should be.

‘He’s a white man, he should have a decent burial,’ he told me on the phone. I advised him to bury the body. The next day he rang back.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I buried him and said a prayer.’

Nineteen years on, we peered over the vertical-slatted wood fence separating François’s veranda from that of his neighbour. The houses were semi-detached. Only now did I understand that Monsieur Albert’s body had fallen just two yards away. François showed me where he had buried him in the garden, near the avocado tree.

‘I didn’t kill Monsieur Albert,’ he said. ‘Nor did I kill his small dog and lay the corpse on top of him.’

It was the first time I had heard about the dog. Ten years after the genocide, in late 2004, I had received a call from a friend who still worked for UNICEF. François, she said, had been arrested for killing Monsieur Albert and she was gathering evidence in his defence. Convinced he was innocent – otherwise he would not have drawn my attention to his dilemma about the body – I had sent a letter describing how he had called me, and attached a copy of an article I had written at the time. I never heard what happened.

François shuffled off to the back of the house, returning with a brown-cardboard file of papers from which he pulled out copies of handwritten letters of support as well as his own account of what had happened. I leafed through and found a copy of my letter. He read it and looked up, startled. Memories trickled back as he put my face to a name.

‘You were the one who wrote this?’ he said in amazement. He called his wife. ‘She was the one who wrote this!’ he said. ‘It’s a miracle! You helped set me free.’

During the genocide, killers had frequently stolen the property of their victims, loot being the reward for murder. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a guerrilla force of Tutsis born in exile in neighbouring Uganda and Burundi, ended the genocide and took power in July 1994. Diaspora Tutsis arrived in their wake and appropriated the property of Hutus who had fled as refugees or been imprisoned. In the upheaval of subsequent years, it was only too easy to take revenge or extort money by making accusations. Family and land disputes were inflamed, and even ten years later new allegations could surface.

François realized that trouble was brewing when a man who introduced himself as a journalist appeared in his office. He claimed to know that François had killed Monsieur Albert, but offered to suppress the story for the equivalent of £500. As a Hutu, François was vulnerable to such an allegation. He had a suspicion about who was behind all this. His second wife, a Tutsi, had died in 2001 and her family resented his remarriage because it meant they would not inherit his property. This, he thought, was their way of pressing their
claim. He mustered £300 to pay the supposed journalist. There were 130,000 genocide suspects in prison without trial and he feared that if he joined them he would never get out. But the pay-off wasn’t enough. A few days later a story was published in a Kinyarwanda-language newspaper called
Umurage
, or ‘Legacy’, under the headline:
HE KILLED A WHITE MAN AND BURIED HIM IN HIS PROPERTY
. Bizarrely, it was illustrated by a photograph of François standing next to a Moroccan soldier in ceremonial regalia, taken during a trip to Rabat in the 1970s and apparently pilfered from his photo album.

‘They wanted to show a picture of me with a white man,’ explained François. ‘Maybe they thought it proved something.’

A few days after the newspaper article appeared, François was arrested on a trip to the north-west of Rwanda. The police said they had received a tip-off that he was about to abscond over the border to the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was held for five months.

‘On January 5th 2005, my late wife’s relatives came to claim my property because I was in prison,’ he told me. ‘But my current wife and my son resisted.’

As he was shuffled between prisons and police stations in different parts of the country, François thought about his complicated family life – his two wives and son who had died, the covetous in-laws, the new wife who was half his age. He was innocent, but would anyone speak on his behalf? There were always those who believe there is ‘no smoke without fire’. It was hard to know what people outside your own circle really thought, and the genocide made people more wary and relationships even more complicated. Mistrust permeated every workplace and neighbourhood. He wondered whether his Tutsi colleagues would defend him. And what about Ngabonziza, the young Tutsi whom Monsieur Albert employed as a cook and cleaner who had asked François for protection after his boss was shot? François took me through his living room to a corridor and pointed at the white-painted wooden panels of the ceiling.

‘I told him to get up there,’ he said. ‘I cleaned the walls so they couldn’t see the marks where his feet had touched as he climbed up.
I got him to crouch on top of one of the walls so even if they hit the ceiling with their rifles they wouldn’t find him.’

The day after they killed Monsieur Albert, the soldiers had returned, forcing their way into François’s house, accusing him of hiding Ngabonziza. François said nothing. After they had left, he brought the boy down and told him to run into the forest. He disappeared.

The case of François Kalikumutima was among the first to be heard in
gacaca
, the system of community courts. It would have taken more than a century to bring all the genocide suspects incarcerated in Rwanda’s overcrowded prisons to formal trial, so in early 2005 the government embarked on an experiment combining elements of traditional justice with modern law. Local judges presided over the
gacaca
courts in which witnesses gave testimony and suspects were encouraged to confess and express remorse. Only the most serious
genocidaires
– rapists, mass murderers and those who had incited and given orders – were returned to prison for longer sentences. On 20 March 2005, François was summoned to a local community centre where his neighbours had gathered to witness his fate.

‘I did everything I could,’ he told the court. ‘I told everyone what had happened, including the Belgian Embassy, so that the body would be collected and repatriated, but such was the situation no one wanted to deal with it. But I had nothing do with the death of this man.’

One by one François’s UNICEF colleagues, several of them genocide survivors whom he had feared might turn against him, testified that he was generous, kind and innocent. He breathed more easily – maybe he would be believed. Documents were presented, including the letter and article I had written. Then François’s accusers brought their star witness, Ngabonziza, to testify that he had seen François kill the Belgian. His in-laws, he later discovered, had paid the young man £50.

‘The judge asked him to tell the truth in front of the Lord,’ recollected François. Ngabonziza changed his testimony.

‘He looked at me and couldn’t do it, despite the money. He said the soldiers killed the Belgian and that I had hidden him. Everyone clapped.’

François showed me the most important document in his file, a typewritten certificate of immediate release, signed by the judge and other witnesses. He had a bureaucrat’s reverence for documents, or maybe it was just fear that if he didn’t hold on to every shred of evidence of his innocence, someone else might come for him. Life, he said, was fine now and he was no longer under threat.

‘Now, in theory, no one talks about Tutsis and Hutus any more,’ he said. ‘We’re all supposed to be just Rwandans.’

This was the new creed propounded and enforced by the government. The genocidal ‘Hutu power’ ideology had been replaced not with Tutsi power but with nationalism. At least, that was the stated policy.

After independence from Belgium in 1959, Rwandan children were taught in school that Hutus and Tutsis were separate
ethnies
, or races. Tutsis – stereotypically tall and slim with long fingers – were said to be Hamitic people from Ethiopia, invaders who set themselves up centuries back as rulers of the native Hutus. That theory has been discredited. Hutu and Tutsi, who speak the same language and do not live in distinct geographic areas, are not tribes in the classic African sense of the word. These days, most historians and anthropologists see the two groups as castes, Tutsis having been traditionally cattle herders and Hutus farmers. Over time, the Tutsis gained higher status, and became rulers. Physiological differences probably evolved gradually and are not absolute – one of the tallest Rwandans I know is a Hutu. The arguments go to the essence of Rwandan identity and history, from the sixteenth century when the distinctions first emerged, to the colonial period when Germans and Belgians classified Africans by measuring nose width and head length and, eventually, to the genocide when
ethnie
determined who would live and who would die.