We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (28 page)

A Tutsi survivor said, “They come here, they see us, and they say, ‘How did you survive? Did you collaborate with the
interahamwe
?’ They think we were fools to have stayed in the country —and maybe we were—so they disdain us. They don’t want to be reminded. It shocks us to the bones.”

An anti-Habyarimana Hutu said, “The Tutsis were in trouble in last year’s massacres, and the army is now dominated by Tutsis. So we thought the survivors would be taken care of, that it would be the first task of the new government. But only those returning from outside are getting homes. And meanwhile, if these people from outside have a problem with a Hutu, they accuse him of committing the genocide they weren’t even here for.”

A Tutsi said, “We survivors find it very difficult to integrate into the present society and—I hate to say it—into the government, too. They have their own style from outside, and they don’t have much trust in us either. When they came they took the country as in a conquest. They thought it was theirs to look after. They said of us Tutsis who were here, ‘The smart ones are dead and those who survived are traumatized.’ The young RPF fighters all had their parents coming from outside the country and they were tired of the austerity of fighting, so they took homes and goods for their families and they didn’t like the survivors getting in the way. And they would say, ‘If they killed everyone and you survived, maybe you collaborated.’ To a woman who was raped twenty times a day, day after day, and now has a baby from that, they would say this. To a Tutsi who was intermarried or a child who was orphaned they would say this. Can you imagine? For us, it was too hard at first, finding that everyone was dead, that we didn’t know anyone. It didn’t occur to us to grab better houses, and now it’s we who are taking care of most of the orphans.”

A Hutu said, “They don’t know the country. They trust only each other. They weren’t here, and they can’t understand. Some of the influence is good. We needed change, fresh ideas. But there are many extremists among them. And many Hutus who were in trouble during last year’s killings are in trouble again under this regime. People who were targeted then for being RPF followers are now accused of being
génocidaires.
Some are in prison. Some run to another country. Some are killed. It’s the army that controls the government, and inside the army there is not enough control. Truly, if I could afford not to live under plastic sheeting in a camp with
génocidaires,
I would become a refugee.”

A Tutsi said, “Our women used to do collections to send Tampax to the women with the RPF when they were up in the mountains, and now when we are with our old Hutu friends, some of the people we’re closest to in the world, these people look at us like ‘Why are you always with this Hutu?’ And we say to ourselves, ‘We’ve lived together with Hutus all our lives, and we speak almost the same language, and we saw our families killed by Hutus, but you’re more racist than we are.’ It’s an enemy in their subconscious. Their idea of cohabitation is really very theoretical. For Hutus now, it’s like for us before the RPF came. Even if you live quietly, you can’t say many things, you can’t criticize a politician, you must live in fear. Of course, all the Hutus now have someone in the camps or in prison, and you can’t abandon your brother even if he killed people. So it’s a real problem, whom to trust. But the returnees don’t even want to discuss it.”

Even among the returnees there was a good deal of grumbling about other returnees. They had imagined they were one people engaged in a homecoming, only to discover that they were all kinds of people from all kinds of places. Those who had spent the past three decades in Uganda being called Rwandans were, in fact, deeply Ugandan, and people called Rwandans who had lived in Burundi seemed alien to them. They had no better reason to regard each other as kin than a child of Sicilians born in Argentina would have to feel related to a Milanese who had lived his entire adult life as an immigrant in Sweden. Adapting to life in Zaire under the capricious dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko and in Tanzania under the authoritarian socialism of Julius Nyerere had not been comparable experiences. Some of the returnees had lived in Francophone countries, others in Anglophone countries, and although most still spoke at least some Kinyarwanda, many were more at home in Swahili or some other foreign African language which other returnees didn’t speak.

Hutu Power created a world in which there was just us and them, and Rwanda was still generally regarded from within and without as a bipolar world of Hutus and Tutsis. But an elaborate grid of subcategories lay just beneath the surface. There were Hutus with good records, and suspect Hutus, Hutus in exile and displaced Hutus, Hutus who wanted to work with the RPF, and anti-Power Hutus who were also anti-RPF, and of course all the old frictions between Hutus of the north and those of the south remained. As for Tutsis, there were all the exiled backgrounds and languages, and survivors and returnees regarding each other with mutual suspicion; there were RPF Tutsis, non-RPF Tutsis, and anti-RPF Tutsis; there were urbanites and cattle keepers, whose concerns as survivors or returnees had almost nothing in common. And, of course, there were many more subcategories, which cut across the others and might, at any given moment, be more important. There were clans and families, rich and poor, Catholics, Muslims, Protestants of various stripes, and a host of more private animists, as well as all the normal social cliques and affiliations, including male and female, who were marrying each other at a fantastic clip, now that the war was over and it was allowed in the RPF, and now that so many had lost any other form of family.

It made one’s head spin. Even Rwandans didn’t claim to have it all mapped. For the most part, they stuck with the people they knew from before, and didn’t care so much if they made no new friends so long as they didn’t acquire new enemies. In the long view, it seemed to my American mind that there was some hope in the fact that a country which had been destroyed by a mad wish for every citizen to have exactly the same identity as every other—the identity of a mass murderer, no less—contained more diversity than ever. But that was taking a very long view. Intermarriage rates were at an all-time low, scoring another point for the
génocidaires
in the new, officially ethnicity-free Rwanda; and not a day went by without a new story going around on
radio
trottoir
of an imminent Hutu Power invasion from Zaire.

“THEY SAY THE war was won but for us too much was lost,” Odette Nyiramilimo told me. After the genocide, she and Jean-Baptiste had adopted ten children, and took it upon themselves to treat child survivors for free at their clinic. “We feel it’s a moral obligation,” she said, “but the children are so traumatized that we hardly know how to help them.”

After the family was evacuated from the Hotel des Milles Collines, Jean-Baptiste had gone to work with an RPF medical unit helping survivors, and Odette had taken their three children to Nairobi, vowing never to return to Rwanda. Then she received news that some of her nephews and nieces had survived. “As soon as I heard that, I knew I had to come back,” she said. “We began to find them and to take them in, but it’s very difficult to satisfy all their needs. One of them—a four-year-old—weighed just seventeen pounds when he was found.” Once she told me, “We were in the car, Jean-Baptiste and I, and our three children, and one of the kids said, ‘I’m so happy just to be all five of us together again.’ We said, ‘Aren’t you happy to live with your cousins?’ But they didn’t say anything.”

Odette looked over at her children in the pool of the Cercle Sportif. When she turned back to me, she said, “This life after a genocide is really a terrible life.” The fluidity and urgency with which she had told the story of her earlier ordeals had given way to a hopscotch, free-associating rhythm as she described life in the aftermath. “When I was still in Nairobi, saying I’d never come back, there was a group of young Rwandan fifty-niners who’d gone to visit Rwanda for the first time,” she said. “They got back to Nairobi and said how beautiful and wonderful it all was, and the only problem in Rwanda was the survivors who want to tell you all their stories forever. That really got to me.”

She said, “The trauma comes back much more as time passes—this year more than last. So how can I look forward to next year? We take refuge a bit in our work, but many people become very depressed. I’m afraid it gets worse. I dream more of my sisters and cry through my dreams.”

Odette had one nephew who survived the genocide in Kinunu, on the hill where she was born in Gisenyi. She had visited him only once, to help bury the dead, who were numerous, and she did not want to go back. “All the Hutus there watched us come, and some wanted to hug me,” she said. “I cried out, ‘Don’t touch me. Where did you put everyone?’ One was married to a cousin of mine. I said, ‘Where’s Thérèse?’ He said, ‘I couldn’t do anything.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘It wasn’t me who did it.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to know you.’ Now whenever the Hutus there see a car coming to my nephew’s, they all hide. People will say I’m an extremist because I can’t accept or tolerate the people who killed my family. So if they’re afraid once in their lives—I was afraid since I was three years old—let them know how it feels.”

She said it was hard to make new friends among the returnees. “They came with all their things. They can laugh, have a party. Among us it’s always tales of genocide, and they don’t like to hear about it. If they see I’m married to a Hutu, that I have some old Hutu friends, they don’t understand. Really, everyone lives for himself now.”

She said, “I was talking to my youngest, Patrick. I said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ He said, ‘Those two guys who came with machetes. It comes back all the time.’ The children don’t go out —you have to push them—they like to stay home. They think about it a lot. My little Patrick, he goes alone into a room, and he looks under the bed for
interahamwe.
My daughter Arriane was in a very good boarding school in Nairobi, and one night she sat up reliving everything, and she cried. At midnight the dorm monitor came by and they spent nearly the whole night together. Arriane told her what had happened, and the monitor was amazed. She’d had no idea. And this was a Kenyan. Nobody really knows. Nobody wants to know.”

Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. “Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it’s written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.”

ONE DAY IN Kigali, I ran into Edmond Mrugamba, a man I had come to know around town, and he invited me to join him for a visit to the latrine into which his sister and her family had been thrown during the genocide. He had mentioned the story before. I remembered that he made a sound—
tcha, tcha, tcha
—and chopped his hand in the air to describe his sister’s killing.

Edmond drove a Mercedes, one of the few that remained in Rwanda, and he was wearing a faded denim shirt and jeans and black cowboy boots. He used to work for a German development program in Kigali, and his wife was German; she remained in Berlin with their children after the genocide. As we drove in the direction of the airport, Edmond told me that he was a well-traveled man, and that after many trips in East Africa and Europe, he had always felt that Rwandans were the nicest, most decent people in the world. But now he couldn’t recover that feeling. In 1990, after the first RPF attack, he had been threatened because he was Tutsi; he had gone into exile and had only returned after the new government was installed. Edmond was in his late thirties; his father had been a cattle keeper in Kigali. His oldest brother was killed in the massacres of 1963. “And I don’t speak of my uncles killed in fifty-nine and sixty-one,” he said, “my grandmother burned in the house, my maternal uncle, a nurse, chopped into many pieces. There were many others who were killed, and others luckily went to Uganda.” Edmond himself had lived for eleven years in Burundi before returning under Habyarimana and finding work with the Germans. He showed me a snapshot of himself in full camouflage uniform and floppy khaki bush hat. In 1993, he left Germany for Uganda and outfitted himself to join the RPF—“then my appendix burst, and I had to have an operation.”

Edmond spoke quietly, with great intensity, and his bearded face was expressive in a subtle, wincing way. Despite his ordeals, he told me, he had never imagined the depth of the ugliness, the meanness—“the disease,” he said—that had afflicted Rwanda, and he could not understand how it could have been so well masked. He said, “An animal will kill, but never to completely annihilate a race, a whole collectivity. What does this make us in this world?”

Edmond returned from exile because he had found it intolerable to be living in a strange land thinking that he might be of use in Rwanda. Now he lived alone in a small, dark house with a young boy, a nephew who had been orphaned in the genocide. “And I ask myself sometimes, Is my presence here really of any significance?” he said. “To build a new Rwanda. I dream all the time. I dream of theories of this history of violence. I dream of finding an end to it.”

Near the outskirts of Kigali, we turned onto a red-dirt track that narrowed and descended between high reed fences surrounding modest homes. A blue metal gate leading to his dead sister’s house stood open. The yard was crackly dry bush strewn with rubble. A family of squatters—Tutsis just returned from Burundi—sat in the living room playing Scrabble. Edmond ignored them. He led me around the side of the house to a stand of dried-out banana plants. There were two holes in the ground, about a foot apart and three feet in diameter—neat, deep, machine-dug wells. Edmond grabbed hold of a bush, leaned out over the holes, and said, “You can see the tibias.” I did as he did, and saw the bones.

“Fourteen meters deep,” Edmond said. He told me that his brother-in-law had been a fanatically religious man, and on April 12, 1994, when he was stopped by
interahamwe
at a roadblock down the street and forced to lead them back to his house, he had persuaded the killers to let him pray. Edmond’s brother-in-law had prayed for half an hour. Then he told the militiamen that he didn’t want his family dismembered, so they invited him to throw his children down the latrine wells alive, and he did. Then Edmond’s sister and his brother-in-law were thrown in on top.