Healing fields of Rwanda

On the night of April 6, 1994, Celine Uwineza went to bed as excited as any 10-year-old would be during school holidays, full of plans for fun and frolic for the next day, with her four siblings and several cousins. The following morning she woke up to the sounds of gunshots and grenades. At their living room in Kigali, her mother sat ashen-faced in front of the television. Rwanda’s second President, Juvénal Habyarimana, and his Burundian counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira — both members of Hutu, Rwanda’s largest ethnic group — had been killed the previous day, after the President’s plane was shot down above the Kigali airport. News reports were out with it a day later.

“Mum rose slowly from her chair,” writes Uwineza in her self-published book, Untamed: Beyond Freedom , to be released on April 10, “and when she spoke, her voice was filled with sadness and fear. ‘My children,’ she said, slowly and deliberately, ‘This is very bad news. It’s the end of us all.’” Uwineza’s family were Tutsi, terrified minorities in their own country.

The next day, the Interahamwe — a Hutu paramilitary organisation — arrived with guns and weapons. The mother begged the killers to spare her children and take her life instead. They shot her foot. “We will be back tomorrow to kill you inyenzis (cockroaches),” they said before leaving. In news reports, Hutu extremists blamed the Tutsi-backed Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) for the attack on the President and soon embarked on a well-organised campaign of slaughter.

Untamed: Beyond FreedomCeline UwinezaSelf-publishedNon-FIction1,035 (approx)

Uwineza’s family fled to a convent in Kicukiro like several others to take refuge. The nuns looked after them. On April 10, just as Sunday mass ended, about 50 Interahamwe members arrived at the convent, armed with machetes, knives and weapons. They drove the nearly 200 worshippers out on to the road and began assaulting them. “Death spoke clearly without uttering a word,” Uwineza writes. The youngest among her siblings, she was spared since she was a child and forced to return to the convent without her family. Alone and terrified, the child heard sounds of slaughtering all around her, something that haunted her for years. “We will kill you later,” the attackers had warned, so she waited for them to return day after day, hoping they would reunite her with her mother and sisters. But they never came for her.

Saviour: Celine with sister Leoncie who was among the nuns who took care of her in 1994 at the Kicukiro convent

Between April and July 1994, a million Tutsis and some moderate Hutus were hunted down — even babies weren’t spared. The ruling establishment’s hate propaganda over radio and other mass media turned neighbours, friends, relatives and lovers into informers and killers overnight. Bodies were spilling out of cars, homes, schools, banana groves, football grounds and even churches and convents — the very places people had fled to for refuge. Besides her mother and three sisters, the carnage claimed 30 other members of Uwineza’s extended family.

“There are several books written on the genocide, but few that tell us what happened after,” Uwineza, now 35, tells BL ink during a recent meeting in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. Written in the style of raw journal accounts from the therapy sessions she underwent after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder three years ago, the book pries open her unprocessed grief, confronts every painful memory head-on, and finds the courage to look forward.

No time to grieve

As the killings began and the family feared they might be next in line, Uwineza’s mother had taught them a prayer: “Tutsis are being killed, and we might die. But don’t worry. Our Heavenly Father will welcome us, and we will all be reunited in heaven.” On the day of their massacre, when Uwineza’s mother and sisters realised that the Interahamwe were willing to spare children, they pushed her to leave. “Go! Live!” they had said.

“As a child, the most threatening thing is to be alone and to be with people you don’t know, rather than to die. We were to die together and go to heaven. They didn’t inform me that the contract had changed,” she says.

After three months in a refugee camp, when the RPF finally ended the genocide, Uwineza was reunited with her father and brother, who had been away in Kenya when the killings began back home. But life would never be the same again for her devastated family. Numbed with grief, the little girl had changed forever.

Made of steel: Uwineza encourages young Rwandans to share their stories of the struggle to cope with painful memories of surviving the genocide

“As Rwandans, we had to go back to life on survival mode. We didn’t have the luxury of stopping to grieve,” she says. It meant that she went back to school, her brother to college and her father to work to put food on their table. “I lived with two people within me. The older me would tell the 10-year-old, ‘life is happening, there’s no time for this, let’s go!’” she remembers. Over the next few years, she had graduated, risen in her career as an HR director and found a loving husband. It was in the middle of all this that she suddenly crashed, unable to feel “grateful” for all that life offered.

Therapy is still seen as “so western” in most parts of Africa. Why pay someone to talk about your feelings? But coaxed by her family, she did go for it. The therapy made her understand that she was weighed down by what is known as survivor’s guilt — feelings of guilt at being the only one to be spared from a collective tragedy. Therapy taught her other things, too. “I discovered that I was going through life subconsciously waiting for my turn to die or for everything to abruptly end. Being hopeful about a relationship, job, means being out there and being vulnerable,” she says. After two years of therapy, she was back on her feet. Today, she is the co-founder of Right Seat, an HR consultancy that helps young Rwandans find suitable employment. Her custom-made training process has helped nearly 10,000 people to improve their job prospects and gain the confidence to ace an interview or bargain for better pay. Intertwined with this is her work in the area of mental healthcare.

“After living on survival mode all these years, now, finally, young people are seeking help, but not enough. It is still a grey area,” she says. In her talks for young people, she encourages them to open up and confront their painful journeys. She also passionately advocates for memory preservation as a tool to heal and fight genocide denialists. “If I tell my story then more people will come forward to tell theirs,” she says.

Survivors: Uwineza with her brother Johnny (left) and father Murengezi Wilberforce (right) on her wedding day

A fascinating experiment

The capital’s Kigali Genocide Memorial, built to commemorate the 1994 Rwandan genocide, houses the remains of over 250,000 victims, and several thousands of testimonies from survivors. At the psychological services room on the upper floor, a video camera waits to roll as genocide survivors still trickle in every now and then, prepared to share a painful memory that refuses to fade away.

“Historical clarity is a duty of memory that we cannot escape. Behind the words ‘Never Again’, there is a story whose truth must be told in full, no matter how uncomfortable,” the current President Paul Kagame had said in 2014. A former rebel member of the RPF, Kagame is the architect of the idea of a united Rwanda.

Real change, most Rwandans believe, happened after his election as President in 2000. By the end of that year, members were elected to the traditional gacaca courts, where ordinary Rwandans judge their peers in an effort aimed at clearing the backlog of genocide cases. But what would a nation do with close to 1,50,000 facing genocide charges? The prisons were bursting at their seams. By December that year, a new flag and national anthem were unveiled to promote national unity and reconciliation. Since 2003, over 60,000 people who confessed to their involvement in the genocide have been freed, to ease overcrowding in the prisons.

This meant the survivors have to go back to living with the killers as neighbours and colleagues. And while they are asked to forgive and accept, they are also told not to forget. Is that asking too much of the people?

In an interview, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda , a gut-wrenching account of the genocide, says: “The government’s project of making people live together and insisting that they must make a nation together — not just any people, but killers and survivors — is an extraordinary experiment. There really is no precedent for it in modern human history.”

Today a Rwandan could be arrested for asking someone, even casually, if they are Hutu or Tutsi. “It’s a homegrown solution for unity. It is called Nd’umunyarwanda (I am Rwandan) — not Hutu, not Tutsi,” explains Uwineza. But underneath the “united Rwanda” image, is the forgiveness and acceptance real?

“We killed each other. Now the prisons are full. It’s a huge budget. You have to choose. Should I invest in more prisons? Or should I develop programmes for the nation to move forward?” asks Uwineza .

“It started with what we told our children — ‘Don’t play with Tutsis’. It ultimately led to a genocide. My responsibility is to choose what to teach my child. It’s still a decision you take every day. Not everything is perfect, but we’re understanding that we need to create our own solutions because we’re the ones who went through it.”

Shriya Mohan

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