Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The men raped not only to humiliate and shame their victims, but also as a way of killing; many of the men were HIV-positive and were encouraged by their leaders to infect as many Tutsi women as possible. They raped to satisfy their own curiosity; they raped to traumatize these women; and they raped because it was a slower and more painful way of killing. They raped out of odium and desire. According to one propaganda slogan, they wanted these women to “die of sadness.” One woman recounted having a foot soldier in the murderous youth brigades back her up against a wall and then take his knife to her vagina, cutting out the entire lining of it, and hanging the gory tube of flesh from a stick outside her house, saying, “Everyone who comes past here will see how Tutsi look.”

At the end of a hundred days, the genocide stopped when Tutsi RPF insurgents seized Kigali, the capital. Most of the Interahamwe fled to Congo, where they continued to wreak terror in refugee camps. Kagame entered office as the new president with much cant about building bridges. Instead, he installed a largely Tutsi power structure—exactly what the Hutu Power movement had feared—with the tacit approval of the rest of the world. Kagame periodically orders raids into the Congo camps; some twenty thousand people have been killed in reprisals since the war ended. The Hutu again live under a largely Tutsi regime and feel enslaved by a loathed minority, while the Tutsi hate the Hutu for having murdered their families. Rwandans are defined by the traumas they have witnessed, received, or inflicted. In official interviews, Rwandans say, “Plus jamais” (“Never again”), but in private, most of the people I met said another eruption was only a matter of time.

As many as half a million women were raped during the genocide. About half the Tutsi women who survived had been raped; almost all of them were HIV-positive; and they gave birth to as many as five thousand rape-conceived children. These children are called “les enfants de mauvais souvenir,” or “the children of bad memories”; one writer called them the “living legacy of a time of death.” Ninety percent of the women in one study said they could not love the child of someone who had killed their family. A woman who had attempted to drown herself under these circumstances and been saved by a fisherman said, “I could not even die with this baby inside me. It was a curse that kept haunting me.” One woman who had been married off to a rapist, as often happened, said, “To be taken as a wife is a form of death. There’s no death worse than that.” Because Rwandan society blames the women, these pregnancies were “rejected and concealed, often denied, and discovered late,” according to Dr. Catherine Bonnet, who has studied the Rwandan rape problem. Godeliève Mukasarasi, a social worker, expounded, “The women who have had children after being raped are the most marginalized. People say that this is a child of an Interahamwe.”

Abortion is essentially unobtainable in Rwanda, but some women self-induced miscarriage in the postwar chaos. Some—no one knows how many—committed infanticide. Others left their rape babies on church steps; the country is peppered with orphanages. Since the women who abandoned their children could not be identified, the women I saw were the ones who had kept their children. The children for whom they were sacrificing themselves served as reminders of their trauma. To love the child who results from violation is almost divine—especially because for most of these women, that violation was only one in a constellation of traumas: loss of family; loss of social status; loss of the societal structures that had once seemed secure; loss of any feeling of stability or constancy; loss of health to HIV. When I went to meet these women and their children in the spring of 2004, their children were nine, and therefore old enough to resemble their Hutu fathers. I went to see how one learned to love such children or reconciled oneself to caring for them without love.