Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Most encounter only disenfranchisement. One woman explained to me that a man came and killed her family, including her husband and three children; took her in sexual slavery and kept her for three months; then fled when the RPF forces came. She gave birth to a son, and though she developed AIDS, her son remained healthy. Rwanda has few social networks outside of family; you need relatives to survive. Knowing she would soon die, she worried that her son would be all by himself, so she tracked down the father of her son in jail and decided to foster a relationship with him—so her son would have someone after she was gone. When we met, she was making the father daily meals and taking them to him in the jail. This man had raped her and slaughtered her children. She could not speak of what she was doing without lowering her eyes and staring fixedly at the floor. No new Rwandan feminism had touched her life.

In Kigali, I met with Beatrice Mukansanga, who had a face like a Picasso mask, and Marie Rose Matamura, who was young and sweet looking. Mukansanga had no clear memory of what happened to her in 1994; she remembered being repeatedly raped and waking up pregnant in a hospital some weeks later, but she didn’t know how she had spent the war. Sometime during the genocide, her leg was chopped off. Her husband and two children had disappeared in the genocide, “all lost, all gone,” she said. At the end of the atrocities, she was pregnant and HIV-positive, but did not know who her rapists were. She said, “The baby died in me and was removed.” Whether she had induced the miscarriage was unclear. When she went back to her town of Nyanza, she found that everybody she had known was killed, so she came to Kigali. “I have a terrible time at this time of year, around the anniversary of the genocide, at the start of the rainy season,” she said. “I have horrible nightmares. I am living always with the feeling that I will die at any time.” She was angry that government health programs were available only to those with connections; she had developed full-fledged AIDS, but when she tried to obtain medication, the health workers laughed at her. “They help those who are well enough to help themselves,” she said, “and leave the rest of us to die.”

At thirty-four, Marie Rose Matamura narrated the events of her life in an even monotone, with an air of complete resignation. When the genocide began, she fled to her church, but militias soon arrived and, with her priest’s consent, killed almost all the people gathered there. She and her sister escaped only to be seized by a Hutu man from the Interahamwe who claimed them as his wives. Many militia would force women into sexual slavery, cynically using the word wife to euphemize a multitude of sins. There were no marriages, and there was no guarantee of protection. All the term meant was that these women had been taken on as the object of repeated sexual assault and lived in a man’s quarters. Matamura’s acquiescence to her captor did not obviate her hatred of him. “He would just go walking around the neighborhood raping the ladies,” she said. “At any time he could force me to accept his friends; I was raped by many others. He told me that he had given me HIV so he didn’t have to waste time killing me.”

Matamura’s captor fled when the Tutsi forces approached; weak and desperate, Matamura and her sister, both pregnant, remained in his house. Matamura’s sister died of AIDS on Christmas Day 2001. Matamura took on her sister’s son and has brought him up with her own daughter. Matamura had begun to develop skin lesions and feared that her neighbors recognized them as a symptom of AIDS; she was too afraid to have the children tested for HIV. “I don’t know who will take care of the children when I die,” she said. “I go from door to door, asking people if they have dirty clothes to be washed. I braid hair for rich Hutu women with husbands. I feel so sad that I will die—not sad for myself, but for the children. I, with my incurable disease, am the only one they have.”

Matamura described trying to protect her children. “For me, the world is just full of hatred, and I am always afraid; I just want to lock myself in the house and see no one. But I make sure the kids are not worried. I don’t want to have them asking me why I am so sad, so lonely. The boy has a hot temper, but I make a particular effort with him because he must feel that I am his mother now. I can see the picture of Hutu militia in their faces, but I can’t hate my own child or my sister’s, though I never forget where they came from. They ask me sometimes, ‘Who is my father?’ and I tell them that they don’t have a father, that they never did. Someday, I will have to tell them the truth. I think all the time about how I will do it and make up the speeches. I will tell them how to behave correctly and what to do if someone tries to rape them. I fear what they will become with me. I fear what they will become after that, without me.”