Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Marianne Mukamana had a good life before the genocide. She loved her husband, a construction worker, and their daughter, who was then five years old. Early on, the génocidaires came for her husband. They said, “We will kill him and then return for you.” She never saw or heard of him again. She tried to run away with her daughter but had no place to run, and neighbors, fearing for their lives, refused to give her refuge. Hoping to save her daughter, she went in despair to the military base and said, “I am here for you to do to me what you want,” and because she was beautiful, they took her as a sex slave. Over the weeks that followed, she was kept at the base and raped constantly and by many different men. They told her that she would end up being killed. When the RPF arrived at Kigali, her captors took her on a massive forced march to Gisenyi; when the RPF finally took Gisenyi, she was set free and headed back to Kigali with her five-year-old.

All of her family was gone save two brothers. When she realized she was pregnant, she planned ways to get rid of the baby. “I wanted to throw her away when she was born,” she recalled. She was now HIV-positive; the child was, too. In the years that followed, Mukamana often felt a surge of loathing when she looked at this daughter, who was a constant reminder of what Mukamana desperately wanted to forget. She could not love this second daughter as she loved the first. She fantasized about finding the child’s father and giving her to him, but she had been raped so often that she didn’t even know who the father was, and the candidates had in any case disappeared with the rest of the Interahamwe and were probably either dead or in Congo. “And thank God it wasn’t a boy,” she said, “because that love would have been even harder. Boys inherit property at twenty-one; since girls have no rights, they pose fewer problems.” But she resolved that she would teach herself to love her two children the same. “Another heart came in me,” she explained. “She was my child, the seed of my womb, mine also, and I felt I had to take care of her for a while.” When I met Mukamana, she told me that she felt exactly the same about both her daughters. But she said she would still like to give the younger one away.

The two girls often faced confusion. The elder one was pure Tutsi and looked it; the younger had dark coloring and Hutu features. Neighbors said that they couldn’t possibly be full sisters, but Mukamana kept the truth from them. “Meanwhile, I try to harmonize these two children, to make them as much alike as I can,” she explained. “And I tell my younger daughter that she is a Tutsi, not to pay attention to the people who tell her she is Hutu. I try to talk to them a lot like that, to make them feel loved.” The older girl still spoke of her father. “I remember that day people came to our house and he went away,” she said. “And he never came back. I saw him going but I never saw him returning. Where could he have gone?” The younger girl asked all the time, “Tell me about my father,” and even, “Why are you alone, and not with my father?”—but Mukamana kept silent. And the younger girl would say, “One day, I will meet my father.” These remarks suggest that they knew they had different fathers, but they didn’t know why that was a taboo subject with their mother.

The two girls were competitive for their mother’s love. The tradition in Rwanda is that the youngest child is the most beloved, and for Mukamana it was hard to embody that expectation. “I will die of AIDS, and my older daughter will be left alone,” she said. “The reason is in the rape that made my younger daughter. How to know that without being angry? But both are mine. And as my younger daughter grows up, I can look at her most of the time without rancor. It gets easier with the passage of the years. I try not to think of the past, because I am afraid of it, and I also don’t think of the future, because now I know better than to have dreams.”