Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Small, wide-eyed, mousy, and sad, Marcelline Niyonsenga maintains the posture of an importuning child, looking up anxiously as if waiting for someone’s permission to go on living. She was nineteen when the war began, visiting family in Kigali when their house was attacked. Her uncle and brother were killed, and she was left with her uncle’s child. The next day the militias came back and took Niyonsenga out of the house. She escaped and found a family with whom to hide. The head of that household threw out his wife and forced Niyonsenga to become his sex slave. She stayed hidden all day, creeping out at night to find water, always afraid of being killed. After two and a half months, the man announced that he was tired of her and threw her out. She was gang-raped and reluctantly found refuge with a businessman who took her to Congo. When she learned that the war was over, she begged to go home, but she was pregnant, and her husband had decided to keep her and the child, saying, “Tutsi woman, if I let you go, you will tell the story of how I took you, and I and my family will be killed.” She waited months for a day when he was away on business. She grabbed three thousand Congolese francs (about $5) and persuaded a taxi driver to take her to Rwanda, where the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees took her in. Her damaged uterus had to be removed after the birth of her daughter, whom she named Clémence Tuyisenge.

Since the war, Niyonsenga keeps house for her brother, who lost his wife. She wanted to bring up her brother’s son and her daughter together, but her brother wouldn’t let Niyonsenga’s AIDS-infected daughter into his house, so the little girl lives with Niyonsenga’s mother. Niyonsenga sees her once a week, sacrificing living with her daughter in order to care for her brother and his son; they are men and must have someone to attend to their needs. At least her brother did not abandon her, Niyonsenga said; sometimes, he even gave her money. Whenever Clémence was sick—and she was often sick with opportunistic infections—Niyonsenga remembered where the child came from. And when Niyonsenga herself was sick, she thought of the man who infected her. Clémence’s body already had erupted in blisters her mother called “pimples.” Whenever Clémence became feverish, her grandmother would bring her to Niyonsenga, who would take her to the hospital. When they were both healthy, Clémence and Niyonsenga would laugh together. When Niyonsenga was sick, Clémence would curl up next to her. On balance, Niyonsenga felt it would be preferable for her daughter to predecease her, and yet she is also deeply reliant on the companionship her daughter affords. “People pity me because I have this enfant de mauvais souvenir, but she is the light of my life,” she said. “To be slowly dying like this without even the comfort of a child would be a thousand times worse. I am dying, but I am not alone.”

The deadness that afflicted many of the women I interviewed had not touched Alphonsine Mukamakuza; she would be laughing one minute and racked with sobs the next, constantly fiery with emotion. She lived in a mud hut on the outskirts of Kigali, furnished incongruously with an airplane seat and two broken wooden chairs. The only light came through a crack between the roof and the wall. In spite of this poverty, she was impeccably dressed in a long cotton print dress and matching head wrap. She did not want her neighbors to know for sure what she felt they had already guessed, that her son was a child of rape, and so while we talked, her nephew stood guard outside, chasing off would-be eavesdroppers.

Mukamakuza was twenty when the genocide began. She thought that the barbarism had broken out only in her village, so she fled to relatives in a neighboring village. The killing had started there, too, so she and her relatives decided to seek refuge across the border in Burundi. They were near their destination when shooting broke out. Mukamakuza kept running as the rest of her family was gunned down behind her. She bolted into a house, where an old woman said, “You are safe here. I will hide you.” That night, the old woman’s son came home, saw this beautiful woman, and told her that he would make her his wife. For three weeks he raped her repeatedly, telling her that her death was coming soon. She did all she could to stay in his favor; he was both her enemy and the man without whose attentions she would surely have been slaughtered. He brought around other Interahamwe who sometimes raped her while he watched.