Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

A month after the end of the genocide, Mukamakuza realized that she was pregnant. After her son, Jean-de-Dieu Ngabonziza, was born, she tried to give him to her brother, but he would have none of it. She took Jean-de-Dieu with her into a new marriage, but made sure he knew that he was an unwelcome burden, beating him mercilessly and occasionally throwing him out of the house. If they went out in public, she would say, “Call me your aunt. Never call me your mother.” Meanwhile, her ostensible consort beat her day and night. He said, “If you want to be with me, get rid of that child. I don’t want to see him.” Finally, she summoned the courage to leave and moved to the slum where I found her. “And then,” she recalled, “I saw that my boy was all I had. And sometimes he would laugh, despite everything, and it was when he laughed that I began to love him. But he does not look like me, and when he does something wrong, it reminds me of those rapes. He goes to school, and I hope he will learn there about the war. In the end I will have to tell him about his origins, and there will only be more tragedy for us.”

Christine Uwamahoro’s proud, erect carriage was not typical of the violated women I met in Rwanda. She was eighteen and living in Kigali when the killing started. “Secretly or publicly, it didn’t matter which, the militias would break into the house, and while one was stealing, the other was raping, and then they would switch. They would give us all kinds of orders: put up your hands, kneel down, stay where you are. One held me up at gunpoint and said, ‘Undress and lie down, or I’ll kill you.’ But he didn’t kill the family. He came back again and again, and each time he raped me, and then my father gave him money to go away. I was saved by God’s grace.”

The family finally fled, but soon came to a bridge with a roadblock. They sat by the side of the road for two hours, waiting and watching as other people were slaughtered. As dusk fell, one of the Interahamwe approached with a murderous look. They ran, but Uwamahoro’s mother faltered, and Uwamahoro’s brother went to help her. Over her shoulder, Uwamahoro saw them both being chopped up with machetes. Uwamahoro herself got a gash in her arm, the scar of which is still visible today; she isn’t sure whether it came from falling or whether she got slashed with a knife, because her memory of the whole episode is so blurred. Uwamahoro and her father managed to walk sixty miles to the city of Gisenyi, hiding by day and stealing quietly along the road by night, but the killing had spread there, too, so they walked another few miles into Congo.

On this final leg of their journey, they met another band of Interahamwe. “Look!” someone called. “They are Tutsi! They must die, by any means!” They hid for a day in a large bush with two other families; they feared a crying baby with one of them would attract attention, but the baby had tuberculosis and died while they were huddled there. Uwamahoro’s arm had become infected and was swollen and painful. They finally reached Goma, where they waited out the war. Uwamahoro feared that she had become infected with HIV, but couldn’t bear to find out and still doesn’t know. She had been advanced in her studies, but she never returned to school. She hated finding out she was pregnant, and she hated the baby and gave her to her father so she would not have to see her. Even ten years later, the child’s existence filled Uwamahoro with sadness and reminded her that her life was ruined; though Uwamahoro visited her sole surviving sister every day, she visited her daughter once a month at most. The little girl is angry and hot tempered, Uwamahoro said. Whatever the girl wants, she wants it now, right away, and if she doesn’t get it, she flies into a temper and will refuse to talk for two days at a time in her rage.