The Rwandan Genocide 30 Years On, My Haunting Survivor’s Remorse
No, my recent memoir—Candid Intent—doesn't dwell on the horrors I witnessed in Rwanda 30 years ago. It explores the Iraq War, but the brutality of Operation Iraqi Freedom reawakened memories of our own tragedy. The following are excerpts from Candid Intent, a reckoning with pain and loss.
The Flight
1994. Kigali, Rwanda. I was in my late twenties. And life was rather treating me well. Very well, in fact.
Four years of higher studies, and a string of assignments here and there in Belgium and Rwanda had given me my credentials of fitness for trading in the print and broadcast and communication industries.
A brief stint with the Organisation of the African Unity later, the UN came with a job offer. Yes, the United Nations—that body born in the wake of the Second World War. I mean, I was exceedingly impressed.
Upon my appointment with the UN, I was on cloud nine with elation at my incredible, good fortunes. Temporarily turning my back to broadcasting, I shifted gears; I became a junior information officer at the local headquarters of the international organisation.
Such a job would be a big deal anywhere for anyone at such an early stage of their career. It was even more so in Kigali. But fate often had a way of playing nasty tricks on us.
While fate, visiting hopeful prospects upon me, appeared to have given all to me with one generous hand, it wickedly, with the other hand, took everything away, as it set the land of my folks on the rattling tracks to war, large-scale violence, massacre and maiming of innocents, chaos, and mayhem—the Genocide.
There was an array of causes to the inter-ethic animosity that had been smouldering across Rwanda. But that is beyond the scope of this introduction. Suffice it to say that our descent into the pit of Hades resulted from a nasty long slow burn.
Gradually, neighbours, friends, in-laws, colleagues, fellow worshippers, football teammates—out of a deadly sentiment against Tutsis and moderate Hutus—lost their senses, and turned to stocking machetes and clubs and bows and arrows. Next, they would use those blunt weapons in a bloody butchery that would leave an abiding scar on the conscience of Humanity.
In the now-infamous 100 Days of Terror, the paradisiacal rolling green hills of the Rwandan countryside lost their idyllic allure. Cities, previously awash with God-fearing fervour, turned into deathly haunts for monsters in human shapes.
In the stretch of urban yards and blocks, no refuge was there for hundreds of thousands of souls, whose desperate attempts at running away from tragedy were nothing but extended agonies.
As the nation spun on itself in the turmoil of unrestrained madness, options thinned out severely for those who were at the receiving end of the bloodshed. Getting killed became more of a certainty.
And the best of hopes was to get the hell out. But how to get the hell out when a dash in any direction was to potentially deliver oneself into the trap of a rabid killer lying in ambush, hugging a machete close to their murderous chest?
No, amid the torpors of the massacre, there was no unscathed ones—not even those who ultimately managed, at the cost of extreme hardship, to escape through the wilderness of Northern and Southern Zaïre, or by way of exfiltration in highly protected corteges of foreign forces.
As a UN employee, I was exfiltrated. And I could attest that surviving was just the beginning of long years of residual anguish and pain.
The atrocities we witnessed irretrievably claimed something deeply intimate in each of us. If anything, that haunting survivor’s remorse would morph into a heavy slab of a burden to bear. I can say that. Because I know it for sure.
Painful Homecoming
“I had travelled through beautiful nature, all the way to this place that held fond memories of my childhood. In the flush countryside, I had stood atop Mount Ibisi, gazing in oppressive contemplation at the distant hills and valleys.”
When the microphone was live, and you were supposed to be speaking, the only way forward was to find the words, to make the story come alive. And that’s what happened.
In fact, after I got over my anxious start, words flowed out of me.
Omar, swinging one question after another my way, ultimately said, “Before I let you go, Venuste, could you tell me how much of this horror, there at Hillah, relates to events and their aftermath in Rwanda back in 1994?”
Damn it, Omar!
Frustrated in his desire to bring up Rwanda when I first got to town, he had just decided to go for another try. And as his question ended, and as I tried to quickly process and deliver on his query, a bank of chaotic pictures rose up in a tangle across my mind. A mess. Rwanda 1994?
This is the particular point of the timeline where Omar’s simple question had transported me: A return home, almost a decade after that exfiltration away into an uncertain sky.
I had travelled through beautiful nature, all the way to this place that held fond memories of my childhood. In the flush countryside, I had stood atop Mount Ibisi, gazing in oppressive contemplation at the distant hills and valleys.
What had greeted me from below was literally the silence of the dead: My native hamlet of Gishamvu had gone quiet; the sound of hammers clanging on anvils had long since faded; no sound from any busy mills; and the neighbouring village of Sheke—which I would visit on the saddle of my bicycle—was just as deserted and quiet. Painful homecoming.
From the top of Mount Ibisi, I had agonised over the impossible reunion with kith and kin. They were now imperceptible wisps of former lives. They now existed only in my mind. What had survived of them, and which seemed eternal to me, etched in the empty air, immune to erasure, was a string of names: Ndekwe, my father; Kanyanza, my brother; Shamagira, my sister, and then some more. Yes, some many more names: Lambert, Alexis, Rugamba, Concessa—an endless list, as it seemed. And here’s the short of it: The hills and valleys opposite Mount Ibisi were now the silent abode of ghosts.
Today—these many years later—when these ghosts sprung to life in the empty theatre of my head, their silence became as loud as some accursed wailings from hell. I mean, the Rwanda of 1994 is a realm of demons. Demons that are mine as well as an entire nation. I am now safe from them most of the time. But never when something came along to awaken them. And here, Omar had tripped a wire.
I quickly lost my composure. I now felt a tug at my heart. And when tears hit the back of my eyelids and a wail escaped my chest, Omar understood what he had done. He would spend the last seconds of the two-way as an improvised counsellor.
Omar did nothing wrong. Without intending it, he had exposed my trick for surviving Hillah—in fact, for surviving Baghdad.
See, these haunting memories from yesterday and my thoughts and feelings about the unfolding Iraqi tragedy; I kept them in separate psychic compartments. It was a necessary discipline. It kept me emotionally sober for the sake of the work at hand. Omar had no way of knowing.