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For years, I’ve been feeling a dull ache in the bottom of my heart, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t quite seem to figure out what it was I had been longing for so fiercely. Over the course of my months abroad, I finally figured out what it was: homesickness for a place I’ve never been. A longing for the magical spirit of Africa.
Eager to begin an adventure I hoped would change my life, I impulsively signed up for a trip that would take me to East Africa. And so I spent four months on the other side of the world, examining Africa’s longest running civil war in Northern Uganda and the most atrocious genocide of recent memory, the Tutsi genocide of 1994, in Rwanda.
The lessons I learned in East Africa are varied and traverse a wide range of subjects, from basic day-to-day living to grander concepts: war, peace, reconciliation. I’ve learned these from a varied cast of characters; both fleeting friends and those I now consider family, all tangling a web of handed-down knowledge and memory that have changed me.
I’m never quite sure how to tell my stories. There are some that are always fun to share: learning how to slaughter a chicken as thirty villagers watched and laughed in order to prove to my host mother I was a “strong African woman”; a former abducted child soldier, who at age 11 toted a gun through the bush as part of Africa’s longest civil war, spending his Saturday afternoon teaching me how to drive his motorcycle through the streets of Gulu; taking boat rides on the River Nile and being mere feet from freely roaming giraffes and elephants with their ivory tusks still gloriously intact; practicing a rain dance with Acholi and mzungu alike and mere moments later watching the skies darken and open up before our eyes, pouring down the first rain of the season. These are the fun parts of my journey, the stories I quickly tell in passing to people who aren’t quite prepared to hear the full truth of what it really means to experience these far-away places. Now, however, I have tougher tales to tell, and they are necessary if anyone is to understand my experience and my resulting perspective on what it means to be part of the human race, part of humanity.
We’ve, hopefully, all heard the story of the Rwanda genocide. On April 6, 1994, the killing began. Hutu extremists, angry after years of colonial oppression that left them with no one to blame but their Tutsi countrymen, began a killing spree that left an estimated one million dead in one hundred days. It is important to note the reason that this is only an estimate: many bodies were never found: sent downriver, eaten by roaming dogs, burned, dismembered, what have you. Often, entire families were slaughtered together, leaving no one behind to declare their absence, to mourn their loss.
There is much more to say about the history of the genocide. I could talk for hours, honestly, about the ways it was planned, orchestrated, carried out, covered up. I could rant and rave about the international community, French involvement, and the failure of the UN to intervene. But instead, I want to share two experiences I had in Rwanda that made the genocide real. Because I could stand here and spout facts and figures, but they are meaningless in the face of true human tragedy, honest suffering, and the value of putting a face and a story to that one million mark.
The first is a story of destruction.
There is a place on a hilltop in southwest Rwanda, and that place is called Murambi. Rwanda is called the “Land of a Thousand Hills,” and Murambi is no exception. The first thing I noticed upon our arrival was how absolutely, undeniably, breath-takingly beautiful it was; I was surrounded by a vast greenness that seemed to go on for an eternity. On this dark day of rain and thunder, mist rose from the earth as birds flew high overhead, singing songs that suggested ignorance of suffering. Although I knew what I was about to encounter here, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d just seen paradise, a concept that may seem morbid by the end of this tale.
Murambi was a technical school when the genocide broke out in 1994. Tutsis from the surrounding towns and villages were told, by their mayors, their clergy, those they trusted to help them, that Murambi would be a safe place for them to hide, their salvation. When all forty thousand of them arrived, however, they were surrounded by the Interahamwe militia, the perpetrators of the genocide. The Interahamwe cut off their water and food supplies and lay in wait for three days. Once their victims were weak from hunger and dehydration, the attack began. They advanced from all sides up the hilltop, launching grenades and shooting rifles. When they closed in, the machetes came out. Of the forty thousand seeking refuge at Murambi, only three survived, hiding amongst the corpses of their loved ones and running in the dark of night.
This is the extent of the narrative of Murambi. It is that simple and that tragic. A year after the genocide, the survivors and a few surrounding villagers returned to dig up the mass graves of their loved ones, their countrymen. They decided, of their own accord and with their own meager funding, to turn Murambi into a memorial. But this is not your typical museum.
The dead have been removed from their graves, preserved in lime, and placed in the rooms in which they were killed, lain snugly together on wooden platforms.
Once the first room was opened, I realized what our Academic Director meant when she said the smell would be the thing we would always remember. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put into words exactly what death smells like, how it feels to have the smell of rotting human flesh fill your lungs. I’ll never, ever forget the hours I spent breathing it in and trying to understand why this had to happen.
At Murambi, there are no plaques to read, no informational pamphlets of facts and figures, no audioguide to spit information into your ear. It is simply an emotional experience, a plain and simple truth you have to feel.
There were children clutched in their mother’s arms; heads with hair still attached, blowing ever so slightly in the breeze wafting through the iron-barred windows; corpses still wearing their clothes, ill-fitting after decomposition. Heads with visible machete marks, bullet holes, some completely and utterly destroyed by a club, a mallet, a hoe, the tools of this brutal slaughter.
I could see expressions on faces: horrified and fearful. I could see the contortions of muscles, bodies positioned as they had died, in defensive stances, knees bent and arms outstretched to deflect the blows of the machete… but some, the children, curled up in fearful positions that suggested they knew they were in grave danger. A child knowing he was about to die.
I firmly believe it is impossible to visit Murambi and not leave a changed person. It is not possible to experience the effects of genocide, to see the pain and fear played out on frozen faces and leave without a new perspective, a shaken faith, a soul numb with the realization that we, as humans, are capable of such horrific crimes, and lungs full of air that only smells of loss and sadness.
This is only one story, the most difficult in the library I keep under my skin and the single most transformative of my twenty-one years. The other, however, is one of hope.
In the Butare district of Southwest Rwanda, not far from Murambi, there is a group of women that call themselves “Ubutwali Bwo Kubaho,” which in the Kinyarwanda language means “Heroism is Living.” They are a cooperative of women made up of both genocide widows and the wives of perpetrators, and they embody the ideology of reconciliation in Rwanda.
In the years immediately following the genocide, these two very different, yet in many ways surprisingly similar groups of women lived their lives exhibiting pure hatred for the other: as one passed by, the other threw stones. After years working with spiritual leaders and realizing their children were growing up learning to hate their neighbors, the root cause of the genocide they suffered, they made a change. Now, they live in harmony, working together to thrive and teaching their children to live their lives for peace. We met with them the day following our visit to Murambi, and it lifted my sinking heart. We spoke with these women about hatred and violence, about peace and forgiveness. After hours of speaking with them and learning from their amazing triumphs, we asked them if there was any message they wanted us to bring back to the West, and they told us this:
“Tell them our story, but then tell them to love. Take back love. Live your lives for love. Listen to one another, be with one another, understand one another. Do this, and love will come. If you love, this will never happen again. With love, everything is possible.”
The single most powerful statement I have heard in my life.
Today, as the world looks to Egypt, Libya, Cote d’Ivoire and many others, we are facing more tragedies and death tolls than we know how to process. In far-off countries that we can’t quite imagine, people are dying and the world is forgetting. It was said the Rwanda was “too black, too poor, and too far away” for anyone to care, to take notice, to act. My host sister in Rwanda asked me one night why my country had forgotten about them, why her family had to die. I had no answer for her and I never will. The world turned its back on Rwanda and in my eyes there is no excuse. It is too late to save the lives already lost, but we face new battles against hatred every day. Obligation and intervention are difficult concepts to negotiate, but I refuse to have my generation’s legacy be yet another ignored and useless slaughter. I will use my voice, unlike so many before me who sat by, claimed ignorance, and watched as innocent people met their fate by the dull blade of a machete. It is not too late for the millions more that could die in future genocides if only we have the courage and the conviction to stand up and embody the single phrase spoken after every genocide that has not once been acted upon: “NEVER AGAIN.”
Genocide is never a story with a happy ending, but it can be a story of hope. We have far more potential for love and goodness than we realize, and the women of Ubutwali Bwo Kubaho are a living, breathing example of what it means to be a member of the human race. Brynn Muir, my friend and fellow traveler, has said it best: now it is upon us to decide. As we live, we decide which story we let win and in so doing decide who we are as humans. We must let the truths of both death through hatred and life through love be remembered, but only one may triumph at the end of the day. And so I ask you, which truth will you live by?
I choose love. I choose life.
Thank you.
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