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As We Forgive
Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda
By Catherine Claire Larson Zondervan Copyright © 2009 Catherine Claire Larson
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-310-28730-8
Chapter One Rosaria's litany
"My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." Matthew 26:38
Cadeaux's eyes laughed. A grin flickered across her face and settled into a slight smile as she went to fetch water. Leaning over the bucket, Cadeaux splashed water on her cheeks, not noticing the dark beauty shimmering back at her. With a block of soap, she scrubbed her neck, her arms, her legs, her feet, and finally her sandals while her slender shadow bowed beneath Rwanda's fierce August sun. At the age of twelve, she was on the cusp of womanhood, but still had the frame of a child and a sheen of innocence.
Her sandaled feet skimmed along the path as she returned home. Were it not for the vividness of the yellow jacaranda trees, the seamless blue skies, and Cadeaux's swishing lavender skirt, the road, the homes, and the roofs would have seemed a still life in sepia.
Back home, Cadeaux broke a deep silence with her soft footfalls and the creak of a door latch. Inside, her mother, Rosaria, had been going about her daily chores cloaked with an air of solemn dignity, wearing her sorrow like holy garments. A crushed hand hung like prayer beads loosely at her side.
Rosaria's eyes lit on Cadeaux as she flitted past. Somehow, the saturated air felt less stifling with her there. Rosaria breathed more freely. More than bread or wine or water, Cadeaux seemed to her mother a sacrament-a visible sign of inward grace. The name Rosaria gave her had this ripeness of meaning. Born in December of 1994, nine months and four days after horror's opening night, Cadeaux is her mother's consolation, her laughter, and her hope. Her name means "gift," because, as Rosaria will tell you, "She was the only gift I had left."
In a place where each person's grief is strung together like bead upon bead, Rosaria must focus her mind on Cadeaux, on the gift before her. But sometimes, she can't help how her thoughts circle back to a painful past.
When Rosaria's son, Alexis, had become ill with a lengthy stomach sickness, she had taken him to the hospital in Kigali. That was three days before the fighting began. When the violence erupted, Rosaria's husband, a driver for an agricultural processing plant, gathered clothes and food and drove the three other children with him to work, hoping they would be safe there. Only months after the slaughter would Rosaria learn their fate.
On May 10, 1994, two weeks after the UN conceded "acts of genocide" had been committed and thirty-five days into the slaughter that had already consumed an estimated 500,000 people, the hospital where Rosaria and her son found refuge forced all the patients to leave. Ostensibly, the hospital had too many military soldiers who needed care. More likely, hospital officials were being pressured to turn out the Tutsi patients.
Sheltered from a month of horrors, Rosaria and her son were now thrust onto the center stage of the nightmare. Along the roadside, bodies lay in various positions of flight, glass from a smashed-in car windshield glinted in the sunlight, and a wild dog gnawed at something resembling a human leg. While the U.S. State Department argued over whether or not to jam Rwandan radio stations, Rosaria and Alexis walked by a radio blaring, "Search houses, search the marshes, search the ditches; make sure no rebels have slipped in to hide." A few miles down the road they found temporary shelter in the Holy Family Church, the largest cathedral in Kigali.
The church teemed with the barely living: a woman without an arm trying to nurse a baby, an old man moaning with bloodied cloths wrapped around his head, a child crying inconsolably for her missing mother. As Rosaria unrolled a blanket for her son, she saw the head priest speaking angrily with one of the nuns. He was a young man with a face full of hate, dressed not in a collar, but in a flack vest with a gun. After the genocide, the tribunal would charge this man with aiding the militia and also with rape. Two nights after Rosaria arrived, the militia did, in fact, raid the church. They came with a list of men, who were promptly taken outside. Alexis and Rosaria heard the shouting, then the shots. Rosaria and Alexis would not stay to see more executions; they decided to move at first light.
From there they fled to Nyamirambo Stadium and then along the Nyabarongo River out of the city toward Nyamata. They did their best to avoid the roadblocks where their fellow Rwandans, drunk on banana beer and blood, shot or butchered anyone without a Hutu identity card and piled the bodies in ditches beside the road.
Two days into the journey, Rosaria and her son encountered three Burundian refugees who were now caught in the midst of Rwanda's genocide. Hoping that identifying with them might offer her some protection, Rosaria posed as their leader. When they reached Nyamata, however, a few of Rosaria's neighbors, who had moved farther north to continue looting, recognized her.
"They sliced us with machetes and left us to die," Rosaria said slowly as if reciting details rubbed smooth through heavy handling. Rosaria was the only one who survived, and Cadeaux was still in her womb. She paused, rolling over the mystery in her mind. "The people who cut us with machetes were neighbors-people who knew me."
Saveri was one of Rosaria's neighbors at the time of the genocide. Though he is only forty, his face seems drawn and tired, as if the memories of the past find their center point where his eyes narrow and his forehead pinches down. He doesn't recall any animosity toward the Tutsi as a child. "But the government would indoctrinate us," he explained, "telling us that a Tutsi is an enemy, as a result of our bad history that took place before we were born."
That "bad history" stretches back to the time of German, then Belgian, colonization around the turn of the century. The muzuungu, or foreigners, noticed how the majority of the king's inner circle, the ruling class, had certain characteristics-thinner noses, lighter skin, taller frames. They theorized that this ruling class was a different race originating from Northern Africa, with common ancestral lineage to the Caucasian race. They deposed any chiefs or subchiefs who did not fit their stereotype. Like a disease, racism spread, as did the myth that the Tutsi were genetically predestined to rule over the Hutu.
When Saveri started school, he was taught this division: the Tutsi were herders, tall, with long noses, while the Hutu were farmers. Such distinctions taught him there was a sharp dichotomy between Hutu and Tutsi. But even back in school, Saveri suspected these were just fabrications geared to incite strife.
The story of those in power inciting strife in the population is one of the most grievous tales of the history of Rwanda. To divide and conquer, the Belgians incited strife by putting Tutsi in power, and relegating Hutu to lesser positions. Basically, the Belgians maintained power by propping up the Tutsi. In the midfifties when King Mutara Rudahigwa, influenced by other African leaders, began distributing power in a more democratic fashion among Hutu and Tutsi alike, the Belgian colonialists swung the pendulum the other way. They released a prominent liberal Tutsi from prison, and aided him in the creation of his own political party. Meanwhile, disgruntled Hutu formed another party, the Parmehutu. When violence inevitably ensued, the Belgians favored the revolutionary Hutu party as a means of retaining their colonial power.
Ousted from power, Tutsi sought refuge in the neighboring countries-Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, and Zaire (the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo). In the meantime, the legacy of strife continued under the Hutu reign. When these exiled Tutsi began to press for the right to return to their homeland, they were repelled. As this Rwandan Patriotic Force or RPF gathered to take back this right by violence, the Hutu extremists incited hatred among the Hutu against the Tutsi through radio broadcasts. Saveri was one of hundreds of thousands indoctrinated to hate the Tutsi people and told to cleanse the countryside of such "cockroaches."
"What brought us the conviction to commit genocide was the indoctrination of divisive ideas by bad government," continued Saveri.
Bad government took many forms. The government-backed newspaper Kangura printed the Hutu Ten Commandments, one of which stated that a Hutu man who married a Tutsi woman should be thought of as a traitor. Presidential advisor Leon Mugesera, speaking at a political rally in 1992, asked, "What are we waiting for to decimate these families?" and "The person whose neck you do not cut is the one who will cut yours." Little by little, those in authority laid the psychological foundation necessary to build genocide. In fact, between 1990 and 1994, systematic killing of Tutsi had already become widespread. And when the United Nations negotiated a treaty of peace and distribution of power between the two groups at a summit in Arusha, Tanzania, on August 4, 1993, those Hutu clinging to power made preparations for one of the worst genocides in history.
On April 6, 1994, President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane plummeted from the sky after being hit by a missile. It became the albatross around the neck of the Tutsi people when Hutu claimed that the RPF had shot it down. The most widely accepted theory today is that radical Hutu, unsatisfied with the direction of the peace talks, assassinated the Rwandan and Burundian presidents. Either way, the sudden streak of a missile and the fiery light of a falling plane were a diabolical kind of fireworks that night-evil's unseemly opening ceremonies to a hundred days of slaughter that would consume the country.
Within hours of the plane's metal shrapnel gashing Rwandan soil, Hutu sharpened their machetes to do likewise. Radios hissed a message that "the season for slaughter" had arrived. In the days to follow, Hutu killed the Tutsi and their sympathizers at a rate five times higher than the mechanized Nazi gas chambers.
Saveri originally objected to the killings. He was standing with some others, mending a fence that April day, when a community leader approached them. The leader told Saveri and the others that he had seen where some rebels, or inkotanyi, were hiding, and that they should follow him. But when they got there, they found what the community leader, Ngabonziza Zakayo, had known all along: these weren't rebels at all. It was a mother, hiding in a neighbor's house with her two children.
Zakayo ordered the old man who had been hiding this mother and her children to kill them. If the old man refused, he would be killed himself. The old man began pleading. Zakayo demanded ten thousand francs. But the old man begged, saying that he did not have that much money.
Zakayo had eyed the small herd of cattle as he approached the house. Greedily, he said that he would take a bull instead as a ransom for the old man's life, so that he would not be buried with the Tutsi he was hiding. The old man continued to plead, suggesting that if he gave Zakayo the bull that the mother and her children should be able to go free. But Zakayo was adamant; the bull was merely penalty for hiding the "cockroaches" and the price for the old man's own life.
"Dig a grave," Zakayo yelled in the direction of the old man. The old man and his neighbor reluctantly obeyed. When the grave was done, the mother and her two children were told to sit in it. They did not try to run, but did just as they were told.
Zakayo selected one of Saveri's friends to beat the mother and her children to death using a spiked club. He refused, was beaten severely, and was then told to sit aside. "Whoever will refuse to kill will be punished later at our discretion," Zakayo warned.
After seeing what had befallen his friend, Saveri did not resist. When given the spiked club, he pummeled the woman and her two small children until they died. Though there were many who then joined in, Saveri was the first to strike. Once they had finished, they covered the bodies with dirt and left the scene. The mother's name was Christine; she was Rosaria's sister.
After killing, Saveri was changed. "Something happened to me," he said. "I was not the same. I was void of peace in my heart from that moment."
Unlike Saveri, Rosaria does not say much about the past.
If asked, she will bare her scars. A gash across her left shoulder reminds the onlooker how she used her back as a human shield to hide two fragile lives, hers and Cadeaux's.
Those mysteries not told by her scars are spoken plainly through her eyes. In the flash of a moment, in the glint of steel, something changed her, and she would never be the same. She too became void of peace in her heart from that moment.
These are the sorrowful mysteries. But Rosaria must turn her eyes again to other mysteries-the mystery of a spared life. Cadeaux: her name is a word Rosaria is just beginning to understand.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from As We Forgive by Catherine Claire Larson Copyright © 2009 by Catherine Claire Larson. Excerpted by permission.
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