Among Beatrice’s conundrums is how she came to live in a pigsty. She can put all the elements together. War. Persecution. Genocide. Survival. Even a victory of sorts. But the way things have worked out just don’t make sense to the forlorn Rwandan Tutsi who believes her life is over although she is only in middle age.
Beatrice, after all, was a victim. Her family was murdered in the genocide. Yet, she says, she is the one made to feel guilty, while others who claim her suffering as the moral basis for their power don’t appear to care.
“What is my life? The survivors are the bottom of the pile. Nobody looks after us. We are the survivors of the genocide, but I am the one living in a pigsty. It would have been better to die,” she said.
Beatrice once had a proper home with three rooms and enough land to feed her family. But then she had a husband, and children, too. All of them are gone now. The house was torn down by her neighbours. Her husband was murdered, and days later her four children were killed with machetes.
Beatrice survived by a stroke of luck she has come to regret. She had hidden her children in the bush and gone to look for food when the killers hunted them down. When she returned they were gone forever.
As she talks about her lost family, Beatrice curls up on a reed mat. She pulls her shawl around her mouth and mumbles. Like many who escaped the genocide, she is a victim of her survival. She grapples with the guilt of living. And she has to contend with the occasional but stinging accusatory comments of others who wonder how she managed to escape. Worst of all, they come not from hostile Hutus but a few of her fellow Tutsis.
One of Beatrice’s neighbours wanders in. She smiles, shakes hands and sits down. But when she hears what is being discussed she moves to leave. Beatrice calms her, tells her that it’s just the truth and asks what anyone can possibly do to them that hasn’t already been done.
The woman boldly ventures an opinion.
“Those outsiders did not suffer like we did. They used our suffering and they promised us lots of things. But I think they want to forget us. Perhaps it would have been easier for them if everyone had died,” she said.
For a woman who showed such caution only minutes before, it was a startling and unusual recognition of the divide between the Tutsis who lived through the genocide, and those who returned to Rwanda from exile after the genocide. It is the “outsiders” who are Rwanda’s new elite. Some of the survivors are beginning to wonder if it is not at their expense.
The genocide’s victims, and the other tiny proportion of Tutsis who slipped through, are the moral foundation for Rwanda’s government. It has no popular legitimacy. The Hutu majority would vote it out in an instant were there to be an election.
But survivors have noted that there are hardly any of their number in the government. Rwanda’s post-war civil service is dominated by men and women who grew up or were born in Uganda. Tutsis returned from Burundi are prominent in business, and notorious even among other Tutsis for their gut-level maltreatment of Hutus. The one-time refugees back from Tanzania have often settled into the more sedate lifestyle of farming.
The survivors have not been so lucky. Often disoriented and numb from grief, they are mostly looking for security, homes and justice. Rarely are they provided. Hutu extremists continue to terrorise and kill. The few Tutsis whose homes are still standing have often not been able to return. Most of the men who organised the genocide are still free.
As Beatrice’s bitterness spills forth, she dares to venture into territory almost no survivor speculates openly about; the origin of their troubles. Yes, there had been decades of routine discrimination interspersed with periodic bursts of anti-Tutsi violence.
But then she mentions October 1990. However bad things were before, that’s when they turned really nasty. That’s when the “outsiders” invaded to liberate Rwanda’s Tutsis. Beatrice says she paid the price.
“That is when our problems began. Before that we got along with our Hutu neighbours. My husband had many friends. But after October 1990 things became very difficult. People would not talk to us, then they accused us. It spoiled everything,” she said.
Then Beatrice’s friend ran out of the door.