itself
As South Africans prepared for the success story of Africa, the country’s first democratic election in April 1994, the Rwandan president’s plane was shot down. It was the signal for an orgy of bloodletting that saw nearly a million people hacked to death in 100 days, a killing rate three times as high as that visited on the Jews during the Holocaust. Antjie Krog reports from Fest’Afrika in Rwanda
‘Don’t call it a tragedy, it’s a genocide!” There’s irritation in the voice of the woman who saw three of her children hacked to death.
“Don’t use safe phrases such as decapitating a child! What happened to that head? What happened to that torso? That artery!”
The writers in the audience squirm a bit. “I cannot describe how it was done, not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t – I don’t know how,” says Ugandan writer Goretti Kyomuhendo, presenting her book about the Rwandan genocide titled Secrets no More.
Four years after the genocide, feeling compelled to write about the genocide as a duty of memory, a group of African writers and film-makers visited Rwanda. Last week they came back with an African Festival to present and discuss their films, plays, novels and other writing.
“Where were the writers before the genocide? What good does writing do after the event?”
Again there are some uncomfortable moments. Most of the Rwandans sitting among us suffered family losses. The soft-spoken rector of the University of Rwanda, Emile Rwamasirabo, had lost about 40 family members in Kigali. The young student next to me demanding justice for the victims, “politically as well as literary”, is the only survivor of an extended family of 20 people.
Seventy-five per cent of Rwanda’s Tutsi population was killed in April 1994. When the slaughter started, South Africans were preparing for their first democratic election and the attention of the world media focused on the success story of Africa.
In the meantime, the heart of the continent was killing itself.
Catherine Coquio, a specialist in comparative literature from the University of Paris, puts it this way: “For us in France, Rwanda only started to exist through the genocide – the day Rwanda turned against itself.
“Genocide is always a question and never an answer. It is unthinkable and yet it was carefully thought out.
“It is only the memory of death that will stop death from getting lost again.”
A white author now living in Belgium, Monique Bernier, recalls the paralysing fear ruling Kigali that night of April 6 1994.
The president’s plane was shot down at dusk and within an hour Hutus started killing their Tutsi neighbours and family.
With frightening speed nearly a million people were killed within 100 days – mainly with pangas.
The killing rate in Rwanda was almost three times as high as that of the Jews during the Holocaust.
It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Monique Bernier was trapped in her house in Kigali. She heard over the radio how her friends were being murdered and was eventually evacuated to Belgium.
A hand shoots up: “Why did you leave? Do you know that a white priest who stayed behind saved the lives of hundreds of children he’d taken into protection?”
“I didn’t have a choice. I had a small child,” she says, while clutching a pack of cigarettes and her recently published book, The Shame.
“It doesn’t matter where I live, whatever happens in Africa profoundly affects me,” says Ivory Coast writer Vronique Tadjo, currently living in London.
“When I saw the front page of The Economist calling Africa “The hopeless continent” – for days I was sick in my stomach.”
Because she could speak French she was asked by a psychiatrist to translate the account of a girl who had survived the Rwandan genocide and was being treated in London. Tadjo wrote a book about it: Imana’s Shadow. Voyage to the end of Rwanda.
The woman who had lost three children also published a book: Death Doesn’t Want Me.
“That night when the president was shot down, my husband called me at the hospital where I was head nurse. When I arrived home he was sitting on the floor against the wall, his arms over his head, crying, ‘We are all going to be killed.’ I said, ‘Utter nonsense!’ Then my brother entered the room with some petals in the palm of his hand. ‘This is what is going to happen to us.’ He blew the petals in one soft whiff to the floor. ‘Except you,’ he said, ‘Because death doesn’t want you.'”
The face of Yolande Mukagasana is still swollen from crying while extracts of her book are being read.
Suddenly an attractive young Rwandan student confronts Mukagasana: “I am sick and tired of you throwing your victimhood in our faces. How dare you order these writers how to write? This is all we’ve heard since arriving here: I this, I that . words should be sunk into collective consciousness . when you use the word ‘I’ you sink into selfishness.”
She is stopped by the chair.
Mukagasana is emphatic: “Do you want my life, my girl? Do you want to be in my shoes? You can have it – every single minute of my life you can have. I have not chosen to be a survivor of a genocide. So long as I am alive I’ll speak on behalf of the dead – on behalf of those whose arms have been carried around in Kigali by dogs, and insist that what was done to them is not glossed over by anybody. The only thing I can tell you, my dear, is you don’t know what it’s like when the relationship between you and your enemy is the foundation of the world.”
Afterwards the student explains her anger and irritation to me.
“I was in exile while the genocide happened. So every time she uses the word ‘I’, she cuts me out of victimhood, survivorhood and sacrifice. I resent that. I have suffered in another way and I want literature to go beyond what has happened here to individuals – to transform everything into an opening instead of a closed wall.”
“Where is the literature warning us that Rwandans will kill on this scale? Where is the poem about a panga and the inhumanity of man?” a student mutters through the proceedings.
In the face of such a variety of demands, the writers, joined by some famous African intellectuals, explore with sensitivity, and with their audience, the borders of fiction and history; imagination and the demands of warning, accuracy and justice.
Everybody admits to the failure of African intellectuals to grapple successfully with the issues of the continent. They also ask the age-old question: what’s the meaning of writing and talking when the most important thing is to act?
Listening to the translations from French, I think about South African literature. To what extent can Afrikaans literature be accused of not preparing me for the inhumanity of an ordinary Afrikaner who would cut off a hand and keep it in a jar on his desk? Although people have told me how my poetry has opened their eyes to injustice, to what extent did I fail the readers of my country? Despite the fact that South Africa has produced some of the best writers of the twentieth century, to what extent does their work do justice to the poignant detail of the victims and the depth of depravity of the perpetrators, as has emerged before the Truth Commission? And is this a valid request of literature?
What is more: does the fact that a country does not have a public forum for victims and perpetrators (like the Truth Commission) place a different set of expectations on its writers?
It is confusing to enter Rwanda. The first person one meets is the customs officer – kind, soft-spoken, charming. Did he? Is he one of the killers? Or is he a surviving witness? People look at you without expression.
I want to meet a Hutu, a perpetrator, I requested, but until the end of that week the only related perpetrator I’d come across was myself. They explain to me there’s no difference between the Hutus and Tutsis – they speak the same language, share the same culture and religion. A South African equivalent would be the Amapondo killing the Thembu.
“I’m African. I’m Rwandan. I’m unavoidable,” states Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop.
The first duty of memory is to find words to bear testimony. The second is to try and explain it, then it’s time for cleansing and finally to transform words into oxygen.
“I believe in the sun although there’s an eclipse,” says Vronique Tadjo.
The writers start off tentatively by emphasising the need for all thinking to move beyond the duality brought in by colonisation. According to highly respected Professor Elikia M’Bokolo, the East and Central African societies had a variety of structures that dealt successfully with ethnic tensions and lack of resources.
In its pre-colonial structures Rwandans were ruled by a monarchy and a diversity of structures (administration, arts, religion, the army etc) shared by Hutu and Tutsi alike. These multiple structures were mainly destroyed by the duality embedded in Christianity: God/man, saint/sinner, body/soul, Christian/ heathen.
As 98% of Rwandans became Catholic during the previous century, it left the population trapped in a framework of a bipolar world such as coloniser/colonised; Hutu/Tutsi; crop- farmer/cattle-farmer;
administration/peasantry from which they seemed unable to escape. Added to this was the Belgians’ policy of identity cards classifying tall people with thin noses as Tutsis, worthy of top positions in colonial powers; and squat, solid people with flat noses as Hutus, worthy of manual labour on the land.
I take a walk through Kigali. A strange city. Lush. Green and heavy with bird song. Spread over hills. Rwanda means: a desire to expand. I see men in pink clothes building a big double-storey house without scaffolding. They build thin wooden laths into the walls using them as a kind of ladder – to be pulled out later and the holes filled up.
They were prisoners. After the genocide the Tutsi government arrested 130 000 Hutus involved in the genocide. They are now in jail, packed so tightly that they have to take turns to stand.
Why these pink clothes? Rumour has it that they were made for the gays in Nazi concentration camps, but somehow ended up in Belgium where someone said: “Pink! My God, send it to the Negroes.”
These participants in the genocide have already spent seven years in jail without trial. What to do with them? The fact that they don’t riot to get out of the overcrowded prisons is proof that they know they are guilty and therefore better off inside than outside, some people believe.
The Rwandans at the conference are adamant. They want justice – retributive justice. People should appear in court, go to jail or be hanged.
“Don’t talk to us about amnesty – it is a despicable option.’
A lively discussion takes place during tea-time: Is justice only for the rich? After the genocide Rwanda was declared the poorest country in Africa, because everything was destroyed – so if they have money, should they rebuild or pay lawyers and judges?
“But wouldn’t the countries responsible for what happened here, such as Belgium and France, even the United Nations, be willing to give money to get justice?” I ask. These countries do not think that they have done anything wrong, I’m told.
Later that week the legal department of the Rwandan University and the Conflict Resolution Centre rolled out the whole restitution-versus-retribution trolley. It was clear that the government had made up its mind. Most of the perpetrators have already spent seven years in jail. The government is considering using the local people’s courts on the hills, the gacacas, to elicit confessions from their former neighbours and give sentences of community service.
In the meantime gruesome stories have become part of everyday conversation. About the survivor who fled to the border. When he bent down to drink water, he had to push the dead out of the way to drink. The ban on fish caught in Lake Kivu in the markets of Uganda, because someone had found a finger inside a fish.
“We ate some Tutsis last night,” would be a joke after a meal of fish.
The Tutsis are known to be tall. “It is time you feel how it is to be as short as I am,” a Hutu would say and systematically hack off part of the Tutsi’s legs until he was the required size. Babies mortared. A Hutu wife killing her Tutsi husband and children.
I put down a cup of famous Rwandan coffee – it suddenly tastes like blood – and am reminded of the dictum that Africa is not kind to its gifted. Nearly two thirds of the speakers at this festival no longer live on the continent.
The scourge of Africa is ethnicity, says the journalist from a newspaper in Kampala. Clans fighting for scarce resources. Mugabe is fortunate – he still has an outside enemy to blame; the few white farmers camouflage the real ethnic division in that country.
“I have given up on Africa,” says one of the writers. “I will never,” says Nocky Djedanoum of Chad, the organiser of Fest’Afrika. “We have written a history as Africans; maybe we now should write it as humans. And then let it be a history which helps people to exist, helps them to live.”