Tag: Rwanda

Alice and Emmanuel: A story of reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda

Emotional scenes played out in Rwanda this week as the country commemorated 20 years since the genocide that left close to a million people dead.

April 1994 is a long time ago, but physical and emotional scars remain fresh.

One wonders, every time the word Rwanda is mentioned, how the country managed to pull itself out of one of the darkest periods in the history of human existence.

Even more astounding is how people in Rwanda managed to find each other, forgive and bridge the gap that was left by the ethnic cleansing that happened 20 years ago.

Other nations are still struggling to find themselves almost a century after wars.

But Rwanda’s is a miracle of unimaginable scale. I know this because I walked the roads the killers walked and visited the sites of mass murders, where only skulls and bloodied garments now bear testimony to the gruesome events that began in April 1994.

I saw this miracle in the eyes of Alice Mukarurinda when she spoke of her boyfriend, Emmanuel Ndayisaba. Theirs is a tale of post-genocide forgiveness.

I met the two in June 2012 when I was a guest of the Rwandan president during the closure of the Gacaca courts – a locally-brewed justice system where trials where held publicly and community members, including women, were elected as judges. It was modelled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission but had better results.

During 2001 until they closed in June 2012, the Gacaca courts heard over two million cases and in the process healed the wounds of many. Even at the closing function, more Rwandans were still wishing it would remain operational.

Locals from the Kigali’s Gikondo District One attend a session of the Gacaca grassroots tribunal on March 28 2004. (Pic: AFP)

Although criticised by few human rights organisations for not subscribing to minimum legal standards, the courts not only heard many cases which would have taken a conventional court years to finish, but they was far cheaper to maintain. Compare it to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which in 2012 had cost $1.7-billion to run, having only tried 60 suspects in its 17 years of existence.

Most of the people I spoke to in Rwanda in 2012, both victims and perpetrators, were happy with the Gacaca tribunal process thus far. This was despite the fact that many families still didn’t know how their family members were killed or where they were buried.

Mass graves were still being discovered in June 2012, which disputes the 800 000 fixed figure of those killed.

In Nyamwata, at a church in which hundreds were killed as they sought safety from the Hutus, families were still coming through to clean the recently exhumed bones in bags which they believe belong to their loved ones.

I asked how they knew the bones belonged to their families members, and they said just by cleaning the bones, it gave them some kind of closure. They felt they had paid their last respects to those they loved, those they will never see again.

But it was how forgiveness brought people from tribal divides together that fascinated me.

I met Alice at one of the functions held to bring down the curtain on these special courts in 2012. Alice still bears machete scars on her head, cheek and neck, and only has half of her arm. The other half was cut off. All this happened one day in April 1994 when Hutu militia came to her village and went on a killing spree of anyone who was slimmer and taller – an indication that they were Tutsis.

Within a few minutes, 33 members of her family were killed in front of her, including her nine-month-old daughter.

During the killing spree, one bearded Hutu man unleashed a machete several times on Alice’s head, and blood gushed onto her face. He tried to finish her, but she managed to use her right arm to block the machete. Her arm got cut, severed just above the wrist. The bearded man sliced her face. His colleague pierced a spear through her left shoulder.

She fainted. The men thought she was dead, and left. She was found alive three days later.

The bearded man who severed Alice’s arm with a machete is Emmanuel Ndayisaba. He is her boyfriend now. The two met during one of the Gacaca court sessions. They were standing on opposing sides – Emmanuel, a genocide perpetrator and Alice, the victim who needed answers.

Emmanuel Ndayisaba and Alice Mukarurinda sit in Alice’s home in Nyamata, Rwanda. (Pic: AP Exchange)

That day, he confessed to the court what he did to Alice and her family. In fact he was surprised to see her alive. She remembered him because of his beard, the same beard he had when he killed her family members, and the same beard that always came to mind when someone asked her about the killings.

Alice told me at first that it was difficult to forgive Emmanuel. She cried until she had no more tears. But she forgave Emmanuel and today the two are very close. “I have learnt to forgive, even the one who tried to kill me,” she told me.

Alice and Emmanuel continue to spread the message of forgiveness at forums where they talk about reconciliation. They hope that this will help heal the wounds of the past atrocities. They have become an inspiration for those who believe in the impossibility of reconciliation after brutal ethnic conflict such as the one that happened in Rwanda.

While theirs is an extraordinary story of reconciliation and forgiveness, it remains to be seen if this will inspire the nation to put its past behind it. Two decades later, many hope that Rwandan leaders and residents will give meaning to the messages of “Never Again” and chart the country to extraordinary healing and hope. To me, that is what is there for Rwanda to celebrate as it commemorates 20 years.

Isaac Masilo Mangena is a communicator/activist. He has spent much of the past decade in newsrooms around Africa, and visited Rwanda as a journalist in 2012. He believes that the African dream will not die.

10 years ago

The legacy of the Rwandan genocide

I went back to Rwanda last month for the first time in almost 20 years. I was head of mission for Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) during and after the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The experience changed me completely; my innocence died there.

In April and May 1994, I was working just across the border in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), receiving refugees fleeing the violence. But very few managed to escape the horrors. Eight hundred thousand people died in 100 days. The rivers were full of mutilated bodies. Most of the corpses were headless, except for those victims who had paid a dollar to be murdered with a bullet.

Photographs of people who were killed during the 1994 genocide are seen inside the Kigali Genocide Memorial Museum. (Pic: Reuters)

I remember some Rwandan boys who came across the border and told me what had happened in their village. While they hid in the bushes, they saw their mother raped and murdered, their sisters killed and their father taken away. Then they ran and ran for days until they reached the border. One of the boys had badly injured his arm – it was barely attached. His little brother had died in his arms.

Return to Rwanda
These were the images that I brought back with me. But on arriving in Kigali, the capital, I found a prosperous African city full of cars, commerce and people living their lives. My memories of a post-apocalyptic ghost town, of bullets, blood and hastily dug mass graves, the air heavy with death and fear, seemed a lifetime ago.

The former MSF hospital in Ruhengeri, northwest of Kigali, is now a beautiful, bustling referral facility, treating a normal range of human ailments. No more patients with war wounds and landmine injuries, like those who came to us in the days and weeks following the genocide. Only people’s mental trauma persists as evidence of the horror they suffered.

Simple memorials and mass grave sites testify to the great evil that sucked up this tiny country. I stopped in Butare to pay my respects to the hundreds of Rwandan MSF aid workers who were slaughtered in April and May 1994. A mass grave has been constructed on the grounds of the University of Butare opposite the hospital – a simple memorial, with photos of the dead. It was here, in this quiet and lovely spot that I was finally able to cry.

Crossing the border
There could not have been a greater contrast between the peace and calm of Rwanda and what I found when I crossed the border into DRC. Goma, previously a small town, has become a bustling city of one million inhabitants sprawled along the shore of Lake Kivu.

More than 100 international humanitarian organisations help fuel a booming economy. It is hot and dusty, dirty and chaotic. The black volcanic rock everywhere reminds you that the city lives in the shadow of active volcanoes that erupted in 2002.

Just outside Goma, terrible roads took us past camps for displaced people that litter the hills and roadsides. The improvised shacks in these camps are home to hundreds of thousands of people, about 80 per cent of them displaced by the armed conflict and violence in Masisi Territory, a beautiful mountainous region north of Goma.

I had last been in Masisi in 1996, but this was not the same place I remembered. Back then the war was just beginning; the Masisi of today is soaked in violence, the people experienced at fleeing conflict.

Driving past a police station, we heard the sounds of a man being beaten inside. Outside, children laughed at his screams of pain and anger. They are part of a new generation of Congolese children who have only known violence, displacement and deprivation.

Struggle to reach care
We reached the MSF hospital in Masisi town. In the emergency room, a baby lay motionless, breathing hard. Medical staff had started treating his severe pneumonia. He got sick while hiding in the forest with his mother and six brothers and sisters, as they fled the battles raging in their small village.

His mother explained that after a year of living in a camp for displaced people, she had recently returned home with her young family. Then the fighting resumed and they had to flee yet again. They had no food, no shelter, no medical care and no protection from the voracious mosquitoes and heavy rains. After four days they turned back, preferring to die at home rather than in the forest.

Her baby became increasingly sick, and there was no medical care in the village; the MSF health centre had been looted, the medicines stolen. She decided to make the long walk to Masisi hospital with her small children in tow. Fortunately an MSF ambulance spotted her on the road. After another day of walking in the heavy rain, it might have been too late for her baby.

The everyday emergency in the DRC
This family is among the 1.7 million people displaced by violent conflict in eastern DRC. You don’t hear much about the Congolese people who have fled their homes and lost what little they have not once, but multiple times over the past 20 years. We have been working in eastern DRC since 1992 providing emergency medical care to this forgotten population.

The people of eastern DRC live in a state of everyday emergency. Our teams routinely respond to outbreaks of measles and cholera; just last week a typhoid epidemic claimed many lives. Local health facilities do not function and the medical situation is desperate.

As we remember the Rwandan genocide of 20 years ago, my hope is that we will look to DRC and the everyday emergency that is bringing a people to its knees. Every day in Congo armed men are pillaging towns and villages and forcing people to flee. Every day children are dying from preventable diseases like pneumonia. Every day mothers are dying in childbirth and every day women are victims of sexual abuse. These people deserve our help.

Rachel Kiddell-Monroe is a Canadian doctor who served as emergency co-ordinator and later head of mission in the DRC (then Zaire) for MSF/Doctors Without Borders from 1993 to the end of 1996.

10 years ago

Transmedia doccie explores reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda

This week marks 20 years since the beginning of the Rwandan genocide in which at least 800 000 people were killed.

It will also signal the beginning of Love Radio: Episodes of Love & Hate, a new transmedia documentary by Anoek Steketee and Eefje Blankevoort that aims to explore the subject of reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda.

Love Radio trailer from Prospektor on Vimeo.

Consisting of a web documentary, mobile tap stories for smartphone users and an exhibition in Amsterdam’s FOAM Museum (from July 11 July to September 7), Love Radio straddles the thin line between fact and fiction. At first glance it tells a linear, almost fairy-tale narrative, based around the radio soap Musekeweya (New Dawn). But a closer look reveals the complex reality. While in the soap happy endings predominate, reconciliation in real life is rather more intransigent. After the gruesome killings, how can perpetrators and victims live with and love each other?

Love Radio tells the story of the soap’s creators, its actors and audience through film, photography and text. It is a story of the impact of mass media and the thin line between fact and fiction, violence and reconciliation, guilt and innocence.

Dynamic Africa is a curated multimedia blog focused on all facets of African cultures, African history, and the lives and experiences of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora – past and present. Visit the blog and connect with the curator, Funke Makinwa, on Twitter.

10 years ago

Black girl privilege

(Pic: Flickr / epSos.de)

When I was a kid, my mother told me I would have to work harder in this life because I was black girl – a warning I am sure many others of my gender and race have received. I should mention that, at the time, I was living in a country where the majority of people were white. As I grew up, I heard the same message in the media – on the news, blogs, in songs and films – it was clear that everyone believed that at the top of the economic food chain were rich white men and at the very bottom were poor black girls.

I moved to my country of origin, Rwanda, when I was 22. It is a small developing country at the heart of Africa that has been recognised for its impressive economic grown in the last decade. As a young adult, I found myself in a world full of charities and NGOs that had pictures of girls that looked just like a 10-year-old me, only no one had brushed their hair or got them to put on their prettiest clothes before taking the picture. I read disheartening statistics that told me that most girls my age and from my region had already given birth to their first child, had dropped out of school, had been subject to sexual violence, domestic abuse – do I need to go on? So what happens to me – a university-educated, single, entrepreneur with a face that world believes belongs to a victim?

This is what happens: rather than suffering the negative discrimination I was promised, the opposite has happened. People want to help me – not because they think I’m intelligent, or driven, or skilled – but because they believe I must need it, being an African woman. I can’t tell you how many times I have been approached (often by white men), with offers to invest in my business or with other valuable opportunities before they’ve had had a chance to get to know me or my business – to know if I really need it or even deserve it. On top of the freebies thrown at me, I often get asked to represent groups that I am a part of, because having a young black woman on the cover will give the impression of diversity and goodwill. You see, as an African woman, there are many people who want to help you through “the struggle” (or at least be photographed helping you through it).

Contrast this with the issues faced by the young white men here in Rwanda and in other African countries. The prejudice they face is that they are all rich, hard working and of course, very generous! I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked by some of my African friends to ask my white friends to help them out financially – a scholarship, a job, a gift, etc. On top of this, white men (and women, too) are often subjected to “muzungu prices” – inflated prices believed that only a white person can pay – no, should pay, because, after all, they have more money than they know what to do with, right? Interestingly, many of the white friends I have in Rwanda are missionaries and volunteers (a few are business people but I don’t know if they are rich… and if they are, they haven’t told me!). The other day, a friend of mine, a white woman, visited Rwanda from the UK. Soon after I was seen with her, I was asked by a Rwandan friend to get my British friend to sponsor her child’s education. She did not ask me if my British friend could afford it or if she was the kind of person to do that – she had seen enough when she saw the colour of her skin.

Many Rwandans have a glorified image of white people – and why wouldn’t they? After all, when we Rwandans visit Europe or America or Australia, we take photos in the capital cities, in front of gleaming skyscrapers, expensive cars, and posh houses. To pose with of a random child playing in the dirt or a homeless man in rags sitting in the street and make that our Facebook profile picture would seem ludicrous!

As a result, white people visiting Africa continue to suffer under the stereotype that they all live on 100 dollars a day. Meanwhile, rich – well, okay, I’m not rich so let’s say “financially stable” – black girls like me must continue to have money thrown at us. So, I guess you’re wondering – what’s the secret? How can you know whether or not a white man that just walked by is here on an expensive holiday or a missionary trip? How can you tell if that black girl is wearing torn jeans as a fashion statement or because she can’t afford new ones? Well – here’s the secret: get to know them!

Akaliza Keza Gara is the founder of a multimedia company called Shaking Sun, a member of Girls In ICT Rwanda, the Kigali Global Shapers hub and kLab, an ICT innovation hub. She loves open source technology, animated films and chocolate milkshakes. Follow her on Twitter: @AkalizaKeza

10 years ago

Briton to walk length of the Nile on 6840km trek from Rwanda to Egypt

Victorian explorers such as Speke, Burton, Livingstone and Stanley famously tramped around central Africa in search of the fabled source of the Nile. But no one has been known to walk the river’s 4 250-mile (6 840km) length, an omission Levison Wood intends to rectify and hopes he can do it in a year.

Setting off from dense forest in the highlands of Rwanda on December 1, Wood (31), a former parachute regiment captain from Putney, south London, will work his way through up to seven countries – depending which side of the river he takes – some of which have been riven by civil unrest and war.

Wood will face natural hazards, from raging torrents to wildlife; he will traverse forests, the vast Sudd swamp, and desert while taking in, possibly, Burundi, but definitely Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan, Sudan and Egypt.

Boats float on the river Nile in Cairo on April 30 2013. (Pic: AFP)

“The old adage is there is nothing more dangerous than between a hippo and the water and that is where I am going to be,” said Wood, admitting it was also as well to ask local people when crocodiles liked to be in the water.”Before you had decent anti-microbials in the 20th century, for most of the Victorian explorers, Speke and Livingstone and all those chaps looking for the source of the Nile, it was much easier coming from the east – [what is now] Tanzania and the coast – than it was to get round the Sudd. Anyone who had ever tried that basically died of malaria,” said Wood.

The Sudanese civil war put much of the Nile off-limits until recently. “For the first time in history, [this journey] is medically, politically and bureacratically possible,” said Wood, who will be seeking to raise money for three charities, Tusk, Space for Giants and Ameca.

Unlike Joanna Lumley and the 2005-2006 Ascend the Nile team who employed mechanised transport, Wood will be heading downstream. He will however, have a Channel Four film crew joining him for up to fortnight.

Wood, who served in Afghanistan in 2008 and has more recently escorted film crews into hostile areas, is well aware of other dangers facing 21st-century explorers. The Ascend the Nile team, led by New Zealanders Garth MacIntyre and Cam McLeay and Briton Neil McGrigor, witnessed one member, Briton Steve Willis, killed in an ambush by an armed rebel group in Uganda. McGrigor also broke and burned his leg in an accident that wrecked a motorised raft and a support aircraft.

Wood will not be armed, though will be joined by armed rangers in national parks, not only to protect him from wild animals but from poachers. “Certainly it is not wise to carry arms yourself.”

Wood hopes to complete up to 100 miles a week but said: “No doubt the film crew will slow me down quite considerably and anything can happen. You only need to get a sprained ankle to delay you by a fortnight.”

He insisted that most of the time he would rely on local guides. “In more remote parts of South Sudan, especially swamp areas, and, of course, the desert, it is going to be tough and there are going to be weeks and weeks without a village. The idea is to explore Africa as much as possible. If there are huge stretches where I need to carry my own food, there might be times I need to get a camel or something … I don’t have the budget for a helicopter.”

Wood, who has received words of encouragement from modern-day adventurers including Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Colonel John Blashford-Snell, reckons the trip will cost about £150 000. He is still seeking sponsors and encouraging wellwishers to support his favourite sub-Saharan wildlife and healthcare charities.

“You have to be prepared as much as you can. The key really is having good, trustworthy local guides who have a good understanding of places you are going into. I have done my research as best I can but a lot of it you have to leave to, I won’t say blind faith, but leave to human kindness.”