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.

11 years ago

Zimbabwe’s crocs go veggie for high fashion

Crocodiles are some of the most feared predators in Africa, ruthless reptiles renowned for tearing their prey to pieces before swallowing hunks of meat raw.

But in the baking sun at Nyanyana crocodile farm on the shores of Zimbabwe’s Lake Kariba, feeding time has a surreal edge as the beasts nibble lazily at bowls of vegetarian pellets.

Besides being cheaper than meat, the diet of protein concentrate, minerals, vitamins, maize meal and water is said to enhance crocodile skin destined to become handbags or shoes on the catwalks of New York, Paris, London or Milan.

“We don’t feed them meat any more,” said Oliver Kamundimu, financial director of farm owner Padenga Holdings.

“It actually improves the quality because we now measure all the nutrients that we are putting in there, which the crocodile may not get from meat only,” he told Reuters in an interview.

Crocodiles feed on vegetarian pellets inside a pen at Nyanyana Crocodile Farm in Kariba. (Pic: Reuters)

Four hundred kilometres northwest of Harare, Nyanyana is home to 50 000 Nile crocodiles and is one of three Padenga farms around Kariba, Africa’s largest man-made lake.

The company has 164 000 crocodiles in all and started feeding pellets in 2006 at the height of an economic crisis in Zimbabwe that made meat scarce and very expensive.

Initially, the pellets contained 50% meat but that has gradually been phased out to an entirely vegetarian diet.

“We have moved gradually to a point where we reduced the meat to about 15% then to 7% and where we are now there is zero meat, zero fish,” he said.

“It’s a much cleaner operation and the crocs are getting all the nutrients they want from that pellet.”

Fed every second day, the crocodiles are largely docile and lie asleep in their enclosures as workers walk around casually cleaning up leftovers.

Hermes, Gucci
The crocodiles are slaughtered at 30 months, when they are about 1.5 metres long and their skin is soft and supple.

Last year Harare-listed Padenga sold 42 000 skins to tanneries in Europe, especially France, where the average skin fetches $550.

Ninety percent of the leather becomes high-end handbags, Kamundimu said, while the remainder makes belts, shoes and watch straps for some of the biggest names in world fashion.

“When you hear names like Hermes, Louis Vuitton and Gucci – those are the brand names we are talking about,” he said with a satisfied smile.

Having survived economic collapse and hyperinflation of 500 billion percent in Zimbabwe, Padenga then had to deal with fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis, and economic contraction in the euro zone, its main market.

However, while appetite for crocodile meat cooled in Europe and Asia, super-wealthy European shoppers shrugged off recession and continued to snap up crocodile-skin items, Kamundimu said.

“When you look at people who buy handbags for their wives or daughters that cost $40 000 a piece, even when the euro zone problems came, they could still afford to buy,” he said. We didn’t feel a decline.”

MacDonald Dzirutwe for Reuters

11 years ago

The tragedy we found in Tuesday’s trash

It’s another pretty day in Ngong with clear skies and chirping birds. Jackie, the newest member of my circle of parenthood help, has just returned home from fetching my son Shaka, who is three months away from turning five. As I open the gate, she says to me: “Mama Shaka, kitu kimefanyika!” Something has happened.

Tuesday is rubbish collection day in our town, which is located in the Great Rift Valley near Nairobi. My family has lived in Ngong for over 20 years, and no municipal or county rubbish removal initiatives have existed during this time. So local entrepreneurs came up with their own trash collection initiative, a service that we use at the moment. On this warm, summer’s day we put our trash out as usual for the truck to collect.

Jackie lives about 50 metres from my childhood home, and just 10 meters from the pile of trash at the end of our street. At 30 she is no shrinking violet, but she doesn’t say much. Today, however, she is more excited than usual. She tells me that a little baby boy has been found on top of the pile of rubbish. I don’t understand. Where is the child’s family, I ask? How do you tell a child to sit on a pile of rubbish? Jackie says she doesn’t know. No one knows. All they know is that the little baby was wrapped in a curtain and left there. A curtain. Now it makes sense. The little baby was aborted and dumped along with Tuesday’s trash.

While rummaging through the rubbish, a street child had found the aborted baby. It was a baby, not a foetus, because this abortion was carried out very late into the pregnancy. Jackie tells me that the child had all its parts – all it had to do was grow. She reckons it was five months or older. She laughs as she relates this to me, but her laughter is not out of malice or insensitivity. Like many others, she just didn’t know what else to say or do.

I ask Jackie why no one called the police. She says someone has to go to the police station and write a statement before they would come and collect the body. I want to do this – but with the law enforcement system here, there’s a chance that I would be questioned, and even suspected of the backstreet abortion. I’m a single mother, with no important surnames that can offer me any kind of protection, and no husband to come vouch for my moral worthiness. Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong police officer would get me into trouble.

I go to cover the body. It is placed at the side of the road where children pass by on their way home from school. They do not need to see that. Worse still, they do not need to hear the conversations vilifying the woman or girl that had aborted the baby, and shaming the faceless and nameless doer of this ‘evil’. Someone ventures that they know whose curtain the baby is wrapped in – but fortunately a witch-hunt is not called for. In places like Ngong with slow justice systems and even slower delivery of public services like police protection, the people’s thirst for due process comes fast and furiously.

Abortions in Kenya
Kenya has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. Over 460 000 abortions were carried out in 2012 alone, according to research by the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC). The majority of these were due to unwanted pregnancies. Another survey revealed that more than 2 500 Kenyan women die annually from complications arising from unsafe abortions carried out by unqualified medical practitioners. Kenya relaxed its abortion laws in the new Constitution that passed in 2010. Before this, abortion was illegal unless except to save a woman’s life – and in this case, three doctors would have to approve a woman’s request for one. The new Constitution gives healthcare practitioners more latitude to determine when an abortion can be carried out. But as you can imagine, if the decision to grant a woman or girl an abortion lies in the hands of a healthcare professional, this leaves a lot to chance. Many Kenyans are still largely conservative when it comes to discourses on abortion, and chances that a nurse in a rural village will grant a 15-year-old with an unplanned pregnancy a requested abortion are very slim. Commenting on the APHRC report, researcher Dr Elizabeth Kimani said that there is still a lot of stigma in Kenya around access to abortion as a reproductive health right for women. The government is dragging its feet in upgrading not only the facilities to carry out abortions, but also initiatives to sensitise health care professionals on why there’s a critical need for conversations about abortion in the country.

(Pic: Flickr / Damien du Toit)

Ten years ago, when I was in high school, I was subjected to a mandatory pregnancy test after what the school authorities found what they suspected was an aborted foetus in one of the dormitory bathrooms. The test was not a pee-on-a-stick type test. The school nurse carried out a vaginal exam, pressed down on my abdomen, and squeezed my nipples – to check for milk production, I guess. It was humiliating to say the least, and all the girls – nearly 1000 of us – had to undergo this. I could not imagine how or with what a fellow student could have carried out that suspected abortion. According to 2012 report by Kenya’s human rights commission, women take overdoses of anti-malaria medication or insert sharp objects like knitting needles and sticks into their bodies.

Back in Ngong, I dared to think about the woman that had just aborted this baby. She wasn’t a statistic in a report far away – she lived in my neighbourhood, she was close enough for me to have maybe met her or even spoken to her. Was she okay? Was she alone? Did she have help? Was she slowly bleeding to death in a little flat somewhere? Had she been raped? Was it an unplanned pregnancy? Maybe it was a case of incest, or maybe it wasn’t. To attempt a backstreet abortion this far into a pregnancy was an act of despair and desperation. The young woman or girl who did this really had no other choice. She didn’t. The people gathered by the side of the road did not ask these questions – all they saw was an aborted child, dumped on top of Tuesday’s trash.

I am unapologetically pro-choice. Restrictive laws and harsh social systems leave women and girls with such few options and virtually no bodily autonomy. And this goes beyond just the right to have safe abortions – it begins with a woman’s or a girl’s right to decide what happens to her body. A lot of underage sex is coerced and transactional. Many unplanned pregnancies are unwanted, even in marriage and in situations of perceived social stability. There’s no safety anywhere as far as women’s and girl’s bodies are concerned.

While society, religious organisations and indeed governments attempt to put their best moral foot forward, the reproductive and health rights of women and girls continue to suffer. And this suffering is not left to the women and girls alone – society suffers too. Women, men and children had to see an aborted child dumped on the side of the road, and the traumatic effects that witnessing such a sight can have on them goes ignored. As a passionate advocate for the right of women to choose, it was a humbling moment when I realised that these ‘issues’ are not happening ‘out there’ – they are happening right outside my front door, right on top of Tuesday’s trash.

*This post was edited to correct the number of abortions carried out in Kenya in 2012.

Sheena Gimase is a Kenyan-born and Africa-raised critical feminist writer, blogger, researcher and thought provocateur. She’s lived and loved in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. Sheena strongly believes in the power of the written word to transform people, cultures and communities. Read her blog and connect with her on Twitter.

11 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.

11 years ago

Westerners head to Gabon for drug-fuelled ‘spiritual’ tourism

Some in Gabon believe the bitter iboga root comes from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Others elsewhere have derided it as a dangerous drug.

Today a growing number of Westerners are travelling to the central African country to sample it themselves as part of an ancestral rite called Bwiti, one of Gabon’s official religions.

Among them is Remy Causse, who at 45 made the long journey from France in hopes that the ritual would help him to “see more clearly”.

Bwiti combines worship of ancient forest spirits with elements of Christianity. It is practiced regularly and involves ingesting the powerful psychoactive root, iboga, which has effects similar to LSD, mescaline or amphetamines.

“Iboga cleans the insides,” says Tatayo, a French-Gabonese spiritual guide who receives many of the Western “bandzi”, or candidates for initiation.

“The bandzi empties himself of everything bad that is buried inside before coming face to face with himself.”

European women rest in a temple after taking iboga during an initiation to the Bwiti rite in September 2005, in Libreville. (Pic: AFP)

But the deaths, deemed accidental, of two Western initiates saw the practice come under sharp scrutiny, notably in former colonial power France where health officials warned it was “hallucinogenic and highly toxic”.

A report by the Mission of Vigilance against Sectarian Abuses (Miviludes) from 2007 called Bwiti a form of cult ritual that is dangerous “both physically and mentally”.

Tatayo himself concedes that “you must be closely watched when you ingest iboga”.

Benefits and dangers
But Bwiti shamans like Tatayo believe that when they eat iboga, they are granted the power to see the future, heal the sick and speak with the dead.

Users say it helps them to break away from negative habits, and an extract from the root is now being used in Western medicine to treat drug addicts and alcoholics.

Like many foreigners before him, Causse turned to “Tatayo”, who is originally from southwest France, at his beachside concession next to the president’s quarters in Gabon’s capital Libreville.

Under the light of the torches, initiates, their faces painted white, intone traditional chants over the music of the Ngombi, a form of sacred harp, or the Mogongo, an instrument made of a chord strung across an arc that the musician strums with a pulsating rhythm.

Causse starts to eat the iboga, crushed into powder, which Tatayo feeds him by the spoonful until he is overcome by visions amid the deafening noise of singing and dancing by “escorts”. Lying on a mat, he seems to be sleeping as his spirit “roams”.

Ingested in high doses, iboga causes anxiety, extreme apprehension and hallucinations, which are enhanced by the darkness and music. Sometimes Causse rouses and begins to vomit.

The visions last all night, and it’s not until the early hours of the morning that Causse wakes up. Still groggy from the experience, he is unable to walk for several hours.

Despite being “a bit scared”, he said he was happy two days after shaking off the lethargy caused by the iboga root. After this he will bear the name “Moukoukou”, which means “spirits”.

“The ritual has given me an understanding that cannot be explained in words; it has answered many of my questions,” he says.

Few people in Gabon doubt the effectiveness of the iboga root, which is considered an important part of the country’s national heritage. The country’s first president was an initiate.

Outside the country, a dozen or so deaths have been reported in the United States and Europe among people who experimented with iboga, though the exact circumstances have not been clarified. Medical reports said the victims’ nervous systems and hearts appear to have been affected and the deaths generally occurred more than 20 hours after taking the root.

In Gabon, neither the French embassy nor the Gabonese health ministry would comment on the bwiti ritual, given that it involves a recognised religious practice and use of a product authorised in the country.

Yet despite the dangers and the high price that Westerners must pay for their new experiences – Causse paid $3 800 for his three-week journey – more and more are coming.

Tatayo says that he now receives around 20 to 25 new foreign initiates – mainly Europeans – a year.

Tiphaine Saint-Criq for AFP