On April 7, 1994, the fastest genocide of the 20th century began: the genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda. I was there. At first naive, I slowly pieced everything together, especially once my parents were gone, leaving my 14-year-old sister and me on our own. The details of how we happened to survive are a very long story for another time. As a 10-year-old, I remember the horror and confusion I felt watching my world crumble around me.
At first, I couldn’t understand why my Tutsi family was being targeted and murdered by our own Hutu neighbors. It made no sense when my mother desperately packed a few belongings and bundled us children in layers of clothing, while our Hutu neighbors remained untouched. I saw smoke rising from Tutsi houses burning on the hill across from our home. The truth soon became clear: being Tutsi was a problem. It was now a crime punishable by death, while being Hutu granted a free pass to life.
The extremist Hutu government had meticulously coordinated this systematic slaughter through the highly hierarchical structure of Rwanda’s administration. Orders to exterminate the Tutsis flowed rapidly from the president’s office down to the smallest administrative unit, the nyumbakumi.
In just three months, more than one million people were massacred, making it the fastest genocide in recorded history. The killers showed no mercy, butchering entire families, including young children and pregnant women like my cousin Kayitesi, who was eight months pregnant. My own parents, three sisters including our 18-month-old baby sister, cousins, aunts, uncles, and countless other relatives were among the victims.
Determining who was Tutsi became a twisted obsession. Every Rwandan over 16 had an ID card labeling them as Hutu or Tutsi. But even without that, the killers had other disturbing and sometimes bizarre ways to identify their targets: judging someone’s looks (no offense, but if you were good-looking, you were likely to be killed as a Tutsi) or the shape of their nose (if it was straight, or not flat enough). They would even go as far as counting ribs (it was said Tutsis had many long ribs), checking the lines in the palm of one’s hand, or measuring the length of one’s fingers.
At checkpoints, my sister and I would try to make our noses look wider to pass as Hutu! The Hutus in our area also wore visible markers to set themselves apart, such as a banana leaf or lawn grass tied around their heads, known as umucaca in Kinyarwanda. These markers would change every day, and anyone found on the street without the correct marker was likely to be killed, as they would not know the secret sign agreed upon during the killers’ daily meetings.
The Hutu militia held daily meetings in every nyumbakumi (Rwanda’s smallest administrative unit, made up of 14 homes at the time) to assess how many Tutsi had been killed, who was still in hiding, and which Tutsi women they would rape.
We once overheard one of these meetings, hiding in a bush behind the house of the righteous Hutus who had hidden us in the early weeks of the genocide. The meeting was not far from where we were concealed. A couple dozen Hutu killers sat around a bonfire, roasting meat from slaughtered Tutsi cows. There was not a single sign of remorse among them. Instead, they would take turns talking about what had happened during the day, celebrating their “work.” To kill Tutsi was code-named “gukora” or “to work” in Kinyarwanda.
While I was too young to fully grasp the political dynamics, the sheer cruelty and devastation were seared into my memory. I remember the state media playing songs that dehumanized Tutsis as “cockroaches” and urged Hutus to “exterminate” us. Checkpoints were set up everywhere to identify and target Tutsis, and our homes were demolished.
Our cattle were also targeted during the genocide. Cattle hold deep cultural significance for us. Each cow we owned had its own unique name. Indangamirwa and Mucyo were two of my father’s favorite cows. Indangamirwa was a distinctive, light brown Ankole-Watusi cow. She had majestic, ivory-colored long horns that pointed upwards and curved as they went up. Indangamirwa was known to be temperamental, only allowing my father to milk her and fighting off others who tried. The milk from Indangamirwa (the legend) was especially delicious, more delicious than any milk I have tasted since. In contrast, Mucyo (the luminary) was a chubby, white cow with small horns. Mucyo had become pregnant just before the genocide began, but she never got to see her long-awaited calf born.
Both our beloved cattle and their master, my father (who took immense pride in our herd beyond their economic value), suffered the same fate. Interestingly, the two moderate Hutu men who hid my sister and me during the genocide had a warm bond with my father, as he had given them a cow. I often wonder if this supreme symbol of friendship influenced their decision to hide us, despite the risks they faced.
When my sister and I returned to the house we grew up in shortly after the genocide, we were struck by the devastation. Our home compound had been demolished, and everything in it was looted. Meanwhile, our Hutu neighbors lived next door, in the same shoddy conditions as before.
I always wondered why our Hutu neighbors did not occupy one of our houses, which were much better than theirs, instead of destroying them and looting. They knew no one from our family had survived the killing. Were they afraid of our angry abazimu (ancestral spirits) haunting them in the house, as Rwandan tradition suggests? I do not know. Or maybe they wanted to erase any evidence that we had ever existed?
But what was most jarring was the emptiness: no people, no cows, no familiar smell of milk. What had always been there was now just a distant memory.
Thirty years later, the genocide is still with us every day. We remember our loved ones, so brutally taken, and the moments we will never get back. Some wounds are too deep for time to heal. Ends.
By Albert Gasake, April 7, 2024.
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