On April 7, 1994, the fastest genocide of the 20th century began – the genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda. I was there. Initially naive, I eventually pieced everything together, especially when 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 child at the time, 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 a gust of smoke of Tutsi houses burning on the other side of the hill adjacent to our home. The truth soon became clear – being Tutsi was a problem. And was now considered a crime punishable by death, while being Hutu granted a free pass to life.

The Rwandan extremist Hutu government had meticulously coordinated this systematic slaughter through a highly hierarchical and vertical structure of the Rwandan government administration. Orders to exterminate the Tutsis flowed rapidly from the top president’s office down to the smallest administrative entity, the nyumbakumi.

In just 3 months, over 1 million lives were massacred – making it the fastest genocide in recorded history. The killers showed no mercy, butchering entire families including pregnant women like my 8-month pregnant cousin Kayitesi and young children. 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 generally good looking you were likely to be killed as Tutsi), the shape of their nose (if your nose was straight or not flat enough), they would even go as far as counting the number of ribs (it was said Tutsi have many long ribs) or checking shapes in the palm of one’s hand, or the length of their fingers.

My sister and I would try to make our noses look bigger at checkpoints at one of the checkpoints to look Hutu! The Hutus in our area also wore visible markers to set themselves apart, such as a banana leaf around their head or law grass, 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 entity consisting 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 located in the backyard of 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 beef meat from slaughtered cows belonging to Tutsis. 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 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 so than any other milk I have tasted so far. In contrast, Mucyo (the luminary) was a chubby, white cow with small horns. Mucyo had only recently become pregnant just before the genocide began, but tragically 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, Two moderate Hutu men who hid me and my sister during the genocide had an amicable bond with my father, as he had gifted 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?

However, what was most jarring was the emptiness – no people, no cows, and no familiar smell of milk. That once ever-present presence was now just a distant memory.

Even 30 years later, the memory of this genocide remains a painful, ever-present reality for survivors. The memories of our loved ones so brutally taken, and the treasured moments we can never reclaim, continue to haunt us. There is simply not enough time to heal wounds as deep as these. The genocide against the Tutsi is a history we must never forget. Ends

By Albert Gasake April 7, 2024.