The sky was lightening above the hills. I put down my pick and switched on the radio to catch the six o’clock news. But all I got this time was classical music. It droned on and on … no news, no announcements, not even the recent vitriol about “exterminating cockroaches.”
Something was weird, and my uneasiness increased when the music continued to whine while I dressed. As the only adult in our home, I had to know what was up. I would ask Goretti, I decided. Her husband, Viateur, was Cimerwa’s head mechanic, and he might have heard something.
I had known Goretti since soon after my arrival in Bugarama as a bride, seven years earlier. When I later moved into the house next to hers, she and I became best friends. Now she, too, was about to have a baby – it was eleven years since her last – and we had both taken our bassinets out of storage, in anticipation, and packed our suitcases for the hospital. Goretti liked to knit, so she’d made sweaters for our infants while I appliqued traditional designs on their ingobyi, the cloths we African mothers use for carrying young children on our backs. Everything was ready … But now?
Before leaving the house, I peeked into my children’s room. Christian lay sprawled on his back, snoring softly. He looked so peaceful, asleep; it would be a different story the moment he woke. At eighteen months, he had a toddler’s knack for bumps and tumbles. Charles-Vital was curled protectively beside him in the bed they shared. A serious little thinker, my four-year-old was interested in everything, asking “why?” all day long. Normally, I savored gazing at my sleeping sons. Today, I gave them scarcely a glance before slipping out the back door.
As every morning, cocks were crowing and the dawn breeze carried the wood-smoke tang of breakfast fires. But I heard no exchange of cheery greetings, no banter, no snatches of song. I hurried through my backyard toward my neighbor’s, calling her name.
Goretti appeared immediately at her back door and hastened to meet me. As she leaned on the fence separating our places, I was alarmed at the hopeless expression in her eyes. Seeing the question in mine, she took a shuddering breath.
“President Habyarimana was assassinated last night,” Goretti said heavily. “His jet was shot down. He was about to land back home in Kigali.”
The dread in my stomach cramped into a knot. Our president, dead in a crumpled and burning plane, had been Hutu.
I had no idea who had committed the crime. According to investigations years later, the fatal missile was almost certainly fired by Hutu extremists. But that Thursday morning, all I knew was that – without a doubt – we Tutsi would pay.
My worst forebodings, however, did not come close to the nightmare before us. It never crossed my mind that this day, April 7, was the chosen launch date for the systematic slaughter of Rwanda’s Tutsi population. Yes, this was Day One of our country’s Hundred Days in Hell, which would hit Bugarama on Day Nine.
The morning was cloudless, unusual for rainy April, but no sunshine could brighten my thoughts as I stumbled home to wake the children. While I helped my little sons get dressed, my mind was far away.
What will happen next? Oh Charles, I can’t even contact you! How will I get to the hospital to have the baby?
After breakfast I hid my official documents under my pillow, with money I had borrowed from Cimerwa for the upcoming birth. I had no clear idea of what to do but wanted to be ready for anything. I tried to tidy the house, but found it impossible to focus.
Hearing a commotion a few hours later, I looked out the front window to see a group of rowdy factory workers coming along the road. They stopped in front of my house, and I ducked out of sight. The men started shouting obscenities as they shook my gate, fortunately still locked from the night. I recognized one of them by his voice: Wasi Wasi, who made cement sacks with my cousin Manasseh. He had always hated Tutsi.
“Hey, Denise,” Wasi Wasi bellowed, “do you think you’re better than Madame Agathe? You’ll meet the same fate. Your time has come!”
What was he talking about? Agathe Uwilingiyimana was our Hutu prime minister, second to the president. She had courageously condemned recent murders of Tutsi. Had something happened to her?
Around noon my husband’s brother Anselm and my cousin Manasseh unexpectedly showed up. They no longer felt safe in their lodgings, they explained when I let them in, and my house had a strong gate and metal doors; might they join me? I welcomed their presence and gave them the guest room. In the event of danger, they would be more dependable than young Samuel.
The next time I turned on the radio, we six adults and teenagers clustered around it to hear the news. Every announcement compounded our fear. Tutsi had shot down the president’s Falcon-50 aircraft, the radio declared, and the government was imposing a curfew: no Tutsi could travel or even leave home. There would be a month of mourning for President Habyarimana, during which all manufacture was prohibited.
That meant no work at Cimerwa. My mind flashed an alarming image of hundreds of Hutu youth loose on Bugarama’s streets, instead of producing cement.
The newscaster continued. At ten o’clock this morning, Madame Agathe Uwilingiyimana and her husband had been shot to death outside their home. He did not mention what I learned later – that the ten UN peacekeepers guarding them had been killed as well, after being horribly mutilated.
I switched off the radio and looked at the people who had joined me in my home. So we were under “curfew” and could not leave the house. I had no desire to step out into the madness descending on our world anyway. I closed all the curtains. It was a relief to know I had a good supply of rice, beans, and sugar in the house. I had just stocked up the week before, preparing for my baby’s arrival.
In the evening, Hutu friends stopped by to report that militia were roving the area. Dizzy with worry, yet sticking to routine for my children’s sake, I tucked the two little boys into bed and locked the house for the night.
When I tuned the radio to RTLM next morning, a fanatical voice was announcing an order “from the top” that the hour had come for all “snakes and cockroaches” to die. “Look in the bushes!” the voice screamed. “Look in the swamps! Wherever you find Tutsi, kill! Kill without mercy!” He named specific “enemies and traitors” to be targeted first and ended with a shriek: “The mass graves are still half-empty! Fill them up!”
From my window, for months, I had watched young men on the factory grounds in the early mornings: running, exercising, or practicing with grenades and rifles. They belonged to Interahamwe, meaning “we who attack together.” These Hutu youth were recruited countrywide in their thousands, taught to hate, and trained to kill. Most wore no uniform, and many were unemployed; yet they were organized and powerful, and they had links to the national army. So I knew the crazy words coming from the radio were no empty threat.
I did not know, however, that the trained Interahamwe were now being joined countrywide by volunteer militias consisting of thugs, volunteers from nearby countries, and our own neighbors and coworkers – any Hutu who would join the massacre.
Their plan was efficient. Working from locally compiled lists, they hunted from one Tutsi home to the next, searching under beds, above ceilings, in closets and cupboards. Even dresser drawers were checked for infants. They set guards on every road and pathway to prevent escape. They scoured fields, plantations, woods, marshes, streambeds, wasteland, inside vehicles. It was the swiftest genocide in history.
Ten years later, in her book Conspiracy to Murder, Linda Melvern would write that “Rwanda, one of the poorest countries in the world, became the third largest importer of weapons in Africa, spending an estimated US $112 million.” Interahamwe were armed with these weapons from France, Israel, Belgium, China, Egypt, South Africa, and possibly other countries as well. Many secrets remain hidden to this day. Unhidden, however, were preparations in the streets and markets. I had seen my Hutu neighbors get their machetes, in broad daylight, from the company canteen across