Becoming Human Again

An Oral History of the Rwanda Genocide against the Tutsi

Donald E. Miller

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780520343771
• eBook ISBN: 9780520975156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Genocide & War Crimes
• Index: Social Sciences

Genocide involves significant death and trauma. Yet the enormous scope of genocide comes into view when one looks at the factors that lead to mass killing, the struggle for survival during genocide, and the ways survivors reconstruct their lives after the violence ends. Over a one hundred day period in 1994, the country of Rwanda saw the genocidal slaughter of at least 800,000 Tutsi at the hands of members of the Hutu majority government. This book is a powerful oral history of the tragedy and its aftermath from the perspective of its survivors.

Based on in-depth interviews conducted over the course of fifteen years, the authors take a holistic approach by tracing how victims experienced the horrific events, as well as how they have coped with the aftermath as they struggled to resume their lives. The Rwanda genocide deserves study and documentation not only because of the failure of the Western world to intervene, but also because it raises profound questions about the ways survivors create a new life out of the ashes of all that was destroyed. How do they deal with the all-encompassing traumas of genocide? Is forgiveness possible? And what does the process of rebuilding teach us about genocide, trauma, and human life?

PART I

The Genocide

CHAPTER 1

Encountering the Genocide

In a recording studio at Solace Ministries, Mama Lambert described in detail how her husband and five of her children had been killed during the genocide against Tutsis in 1994. She escaped the slaughter of more than 800,000 Tutsis by Hutu extremists by hiding in the bushes for three months with her one-year-old son.¹ To the interview she brought a picture of her murdered husband, the letters written from prison of the young man who confessed to killing her two daughters, and the little shirt that her son had worn while she carried him on her back. At the end of the interview she volunteered to take us [Don Miller and Lorna Miller] to the actual location where the deaths of her family occurred. She wanted us to see the foundation stones of her destroyed house, the beautiful hillside where their cows had grazed, and the memorial where she had buried her family members and other loved ones.

At the top of the hill we climbed out of a four-wheel-drive vehicle and made our way down the side of the hill. Stopping at a clump of bushes, Mama Lambert said, “this was the entrance to our garden,” and pointing, she said, “there was where our house stood.” Describing their property, she continued: “We had a very big land that was fertile. We cultivated and grew all kinds of crops except rice.” As Don set his video camera on a tripod, Mama Lambert looked across to the green valley and the hills in the distance, populated with houses and small farming plots. When she turned to face the camera, tears were streaming down her cheeks.

On a not too distant hill, in April 1994 they had the first warning sign of an impending disaster. Houses were being burned. Suddenly their Hutu neighbors with whom they had enjoyed good relations became hostile. Her husband, who was the headmaster of a school, was loaded onto a truck at the roadblock up the hill from their house, and along with other leaders in the community he was taken down the hill to a lake where he was killed and his body along with hundreds of others was discarded. Mama Lambert has been able to exhume the bodies of her children and give them proper burial, but her husband’s bones are mired somewhere in the sediment of this lake. Many times, she has wondered if the lake could be drained so that she and other survivors could uncover the skeletal remains of their loved ones and bury them properly.

Amid the tangled brush, we then made our way to the actual site of her house. The foundation was completely overgrown. In addition to slaughtering Tutsis with machetes and clubs, the “killers,” as survivors refer to them, looted the houses of their victims, stealing kitchen items as well as door frames, windows, and metal roofing sheets, and then lit the houses on fire to make certain that no one would return so that they could assume ownership of the land. Later Mama Lambert said that she wanted to rebuild this house, not to live in it herself, but so that the neighbors would say, “This was Placid’s home.” For her, it is important that her husband’s name not be erased.

And then several surprising, unscripted encounters occurred. As we walked a short distance to a neighboring house, we saw a young woman and her child. Mama Lambert greeted her and then told us that they had been godparents to this girl’s elder sister. “Whenever we had parties, we would share together.” She said that her children had taught these kids how to read, and her husband had generously supplied milk and even paid the school fees of Hutu children in the area. After greeting her, Mama Lambert turned to this young woman and said, “Could your family have not hidden at least one of my children?” In response, the woman said, “Please forgive us. . . . It hurts me that I have no neighbor, that my child has no one to play with.” She was a girl at the time of the genocide and protested that she didn’t have any control over what was happening. Reflecting on the events of the genocide, she said, “We did not benefit anything by killing you.”

We then looked up the hillside and saw an older woman walking down the path from the road. Mama Lambert embraced this woman—a Tutsi who was married to a Hutu—and turning to us, said, “This woman’s son killed my two daughters.” In 1998 this young man wrote a letter to Mama Lambert from prison in which he explained what he had done. In the letter, “He narrated how he killed my children. Some were stoned in the chest and others had their heads cut off. When I read this I was so confused, and I actually got angry with the leaders of the prison for having allowed him to send me this kind of letter. I knew that my children were killed, but I did not know all those horrible details.”

We then made our way back up to the road where our vehicle was located. Mama Lambert pointed to a house that had been owned by a Hutu who now is hiding in France, or at least this is her assumption since he escaped Rwanda with French troops. It was in this house that her daughters were raped, along with many other girls. After the gacaca courts,² where many killers confessed to their crimes, survivors found twenty-six bodies that had been thrown into a pit latrine behind this house. Everyone was naked, including her two daughters and the body of her mother-in-law. In this latrine, they found the decapitated head of one of her daughters. Across from this house Mama Lambert had built a memorial with the names of those who were buried there. She went down the list, one by one, recalling the names of each person, including her two daughters, other relatives, and a neighbor who is buried there along with her five children.

Collecting ourselves after these rather dramatic encounters, we crossed the road and made our way up another hill. Mama Lambert waved her arms in all directions saying this entire area was populated with Tutsis; now only an occasional house was in sight. She said that what hurts her is that Hutus now live in nice houses, but houses of Tutsis are destroyed. In her view, perpetrators of the genocide look at the lack of Tutsi homes and say, “What we did was a success.” The fact that she has forgiven the killer of her daughters does not alter the bitterness that she feels about the genocide.

Near the top of the hill we entered a small banana plantation. There was an indentation in the earth, which in 1994 was the pit where the bodies of Tutsis were being thrown as they were slaughtered. Miraculously, a young woman survived the killing and gave witness to what happened. The woman who survived said that she saw her own mother’s head being cut, falling on the stomach of one of Mama Lambert’s sons. It is also in this pit that Mama Lambert found the remains of her other son, who wanted to be a doctor.

At a nearby memorial, where 109 bodies were exhumed from this pit, flowers had been put on the gravesite. One bouquet said, “We cannot forget you.” Another one read, “You left when we still needed you.” Mama Lambert said that they had hurriedly buried these bodies after they were discovered so that they would not be dug up and eaten by dogs. From the banana plantation, we trudged up to the top of the hill. Mama Lambert pointed across the valley to a hillside some distance away. It was there that she and her one-year-old son hid for three months. At this site and throughout the day, Mama Lambert wiped away her silent tears.

SURVIVING

Mama Lambert’s personal odyssey of the genocide began on April 24, 1994, when her husband was killed, although she did not witness his death nor that of her children. These details were revealed in the gacaca court and in the confession that was sent to her from prison by the individual who had killed her daughters. Her own memory of the following three months is absolutely vivid, however. She survived with her one-year-old son, Lambert, whose name she took after the genocide—the “mother of Lambert” or Mama Lambert.

During the three months from April through June, she experienced several different moments when she could have been killed. On one occasion, with Lambert on her back, she remembers being chased through a banana plantation by the killers. A Twa³ woman saw her running and motioned for her to crouch behind some pottery that she was making. “I hid behind the pots and they did not see me. The Twa woman told them that neither Hutus nor Tutsis are allowed to step near unfinished pots. That’s how I survived.” This woman then made porridge for Lambert and this kept him from going hungry for the moment, but they were sent away since it was dangerous for anyone to harbor a Tutsi.

After leaving the Twa woman she narrowly escaped death again. Killers were placing Tutsis into three different lines—men in one line, women in another, and children in a third line. One by one they were cutting them with machetes and throwing them into a pit. She recalls people calling on God for help. “Some were praying, Catholics were reciting the rosary, and children who had been cut and were still alive in the pit were saying, ‘Please forgive me, I will not do it again.’ Others were saying, ‘I did not urinate in bed.’ And still others were pleading that they will never be a Tutsi. And others were asking God, ‘Please receive my soul.’ ” In remembering such things, Mama Lambert said, “My heart becomes unstable.”

When her time came to be cut and thrown in the pit, she asked the lady in front of her whether she or her daughter was going next. “I told her that I was scared seeing our children being cut down, and she answered me, ‘All I know is that we are entering heaven. Just be silent.’ ” Then, just as she was putting Lambert down from her back, a boy appeared who had once been her student. He said to the leaders, “Look at my teacher, just hand her to me. I will kill her the way I want.” This boy then started kicking Mama Lambert, leading her away from the rest of the group. This was his strategy for saving her.

When they were at a sufficient distance, Mama Lambert remembers the boy saying to her that you are not going to die. That she had treated him well and encouraged him to study. She remembers him saying, “If you die, you will die from another place, but I cannot stand seeing you killed.” He told her to stay in the bushes and not enter any houses, because the next day they were going to search to see if anyone was hiding Tutsis.

During the period of hiding, Mama Lambert began to question God’s intentions, saying, “You protected me in ’59, ’63, ’73, why don’t you protect me in this war of ’94?” She told God that if she survived, she would serve as a witness to what happened to the Tutsis. Meanwhile, her son Lambert was very near death. He groaned for a while and then grew silent, so she put him on her back and continued hiding. Some fleeing mothers would put their babies near the home of a Hutu, hoping that a sympathetic woman would take the child. Mama Lambert refused to do this, but in the month of May she thought that her son was nearly dead from lack of nutrition and water. She said that Lambert developed a very thick yellow fluid in his mouth, which she tried to extract without success. He was literally dying in her arms and she began to wonder, “If he dies, where am I going to bury him, and what will I do?” In fact, she began to regret that she and Lambert were not killed at the pit where people were being slaughtered.

During this time, they were surviving on wild fruits that would cause sores in their mouths. Because it was rainy season, they would wet their mouths by licking wet leaves. She even remembers putting damp soil in her mouth, trying to suck out the moisture. And other times, when it was raining hard, she would cup her hands to catch falling drops. At one point, in anger at God, she threw a Bible that she was carrying into a bushy area. And when she looked to see where it landed, she said, “I saw wild fruits which were ripe.” She immediately picked them and squeezed the juice into the mouth of little Lambert, which revived him from a coma-like state. Momentarily, they both regained strength.

But life was miserable in this location. Caterpillars kept falling on them, and Lambert would make a sign to her so that she would brush them off him. He also would sometimes alert her to danger that he sensed. And somewhat miraculously, he never cried. Perhaps he lacked the strength.

Finally, she grew tired of the rain and caterpillars and thought of going to the house of a Hutu man to whom her husband had given a cow. They had also paid the school fees of his son who lived with them, and she thought he might take pity on her. But instead, when they arrived the man got his panga—a machete—and was going to cut her. Heroically, the boy whom they had supported protested, saying that the rest of the family has been killed, let us save just one. So, he took the two of them inside the house and told Mama Lambert to climb up into the ceiling area, saying, “They will have to kill me before they kill you.”

That night the father brought some men to the house, and one of them said that he could smell a Tutsi and started stabbing his spear into the ceiling, searching for someone who was hiding. The spear pierced Mama Lambert in her rib cage but did not fatally wound her. And in the process of poking around in the ceiling their eyes met, and Mama Lambert held out a 5,000 franc note for him to see, and he stealthily tucked it in his pocket in a way that the others could not observe—which in turn saved her life, since he didn’t want to share the money with the other men who were present. (Ironically, in the gacaca court he acknowledged this event and wanted to refund her the money, but she refused, saying that he had actually saved her life.)

After leaving this house, with Lambert once again on her back, she had another narrow escape with a group of killers, but she spotted a grinding stone that she started to turn and, pretending to be a Hutu, told them she was going to make them beer. Eventually, however, she grew so discouraged that she sought out a leader of the Hutu militia and asked him to shoot her, but the man refused, saying that the Tutsi rebel forces were nearby and that she could testify to them that he had protected her. At this point, she said that she had become nearly insane and had given up all hope of survival. Shortly thereafter the Rwandan Patriotic Army⁴ took control of the area and she was safe, with many of the killers fleeing to Zaire⁵ and other neighboring cou...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: The Genocide
• Part II: Postgenocide Experiences
• Appendix I: Methodology
• Appendix II: Survey Results on Distress and Resilience
• Notes
• References and Bibliography
• Index