How a Boy Survived Genocide, or Living With Hope

By Leopold Nayabagabo

A true story of how a teenage Hutu relates his boyhood journey of courage and faith through the atrocities and hardships of tribal warfare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rod Fisher
• Release date: Dec 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311972750

Book preview

HOW A BOY

SURVIVED GENOCIDE

Or

Living With Hope

By

Leopold Nayabagabo

©2013 Rod Fisher, Sweet Bee Press

415 Wisconsin Ave.,

Whitefish, Montanal, USA

All Rights Reserved

ISBN-13: 978-1492879596

ISBN-10: 1492879592

Chapter 1

It was the first time in my life I was to see the ruthlessness of the soldiers. I just cannot forget how about twenty or more soldiers were harassing and beating one person, and that man was my loving father. His life was at God’s mercy and He alone could rescue him from these heartless beasts.

I am Leopold Nayabagabo. This is how it began. I was born 1979 in exile in the Province of Kigoma, Tanzania where my parents had fled from Burundi in 1972. We were living in a place called Buzebazeba-Ujiji, Kigoma in Tanzania. Burundi is one of the smallest countries in Africa with a high population.

There began a civil war after independence in 1972. On the day of independence itself the Burundian President was killed by his two brothers, together with many higher army officers. Furthermore, many University students were also killed too. That was the time the bloodshed started.

In 1972 Michel Micombero became the first President after killing many people. Innocuous people were killed in open places like stadia by shooting. He used to catch and put them together and then order the soldiers to shoot them. Sometimes, he would do it himself taking a big gun and shooting the harmless people. This was the way to reduce the majority people, the Hutus, some years after Baptist Bagaza, the second President, captured the power by force.

He came to power with a very sweet tongue so that the people who fled the country would come back home. He took to the same strategies as Michel Micombero to eliminate the intelligentsia one by one. In this manner the regimes that came to power cleaned up the majority race Hutus secretly, and even categorized them as bad guys. Even when Pierre Buyoya, the third President of the same tribal family came to power, he did the same as his predecessors by making their lives a living inferno. All those three men coming from the same family line had one common diabolical plan--to eliminate the majority. They handed on this evil legacy to their progeny who followed the foot-steps of their parents.

During the regimes of the three men, they were murdering the innocent people and were convinced that no one would ever know their nefarious activities or anyone would ever prevent them from doing so. In this manner, people were done away with like flies. One person was capable of slaughtering more than a hundred people by using a big panga (a very sharp knife). The military used the bayonet to kill the people so that they would not waste their bullets. It was a huge massacre. Burundians fled to the neighbor countries all over such as Congo (DRC), and Rwanda. Many escaped Burundi into Tanzania, and thousands and thousands of Burundian Refugees are in Tanzania still.

In two camps at Uryankuru and Mpanda, Burundian refugees suffered immensely. Some of them were devoured by wild animals or died of snake-bite. Burundian Refugees in these two camps surely suffered so much up to now, and they are still suffering. They were given only axes, hoes, and seeds of maize and beans. They were told to find out the way to produce their own food. They were dumped in the forest where there were no infrastructures or human habitations so that their cries and lamentations were not heard by anyone. Because of their groaning the Refugees became closer to God as was the case with Israelites in the time of their slavery in Egypt (Ex 2:23-24).

Those still surviving now in Tanzania are excellent farmers and they form the best choirs in the local Churches. Those camps are the first places to produce maize, beans and other cereals in the whole of Tanzania and these camps today have become very nice places to live.

Burundi had become a slaughterhouse and its former European colonizers who knew what they did to their Burundian slaves were now watching that slaughterhouse from far away in their cozy homes in Europe. Some of those slaves were given guns to kill, while those without weapons had to despair their fellow countrymen and women. Divisions made in this manner have still blanketed their eyes and the hurts ache still in their hearts.

A normal person can’t just kill another person because of having a big nose or straight nose. That was the philosophy taught by the colonizers. All that they wanted was only the rich produce of the soil at the expense of the sweat and blood of the slaves. It was this philosophy of bias that led to the discrimination of my family.

Chapter 2

My grandfather was killed far away from his home where he was working and even my grandmother never saw his dead body. The bodies of my poor granddaddy and other members of my family were eaten by birds of prey and dogs. In Tanzania my parents used to walk long distances in search of work and food. If they leave the camp by 5.00 early in the morning they will come back home only the next day. I was a little child and I had to stay at home with other people in the small hut.

My parents could not send me to school because the poverty in which we were living was abysmal. When I was three years of age my mother had to leave my younger brother with me so that she could go and fight for our daily survival. When my brother was crying I had to put him on my back and start singing the lullaby which my mum used to sing when kids were crying. I was like a girl in the house doing all the work that a mother did. I love my parents because they taught me to respect every human being; and they are the ones who taught me how to pray.

Life in Tanzania was not easy at that time. The people were not allowed to have anything new, for example shoes, clothes or nice new houses. The government will query as to where one got money from and what kind of a business one was doing and many more questions. People were wearing shoes made by hand from old car tyres. I started to wear shoes and complete clothing only in 1981. Tanzanians were hurting foreigners. The owner of the premises where we lived was a good man. He never reported us until we returned to Burundi in 1981. For safety’s sake my parents always advised us to stay inside the house.

In 1981 many people returned home to the regime of Bagaza, who took over the power from Michel Micombero by putsch. People thought that there was full peace, but it was only a trick of the President to lure the people so that they could be killed one by one again. People were arrested, especially men. Once they arrested a person, he had to be really lucky to return home. People disappeared in thousands. When people saw that kind of silent killing they fled back to the countries where they had been refugees.

All three Burundian Presidents Michel Micombero,