My Exile to the World: A Citizen of the World

By Faustin Rusanganwa

Born in Rwanda, known as The Land of a Thousand Hills, Faustin Rusanganwa would have never thought he would one day become a refugee from his own country. What begins as a plan to see five countries, turns into a journey that that leads him to over a dozen, eventually ending in Europe. Some days, he travelled through war torn countries, while ot

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641112192

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Part One: A Childhood with Broken Wings

Chapter 1

Jabana: My Lost Paradise

I

was born on July 17, 1954, in Jabana, Rwanda, the third in a family of seven children. I had two sisters and four brothers. My oldest sister, Mukabuzizi Specioza, was four when I was born. She was the fastest in our family, and she loved dancing. The second oldest was my brother, François Rusinzigwa. He was usually nice and friendly, but sometimes had a temper. I was next; then after me came my brother Celestin Kabisa. What I most remember about him is how much he loved the girls! In 1958, the fifth child in our family was born. Her name was Martha Mukabazayire. She was my soul sister. She was a tomboy, and everything about her was fun or funny. She was the queen in the family. My brother, who was next, ended up as a gentle giant. His name was Damacent Rukumba. He was very strong and a hard worker, ready to help anyone. Lastly, in 1960, my youngest brother, Emmanuel Hitayezu, who was always infatuated with animals, was born.

Growing up in the village created some of my fondest memories. We played together and always helped the younger ones so everyone could have fun. My parents, Maria Mukarukore and Kamili Buyenge, were very happy, building a life for us all. Mama was the foundation of the family, and she made everything feel like home. My dad was the roof. To make a home, you have to have a foundation and a roof. We were lucky to have both.

At six years old, I started school, but had it been up to me, I would have started earlier. I don't know what caused my precociousness. It might have been my exposure to the violence that had erupted in 1959 between the Hutus and the Tutsis in my village. It could've been the bedtime stories my papa told us as we all huddled in our one bed, four of his sons, dozing off to the sound of his voice. His stories were about growing up and how to stay out of trouble. They were stories his parents told him when he was a child.

Rwanda is known as the land of a thousand hills and is among the smallest countries in Africa. It sits below the equator between another of Africa's smallest countries, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Bordering Rwanda is Uganda and Tanzania. The country has two basic seasons: the rainy and the dry. We are known for our bananas, some of which are grown for cooking and others for beer. Rwanda also produces sorghum, beans, cassava, sweet potatoes, corn, peas, coffee, and tea.

Jabana, my native village, is on one of those thousand hills, which sits about twelve kilometers outside of Kigali, the country's capital. It had a good community for us as children to grow in. There was a lot of giving, sharing, and celebrating. One thing we always celebrated was the naming of a newborn. About a month after the birth, all the children in the village were invited into the home so the parents could introduce this newest member to their community. Each child was expected to give the newborn a name. The names were silly, funny, and sometimes didn't even make any sense. This big traditional ceremony tended to last at least half a day, and it was something everyone looked forward to. After all the kids had given the newborn a name, the parents would raise the child above the crowd and introduce him or her to the whole village. They would use the name they had already chosen before the ceremony, usually the name of a relative, like a cousin from a distant village.

The way of life in my father's house was the same as life was in most homes in the surrounding villages. We grew enough food to cover our needs, thanks to benevolent seasons. Rwandans live on what falls from the sky and what grows from the earth; the rain falls upon it seven to nine months a year, and we depend on this to live. The door of my father's house was always open, open to everyone. As children, we played without paying attention to whether we were part of the Hutus or Tutsis. As a matter of fact, no one worried about it at the time. It was a blessed time, but it ended without warning. The first signs of trouble came when my father was fired from his job as a policeman in 1959. He wasn't alone. Office workers, teachers, postal workers, and all Tutsi professionals were fired for being Tutsi. This was only the start of change in Rwanda.

Historically, in the late 1800s, Rwanda had three main African tribes: the Hutus, the Tutsis, and the Twa. We shared everything: our culture, religion, morals, and customs, and even our common language of Kinyarwanda. Our oneness was emphasized by the fact that we united under the same flag and national song as well. The Hutus and Tutsis were like the biblical brothers Cain and Abel. We intermarried, and our kids enjoyed the same lives. We were all Rwandan, even though the Hutus made up the majority of the population at about 85 percent. The Tutsis made up 14 percent and the Twa just 1 percent. Even with much shared, there were differences; the most basic difference between the tribes was based on how they made their livelihoods. Hutus were traditionally farmers, Tutsis were herdsmen, and the Twa were hunter-gatherers and potters. No one is quite sure where the inequality sprouted from, but many hypothesize that it was due to cattle being the most valuable asset in the lands. Since the Tutsis were herdsmen, they were richer than their counterparts, making them the de facto elite. Their power grew further when the Tutsi king, Kigeli IV Rwabugiri, expanded his territory and consolidated his power across Rwanda by appointing Tutsi chieftains in his newly acquired lands. In 1897, two years after his death, a window opened for Germans to directly colonize a weakened and unstable Rwanda. The Germans harnessed the divisions between the Tutsi chiefs and Hutus, their feudal subjects, before passing the reins to the Belgians after the First World War. By 1933, the Belgians had issued ID cards for each tribe, which emphasized minor ethnic differences such as heights and nose sizes, sowed deep tribal divisions, and solidified the apartheid system that continued to bring privilege to the Tutsis, but not to the Hutus. The separation of the population through different Identification Cards was the main root of all evils the peaceful and beautiful Rwanda went through.

Since I was a boy, I knew that the Belgian colonizers divided the tribes for their own purposes. Looking to profit from the colony, they forced farmers, regardless of their tribes, to grow coffee crops and forced both Hutus and Tutsis to leave their livelihoods to work on development projects like building roads. The Tutsi ruler at the time, King Mutara, eventually refused to cooperate with the Belgians in forcing labor on his people. He demanded independence from Belgium in 1956, two years after I was born, while tensions were rising with the Hutus. The Belgians provoked Hutus to violence, and the Hutus eventually rose up and revolted, took the Tutsi king out, and put their own Hutu in power.

In 1959, things reached a boiling point. Caught up in their rage and rebellion against the Belgians, Hutus raided Tutsi homes and forced them out of the country. We were forced to forget our lives' work and our lives altogether, leaving without fully being able to run from the danger, with so many of us left behind. This was the start of not only the anti-Tutsi discrimination, but the whole dehumanization of a people.

Our crime? We were Tutsi.

I always saw or heard talk of it. From whom? The Hutu government, which wanted our death, all our deaths. Most of the populace would just reluctantly bow and obey. Note that the Hutu majority wasn't extremist. Some would offer clothing, others tools, and still others something to eat.

The 1962 ethnic regime of the Hutu Grégoire Kayibanda, the first Rwandan president after independence from Belgium, would not be kind to Tutsis. Tutsis were banned from schools and jobs. We were stripped of our rights and were not even allowed to leave the country legally. We couldn't do anything, so we were forced to start growing food for ourselves in order to survive. Most of these people were not farmers; they were professors, bureaucrats, and doctors, so farming did not come easy. In my world, there was no ethnic hatred, not among my friends. Not in my paradise. I didn't even know by the age of nine that there were labels to describe those of us who lived in Rwanda as different people. In Jabana, we considered ourselves all Rwandans, children of the universe. Before I left school, we proudly sang Our Rwanda, our national anthem.

Home-born Rwandans all, beat the victory drums!

Democracy has triumphed in our land.

All of us together we have striven for it arduously.

Together we have decreed it—Tutsi, Twa, Hutu, with other racial elements,

This hard-won independence of ours,

Let us all join to build it up!

Let us cherish it in peace and in truth,

In freedom and in harmony!

When my father lost his police job in 1959, I was only five. We suffered worse living conditions, and my father fell back on agriculture to help feed his large family. But on what field, oh Lord! It was too small to sustain an African family, and my father had to start from scratch. He had never grown a vegetable in his life. There were a few good souls around who lent us a hand, but besides that, we were on our own.

The discrimination against the Tutsis only worsened as time went on. Hutus started seizing our land, arbitrarily carving out the lion's share for themselves, but it was unclear why they were acting so brutally toward us. As a child, I couldn't understand. Who or what were they avenging? We spoke the same language, shared the same culture, and ate the same food. We were one and the same. But the Tutsi king was a good king who wanted to protect all the people in his country, and the Belgians wanted to enact unfair labor practices. By printing identification documents that emphasized our tribal background, the colonizers caused us to turn against each other.

Having been brainwashed by Hutu extremists, even our own neighbors betrayed us. My father gave one of our neighbors a half acre of land as a wedding gift, helped build his house on the land, and treated him like family. However, the Hutu revolution changed everything. This same neighbor, whom my Dad had been so generous with, saw his chance to grow richer at our expense by stealing our land. My father was a well-respected man in the village and tried to rally the community to our protection. He brought them to our home and showed the land markers that demarcated our land, but even this failed because the movement against Tutsis was too strong. The ungrateful neighbor ripped out our land markers three different times, and we were forced to leave our fields and possessions behind to find shelter far from our ancestral lands. Though the plundering of our land forever remains etched in my memory, even this did not prepare me for the genocide that would occur thirty-five years later. It was without a name and without precedent in my homeland.

After we lost our home and our land, we had to move four miles away. My dad also had land here. We had to build a new house, but at least we still had land. In 1962, things got worse. My parents decided to send some of my siblings to live with different families in nearby villages in case of an attack on our home. That way, our family would have a better chance of survival. They sent me to a village around two miles away to live with an older couple, Pierre Tukokora and his wife, Euphraise, who were distant relatives of ours. I was nine when I was with them and in my third year of primary school. When not in school, I occupied myself with helpful chores like bringing water from the river and collecting wood for the stove.

One summer day started out like so many others. I went to the river to get water, came back, and did my chores; I cleaned and hung the laundry to dry and collected and stacked wood. Then I went on to enjoy a meal and pleasant conversation with Pierre and Euphrasie. I remember the exact moment things changed. We were laughing at something Pierre had said; he was such a jovial soul, always laughing and making jokes. We were all sitting in the house when suddenly, we heard piercing whistles and shouts outside. We ran to see what was going on and saw in the distance a raging mob of around forty Hutus storming toward us from the hills with clubs and machetes. We knew right away we were in trouble, but we didn't have anywhere to go. I had no time to think, so I just took off toward the banana plantation down from Pierre's hut. I hid behind a banana tree and watched as the mob dragged Pierre out of his home and beat him with clubs. I'll never forget the groans and shouts of the old man. My heart was beating faster than ever before, and I was sweaty and shaking. Then they dragged Pierre to the creek, where they hacked him to death in a rain of machetes. For the first time in my life, at eight years old, I saw a man die. It was not a natural death, and not just any man; it was the violent death of my beloved guardian, Pierre, at the hands of evil Hutus. In my terrified mind, I remember wondering, Why? Why so much hate? It didn't make sense. I didn't understand why he had to die just because he was a Tutsi. Just as the natural world is diverse, with mountains, trees, flowers, and rivers, humans come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. That's what made the world beautiful to me. That's what still makes the world beautiful to me.

I didn't know what to think. I didn't know whether to pray or not. I knew that the executioners must have been baptized, so it occurred to me that maybe I should pray to a demon instead of a saint.

I was worried about Euphrasie. Did she get away? Was she also dead? I didn't stay to find out. In Rwanda, we say that the gods of misfortune are also the gods of good fortune. I hoped that she was on their good side.

I ran for about forty minutes until I got back to my family in the hills. My nine-year-old mind kept repeating the same horrible vision of what I had just seen. I would be unable to wash that horrible image from my dreams for the next six months. Everything I was seeing before me—the trees, the bananas—all looked dangerous, as if they were evil Hutus trying to kill me. I just kept running. The tears in my eyes made it impossible to see clearly. In that moment, I was not myself; I was a being of pure panic and pain.

When I got to my family's hut, my father was nowhere to be seen, but everyone else was there. My mother and my siblings were panicked, ready to flee. They were grabbing clothes and putting them on, one on top of the other. I was in tears, having cried the whole way back. I told my family what had happened to Pierre, and we feared that the Hutus had killed our father in the same way, as the Hutus were at the moment targeting males fifteen or older.

We didn't have time to wait around; as my brother was seventeen, he would surely be the next target. We were all aware that they could have come any minute. My mother took the reins of the family without my father there and deemed it was time to go. That moment was the strongest I had ever seen my mother. It had been all of five minutes, and throughout it all, I just stood there, violent flashbacks playing out in my mind. We broke up into smaller groups and fled toward the next village. I traveled with my eleven-year-old brother. We carefully spaced our groups and parted onto different trails. We would all meet up at our local church, which was roughly a forty-five-minute speed walk from our home.

François and I were together on a trail that gently and quietly climbed up, then down, then up again, and so on for what felt like hours. My memory of it has us surrounded by darkness, though in truth, it was a bright, sunny day. We didn't dare talk—maybe a few whispers here and there, but we were terrified of what awaited us over each hill. The school associated with the church came into view first, then the church itself. Its cement-walled exterior, painted white, greeted my fearful heart in a way that I think only other religious folk can understand. A flash of comfort for just a second, then I urgently scanned the surroundings. My thoughts were on the rest of the group. François and I were the first to arrive, but then we had to wait for my mother and the rest of our siblings. My mind raced. Would they be OK? Would the Hutus find them and do what they did to Pierre?

After about an hour, we could stop. When we finally got there, we rallied at the Catholic mission of Kabuye. We had all made it, thank God. We arrived in the churchyard, where there was already a crowd gathered, and more people were coming over the hills, from every direction. You could see everyone, some carrying things, some crying, some holding and comforting their loved ones…some were injured and some frozen still in a state of shock, but everyone had darkness in their hearts; everyone was grieving. Suddenly, I saw Pierre's wife in the crowd, mourning and crying softly to herself. When I lived with them, she was always so happy, but seeing her now, without her husband of more than fifty years, the love of her life, she looked like a completely different person. The sorrow was unimaginable. I burst into tears again. Euphrasie was like a mother to me and her devastation on top of the loss of Pierre was too much for me to handle.

Other Tutsis from surrounding regions started to stream into the Kabuye Mission. I felt utterly devastated, thinking about everything my family had lost—our home, our cows, goats, clothes, everything we had owned. Then I heard other people's stories and saw blood streaming down people's faces from the beatings they endured at the hands of the Hutus. The blood was not their own, but their children's, their husbands' or wives', sometimes even their entire families'. Mothers had been forced to leave their children behind, as Hutus would take and kill Tutsi babies. My loss felt small in comparison to others', as aside from our father, we were all alive and together. Yet, as the cries filled the air and more and more victims joined the mass, I felt hopeless for us all.

What standard of living could we even expect at the Kabuye Mission? Without basic supplies, we slept on the floor, without mattresses or sufficient blankets. Because we didn't change out of our clothes—we had left everything behind, and many of us had only enough time to flee in what we had been wearing—we recognized each other by our single dirty outfits. We wore the same things everyday, as we had no options for obtaining new clothes in the refugee camp. Some people walked around in rags, their clothes having been torn to shreds by bands of Hutus. At night there was so much commotion that I slept at most three or four hours. I kept imagining how much worse it was for the children, who had to make their way through this chaotic crowd of hundreds. Still today, I wonder, where are they now? What became of their lives after all this? How sad and terrifying it must have been for them. Still today, I am haunted by this all. I cannot even imagine what the children, who went through worse, must have felt if they ever made it to adulthood. In terms of food, we had little to eat. Sorghum was scarce, but the grain was our only source of food at that point. People would try and go home to bring food back for the group. Sometimes they were caught, but when they came back, we all shared what we had. Conditions were not sanitary; there were no toilets, and there were hundreds of us. Within a week, dysentery set in, and infections and contagious diseases of all kinds and severity threatened to take more lives from one moment to the next.

But my family still had our health—as did my father, it turned out. We were playing soccer with other kids on the field. We had quickly bonded with many other children, just as you'd expect from such a situation. We were having fun together in the game, despite our dire circumstances. My brother was playing next to me when he suddenly screamed and took off. I followed him to see what it was, and there was my dad. He was walking toward us. I was so happy that I forgot the pain of my scraped shin, which had been scratched when I was fleeing from Pierre's hut. He