The Lances Were Looking Down: One Woman’s Path Through the Rwandan Genocide to Life in the States

By Hadidja Nyiransekuye

The night of April 6, 1994, in Rwanda was like many others for Hadidja Nyiransekuye and her family. Yet the next morning when they awakened, turned on Radio Rwanda, and heard nothing but dead air, Hadidja’s husband had a premonition—something was wrong. It turns out, he was right. Overnight, the Rwandan President had died in a plane crash, Prime Minister Agathe had been shot, and the killing of innocent people had already begun.

In her memoir, The Lances Were Looking Down, Hadidja shares her incredible journey before, during, and after the one hundreds days of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Nothing had prepared Hadidja, her family, and other Rwandans for the magnitude of the carnage and the barbarism that followed the death of the president. When all was said and done, more than eight hundred thousand people would lie dead in the streets; their country would never be the same.

As Hadidja leads others through the heartbreaking, shocking, and disturbing events that caused the self-destruction of a beautiful country and its people, she also shares her hopes and fears for her fellow Rwandans, proving that no matter what the tragedy, an unyielding love for family, friends, and country will always triumph over evil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450257183

Hadidja Nyiransekuye

Hadidja Nyiransekuye was born in Gisenyi, Rwanda, and lived in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. She immigrated to the United States in 1998 and graduated from the University of Denver with a MSW and a Ph.D. She lives in Denver, Colorado, where she teaches at the Metropolitan State College of Denver.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Gisenyi

A Normal Adult Life

Who Owns The Sword

The Lances Were Looking Down

A Hole in the Ground, a Window in the Wall, and the Angels Network

A New Cycle

Post-Genocide Social Relations

The Mass Repatriation

Tipping the Scales:

The Evening that Changed It All

Journey from Rwanda:

Into American Social Work Education and Practice

Settling In

Sandra

WHEEE…LS!

And Then He Was Gone

Finding My Way

The Rift is Final

What’s Running Inside Me

In memory of Tete and Sandrine

To Ishimwe and Mbonaruza

and

All the children of Rwanda

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank all my professors at the School of Social Work for challenging me, and my students for allowing me to shed light on the lives of African women.

Thanks to the participants in my speaking engagements, who allowed me to go beyond the obvious and consider aspects of the Rwandan tragedy that I previously had preferred to keep hidden.

My deepest gratitude goes to Julie Schroeder, Julie Mork, and Dr. Sandra McEntire for their support and encouragement along the path of my life.

Special thanks go to all the people who took the time to read the first drafts of this book and who offered their valuable comments and suggestions.

And finally, lots of thanks to my editor, Marilyn Baseman, for her work on this memoir.

Preface

Many of the relevant details of my life were ugly and demeaning. They exposed the reality of the lives of my people and me, and I would rather have kept that reality faceless and hidden. I had dismissed the idea of ever writing my own story, as I thought it sounded like self-pity. But that was before I started the research for my doctoral degree.

In 1998, twenty-five women from Littleton, Colorado—the Maria’s Group—had agreed to sponsor me for one year if I wanted to go back to school for a master’s degree.

When I came to America, I began giving talks on Rwanda, especially the genocide that I had witnessed. My sponsors, who usually referred to their group and its members as the Maria’s, took turns driving me from place to place for my speaking engagements. The comments were invariably the same after each talk: You should write your story for a larger audience. I did not feel the need at that time, though, nor was I ready.

The Gathering Place, a homeless shelter for women and children in the Denver metro area, arranged for me to be interviewed one day by a Denver Post reporter, and the very next day I received an e-mail message from the shelter’s executive director, asking if I would be willing to have my story published on the Internet by someone who had been very moved by my talk. Once again, I did not feel the need to bring my horrific experience to a larger public.

In 2000, I took a class on political repression, and breaking my silence in an academic way for the first time, I wrote about the case of Rwanda. My professor thought my paper should be published, but I was not willing to do so because I feared for my family that still lived in Rwanda.

The film Hotel Rwanda was released a few years later, and then Left to Tell and Rwanda Means the Universe were published. Each of these books was written by a former student whom I had taught back in Rwanda. I thought to myself, Good! Survivors are now telling the story rather than having foreign experts writing our history for us.

Many more books were published, especially in French, and more movies came out about our tragedy and what the world was making of it. Rwanda was all over the map.

In the fall of 2000, I began my intense journey into the doctoral program at the University of Denver. My research focused on refugee women from the Great Lakes region of Africa, which Rwanda is part of. After six years, however, I felt I had been in the program for too long and needed to finish as soon as possible. To achieve this, I agreed with my advisor’s plan for me to interview at least four refugee women each week. But that was before listening to their personal tragedies.

I was unable to sleep at the end of my first day of interviews, as the horrors of my participants’ experiences intermingled with my own, plunging me once again into the nightmares I thought I had gotten over.

When I met with my PhD advisor, Dr. Susan Manning, to talk about the progress of my work, I was in tears over my nightmares. She was quick to suggest that I tell my own story because it constituted my presuppositions about the refugee phenomenon I was studying in my dissertation. Before I could figure out this new challenge, which had become some kind of writer’s block, Christine Martinez, a woman I met at one of my speaking engagements, came to me at the end of my talk and said, Hadidja, you have an obligation toward your people, and that is to tell your story.

It took me one month to write the first draft of my memories, as another story wanted to come out each time I tried to relax, and I would interrupt whatever I was doing to go to my computer and write it down. I was not able to return to the data I had been collecting from the refugee women until I finished writing the main stories.

This book is a compilation of what I remember about the one hundred days of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, events leading up to it, and my reflections on how it felt to see what was happening to my people then and afterward.

Did I see it coming? Was it predictable? Some argue it was; many of us were not sure. Life was routine before our world turned upside down. Nothing prepared any of us for the magnitude of the carnage and the barbarism we witnessed. We were even less prepared for what became of us.

What came out of the genocide, if anything, put Rwanda and the Rwandan people in Guinness World Records for a people’s self-destruction. Today we are a people in search of itself—in and out of Rwanda. The world is probably ready to move on, and many among us think we actually did move on. I beg to differ. I believe that Rwandans, including me, would rather not look at all the truths because it is much easier to have a one-and-only truth.

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,  

Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la toison,  

Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison,  

Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge!  

Quand reverrai-je, hélas, de mon petit village  

Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison  

Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,  

Qui m’est une province, et beaucoup davantage?  

Plus me plaît le séjour qu’ont bâti mes aïeux,  

Que des palais Romains le front audacieux,  

Plus que le marbre dur me plaît l’ardoise fine :  

Plus mon Loir gaulois, que le Tibre latin,  

Plus mon petit Liré, que le mont Palatin,  

Et plus que l’air marin la doulceur angevine.

Happy he who, like Ulysses, went on a beautiful journey, or that one who conquered the fleece and then went back full of skills and reason and lived among his relatives the remainder of his life!

When will I, alas, see again the smoke from the chimney in my small village, and in which season will I see again the fence of my poor house, which to me is a province, and much more?

More I like the dwelling that my ancestors built than Roman palaces with daring fronts; more than the hard marble, I like the fine slate.

More my Gallic Loire than the Latin Tiber; more my small Lira than Mount Palatine; and more than the sea air, the softness of Anjou.

Joachim Du Bellay (French poet 1522-1560)

Gisenyi

The night before, squeezed between my two mothers on a small twin-size bed, I had dared not complain, even though I could barely breathe. I was desperate to make a good impression so they would take me with them when they left.

Now, here I was, riding in my father’s car with my parents, three of my uncles, and Father’s new wife. The year was 1963, and we were starting the last leg of our trip home from Uganda.

My fondest memory of my hometown is more an image: Gisenyi by twilight. As we descended the winding road between the hills of Nyakiriba—all of a sudden—spread across the horizon was a wide, glistening, metallic-looking mat so wide I could not see where it started or where it ended. I caught my breath, then there it was: Lake Kivu.

Closer down, as though they were on the step right before us, were the banana plantations in the valley. They formed another wide mat, but a green one, almost as wide as the metallic one. These were the main features of the Bugoyi region where Gisenyi is located.

Another hill came rushing in front of us, hiding the metallic mat from our sight until the city lights at the bottom of the hill greeted our car. There, across the road, was a whitewashed building bigger than anything I could remember. That was Gisenyi’s hospital, at the city entrance. The road branched out at this point. The left fork would take a visitor to the city administrative quarters, the hotels, and to Goma (the closest city in the former Zaire). The right branch of the road, a mile or so away, led from the hospital to the shopping center, the market and trading area, and my father’s compound a little bit north of the market. When I was growing up, we used to sing songs about Gisenyi, the Jewel of Rwanda. Mount Rubavu stood guard to protect the city. I thought that fitting.

I remember only bits and pieces of my life before primary school. Some images are still very vivid, though, like days I spent with my great-grandmother, Nyiranyoni. She was petite, plump, had a ready smile for everyone, and was very efficient. Her name actually meant of the little birds, but for me the name will always mean beautiful matriarch. I have that tendency to give my own meaning, beyond the literal, to our names.

Nyiranyoni—every family should have its Nyiranyoni. This one was my paternal grandmother’s mother. She was born and raised in a family that had cattle, a sign of wealth for Banyarwanda (the people of Rwanda), especially in the South where the family came from. My great-grandmother looked like a woman who had drunk her fair share of cow milk when she was growing up. In Kinyarwanda (the language of Rwanda) we say, "Uwanyoye inka" (the one who drank cows).

One of my everlasting memories was a trip to Uganda with Nyiranyoni’s daughter Ester, my grandmother. There were these elegant, goat-looking, wild animals with long branched horns: "Inyemera," I heard other passengers say. I thought, Oh, yeah, that’s what they mean when Banyarwanda say in a riddle, Zagarika amahembe ntiwamenya izo nyoko yakowe (if they were to display their horns, you would not be able to tell which ones were given as your mother’s bride price). The answer to the riddle was Ingara z’iminyinya (acacia tree branches). That was the image conveyed to me by the inyemera. Imagery is everywhere in Rwandan culture. This memory and many others that I have been carrying are a testimony to that culture.

My father was a very hard-working man from the North. When he was very small, he had lost his father, had been separated from his mother, and had one younger brother. When his father died at a very young age, his father’s wife (my grandmother) was asked by her in-laws to leave the house and return to her family’s home in the South. She was not allowed to take her son (my father) with her. Until then, Grandma had lived with her husband in the fertile and wealthy Bugoyi region, where lush green banana plantations intermingle with tea and coffee plantations on the thousand hills dotting the countryside.

It was a Rwandan tradition, until very recently, that the wife would inherit nothing when the husband died; instead, only male children would receive the inheritance. Separating the widowed mother from her son was intended to make sure the wife would not benefit from the son’s inheritance. In my grandfather’s case, his death signaled the dismissal of his wife, leaving her son (my father) behind.

As it turned out, when he was just a little boy, my father was mistreated by the greedy in-laws, and he was made to leave home when he turned ten, thereby losing the family property he was to have inherited. He learned to fend for himself at ten years old, carrying big tins of palm oil along the twenty-mile stretch of mud road to Ryabizige, the only known market at that time.

My father worked for various rich merchants who paid him by allowing him to spend the night in their homes, and he carried a mat around with him so he would not impose on the generosity of his hosts. Every morning he would fold the mat and go out looking for the day’s employment.

Eventually, an Arab family noticed him on the street, took him in, and converted him to Islam. He taught himself to read and write by watching and listening as the children in this family were being tutored. One of the children was a little girl named Hadidja, and later, when my father had his own daughter—me—he named her after the Arab child in honor of the family who had rescued him.

When my grandmother was sent away from her dead husband’s family, she was expecting a second son whom she delivered shortly after she arrived at her parents’ home in the South. Having decided to remarry and move to Uganda with her new husband, she left her baby (a brother for my father) with her mother for the newborn baby’s welfare.

Meanwhile, my father had grown up, and in his eagerness to have a family of his own, he married very young. The union was not blessed with a child, though, so after a few years, my father decided to marry again, as permitted by Islam. This time, he married a young girl who was a child herself. By the time she turned sixteen, she had a baby of her own. I was her firstborn. Having been laughed at because I was born following a long period of his being childless, my parents named me Nyiransekuye, which means the one who restores family dignity. Unfortunately, I had polio at age two, which was rather a setback to my father’s hopes of having a large and healthy family.

My father had been unhappy because he did not know his mother’s whereabouts. By sheer luck, his uncle was traveling to the Bugoyi and met my father, who within a few years was reunited with his mother’s side of the family. That was when I first was allowed to visit my paternal great-grandmother. After that, my grandmother took me to her new home in Uganda. But I am getting ahead of my story.

Father’s first wife decided to try her luck with a different man and left. In less than four years, Mother had three daughters—it must have been overwhelming. For some respite and much-needed childcare, she sent me (the oldest) to live with her mother-in-law. While my mother’s concern was the care of the three little girls and her husband’s well-being, he had a concern of his own. My father was becoming a prosperous businessman but did not have an heir.

Islam permitting, he married yet another wife, which must have been a blow to my mother’s self-esteem. Apparently, pleading that it was time for me to go to school (I was already six years old), she requested that Father bring me back from his mother’s home in Uganda.

My parents, along with Father’s new wife and three of my uncles, all went to Uganda to get me. That was the night my two mothers and I all shared the twin-size bed and I barely slept, praying, as I lay there, that they would not leave without me.

On our trip back to Rwanda, there was talk about the new political climate. The Tutsi had lost power, and there had been a referendum allowing Bahutu to access power. The women were singing, "Twarashe inyenzi mu Ruhengeri Mwene Rukeba arakomereka (we shot cockroaches in Ruhengeri, and Rukeba’s son was wounded). This referred to recent attacks by exiled Tutsi who were trying to regain power in Rwanda. They called themselves Inyenzi" (cockroaches), not anticipating that the term would acquire a derogatory connotation. At the time, I did not know what it all meant.

When we drove into Gisenyi, the police were raiding homes, searching for people who had collaborated with the exiled Tutsi. As in many political crises, men were taken to jail, never to be seen again, and people whispered about the disappearances but never voiced their opinions. I later learned that those who were jailed, and probably executed, were Tutsi men and their supporters.

Arriving at my parents’ home was quite an experience. In the compound, there were many houses, all bigger than my grandmother’s. The two mothers each had her own quarters, which were attached on one side to a boutique (a specialized little shop), and on the other to an annex that was available for rent. Father would spend three nights with one of the mothers and then move on to the other. He made a living renting the annexes and raising cattle and goats.

There was always some kind of evening ritual in our home. One of the mothers, or one of us girls, would wash Father’s feet, and then the time would come for storytelling. The mothers, and sometimes Father, would tell fascinating stories, usually legends and tales about our people. Later on, we children would tell those same stories to other audiences, often cousins or friends.

The mothers took turns cooking for all of us, but my father’s new and younger wife (the other mother) was always complaining. I would hear her say things like, It’s not as if I’m cooking for Gerigora’s children.

Gerigora was her father, and she would rather not cook for children who were not hers or her father’s. Of course, as a child, I assumed we children might have done something to make her angry. She became increasingly unhappy living in the same compound with us, and I heard people say she went on a hunger strike so she would be given her own compound. It must have worked. Father had one built for her, and she moved down the street from us.

Mealtimes were punctuated by my father’s comings and goings to the mosque. The mothers sat with him at the table while we children sat on a mat in a corner of the living room. When the mothers made meat stew, two children would be given one piece of meat to share, and we always would watch each other to see who took a big bite and whisper to each other, Take a small bite. We did the same thing with rare treats, like mandazi, chapati, or cow buttermilk.

Father did not like children talking at the table, and if we complained aloud, he would ask, Is someone’s farm being taken away? For him, one would speak up only when something serious like that happened; otherwise, you would keep quiet.

My younger sister, who already was in school, wore a medallion of the Virgin Mary around her neck. She was teased mercilessly by everyone in the compound and had to find a way of removing the medallion without getting into trouble with her teacher. She attended a Catholic school, but I went to a different school, a Pentecostal primary school, because it was closer to home. I felt cheated and continually wondered, Why couldn’t I go where everybody else went to school?

But my father made sure I went to the nearest school because, as the result of childhood polio, I could not walk long distances on foot. The morning of my first day of school, just before sending me off, Father called me and explained that when I got to school I would be asked to bend one of my arms over my head to see if I could touch my ear on the opposite side. That was how they could tell if I was old enough to attend school. Also, he said, they will call your name, so from now on you must know that your last name is Nyiransekuye. I thought this was too long and too complicated for a child’s name.

Looking back at the situation, I realize how really lucky I was, as it was not very often that parents would send a child with a disability to school, especially because they had to pay fees, and schools were usually far from home. The bottom line was that a child with a disability was considered a burden to the family.

In my case, I would say that my father, by trying to find ways of investing for my future, was far ahead of his time. After all, a girl was destined to be a wife and mother, but because I had a disability I was not going to find a husband—at least, that was what my father thought.

He found another way to prepare for my future, sending me to school, because I was not physically strong and was not going to be able to work on someone else’s farm. He insisted that I do well, which he did not require of my younger brothers and sisters.

All my siblings and I had to attend Quran school, and sometimes it was hard to decide whom to listen to between the kizungu teachers (white man schoolteachers who all were Christian) and the Quran teachers. Muslims were very protective of their beliefs and regarded with contempt anybody who was not Muslim, the same way my kizungu teachers regarded non-Christians. Every student was required to attend Christian Sunday school, and points were taken away as a penalty for students who did not show up.

Quran school, which I had to attend both Saturdays and Sundays, had evening and weekend classes. Unable to be in two places at one time, I would go to the Sunday school to avoid being penalized, and then I would rush to the Quran classes, knowing I would be beaten for being late. A few parents withdrew their children from the program because of the repeated beatings. My parents obviously did not think it was a problem, so I had to figure out a way to make the best of a bad situation.

I was a very good student. I sang, "Jesus benis-soit ton nom, as well as, Muhamad Habib Laihi wakan janabi, and later, Yezu waje kubana natwe"—each from one of the three different religious schools I attended: Catholic, Pentecostal, and Muslim. Today, I am the product of that mixture of education.

My Quran reciting skills sometimes compensated for my tardiness, while my participation in choirs and bible readings afforded me the honor of being picked to give a farewell address to Ruth Larson, the Swedish lady who was the first head of the Pentecostal school. I panicked when they called me to present the speech, as I was only a fourth grader. Couldn’t they pick an older student?

I usually did not sing, except to babies and myself, but in fourth grade I apparently had a strong voice, which was why I was asked to recite the Quran at large gatherings like the celebration of the prophet’s birthday.

Fourth grade also marked my initiation into fasting for the holy month of Ramadan: Don’t swallow your saliva. Don’t talk back or say something angry and mean to anybody. And if people want to start an argument, say to them, ‘I am fasting,’ and walk away. If you fast and do not pray five times a day, your fasting does not reach heaven. It becomes a day without food and is not counted as a fasting day with spiritual rewards. When you fast, be also generous, and give to those less fortunate so your reward will be doubled the day of the judgment—so many rules and requirements. Nevertheless, I considered it an honor to be awakened in the middle of the night to go and share the last meal with my father, who sometimes was the only person fasting, as women were excused during their monthly happenings. I was disappointed, though, as that year I did not get a new dress on Eid (the Muslim celebration to mark the end of the fasting).

The year I was in sixth grade, which was intense for me on many levels, the school had its first government-funded teaching position. Up until then, all our teachers were Pentecostal men, and many of them were Zairians. The new teacher was a young woman, Catholic and Rwandan, and she was going to be the sixth-grade teacher. That was a big deal for me in particular because I wanted the best education I could get, and rumors had it that only Catholic-trained teachers could provide that.

Mademoiselle Alice, the new teacher, was strict but very good. She filled the blackboard with math quizzes toward the end of every school day and retained us in class until we finished them. I did well with her teaching, but unfortunately I did not pass the national test the first time around and had to repeat sixth grade. Nobody from our school passed.

At home, one of my cousins got married, and the wedding celebration was an event to live for. A group of young women my cousin’s age came to my uncle’s house every evening for seven days following the day of nikah (the Muslim religious wedding ceremony). My cousin’s hands and feet were decorated with henna and her eyes were whitened with lemon drops, which I thought would have been painful. She stayed indoors during a time referred to as "kutawa" in Kiswahili, or "kwarama" in Kinyarwanda. We girls spent the night out singing, beating the drums (ngoma), and dancing till dawn. The bride’s preparations for her new married life, the singing and dancing, and the trip to her new home in Kabaya were just fabulous. I was asked to stay with my cousin for seven days before she was allowed to resume her daily chores as the mistress of her new home.

I will never forget an event that occurred when my parents had a falling out, which resulted in Mother’s having to leave home and stay at her brother’s for several weeks. Father made her leave my young brother Hamid behind. He was only around two years old and still breast-feeding. My sister and I had to take care of the little boy. The separation was very hard on him. Mother was still living at her brother’s when my little brother became sick, and my father accused her of sneaking inside to breast-feed the boy. She insisted on taking the child to the hospital, but I guess it was too late, and he died a week later. She reported that Hamid died calling to my sister, "Ayima we, mayi unywa … bibi nyuma." Nobody understood what he meant, but it was heart wrenching to hear. I felt so sad and hopeless when my brother died. It was my first personal confrontation with death, and for the longest time, I felt powerless and empty. I still get a hollow feeling in my stomach every time I lose a loved one. It is hard to describe and even harder to get over.

Being the oldest child meant having certain responsibilities that I could not escape, despite my disability. Father had