And so it goes. When you think you’re done with one week of reflection on the evil that was visited on your people, circumstances bring to the fore the bitter memory that you’d willed into the recess of your mind. And when you witness survivors who are managing to live with their erstwhile tormentors, a thin voice in your conscience hisses: “How heartless can you be!” Indeed, the world should not fear memories of evil, however long they may be.
So, last Saturday when a group I am attached to visited Nyarubuye Genocide Memorial Site, I saw a chance for my own particular recollection. Nyarubuye is a rocky knoll overlooking the south-eastern border with Tanzania. If it were not in Rwanda, it’d be holding a record for being home to the single most horridly vivid symbol of a descent by man into the darkest hell-hole in the history of this earth. But Rwanda being Rwanda, the holder of that ghastly record among the memorial sites in the country cannot easily be established.
I first visited the place in December 1994. Our driver, who’d visited before, parked our vehicle far from the local church and guided us through a track with overgrown grass. As I pressed forward enveloped in a heavy stench, my right foot slid on something that felt like an algae-covered rock. After steadying myself, I lifted my foot and looked. I parted the grass, rested my heel on the ground and looked again. Now at my foot, now at the ‘rock’. And froze.
My foot was covered in rotting flesh with a thick growth of hair. The ‘rock’ was a just-cleaned human skull. Fearing retching, I quickly pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and stuffed it into my mouth and nostrils as I brought up the rear of the foreign visitors I was accompanying, my foot on the heel of my shoe. We were now moving like zombies, save for the driver we followed in grim silence.
The church and adjoining buildings were stacked with bodies in different stages of decomposition, those on top decomposing faster and slipping off those underneath.
The area in the surrounding grass and bush was equally teeming with bodies, some of their faces still showing horrified expressions. Different crude weapons stuck out of bodies at crazy angles like satanic tombstones.
No, there was no hell like Nyarubuye!
After the revolting tour, we observed a minute of silence, then trooped back to our vehicle. At the vehicle, I got a piece of plastic sheeting and wrapped the flesh, hair and shoe in it. With a crude weapon I’d picked from those strewn around, I dug a hole in the ground and solemnly buried them.
There was nobody to recount the details of what had happened but none of us needed them, anyway. Nor did I need any at the hundred or so sites that I subsequently visited.
Yes, every site was more or less like Nyarubuye – more than hell!
Today, those bodies of 1994 at the Nyarubuye Genocide Memorial Site are interred in well-arranged graves that are in a neat garden. To this day, bodies that were hastily buried in shallow graves in surrounding areas are being brought to this garden for decent reburial. There are guides now, impossibly courageous survivors of that horror, who will walk you through the details of what happened.
And so we listened. And December 1994 glared back in my face with soberer clarity.
In 1994 I could not have imagined that wooden troughs – as are used in Rwanda for the preparation of local brew (imivure yenga urwagwa) – could be used for collecting human blood. Until now when it was explained that this was an exercise in mockery of the victims, having been cattle-keepers. The killers kept the blood for it to turn into milk so that they’d ‘generously’ give it to the starving, still surviving, refugees before final slaughter.
In another unimaginably fiendish act, the killers cut out hearts of their victims for eating, to fend off the curse of their chilling handiwork. As the men cut out hearts, they handed them to women who ground them on traditional grinding stones. Even a modern grinder was found in the prelates’ kitchen and it helped to ready their ‘meal’ faster, after it’d been boiled in kilns.
For being close to the border, Nyarubuye’d attracted many refugees from inland and around who’d hoped to cross into Tanzania. But the killers were aware of this and their leaders went out of their way to welcome the refugees into Nyarubuye Catholic Church. They knew that, all through the earlier pogroms, Batutsi had always trusted these churches as their holy refuge. But, as we know, nothing was sacred any more, in Rwanda.
So, with grenades, bullets and all sorts of traditional implements, the killers set on the refugees with apocalyptic zeal after they’d congregated in and around the church. Whoever survived was smoked out of heaps of corpses with the spray of ground pepper. In case any still survived, there was a ring of killers outflanking the inner group to deal the final blow.
But miracles happen and, believe it or not, there were survivors: 4 in the church and 21 in its environs.
Among them a few orphans who entertained us. They now live in the same village with the self-confessed former killers of their parents, freely playing with their children. Together, they form part of a re-united family of Rwandans.
Every member of our group found the energy and enthusiasm of those orphans rejuvenating.
Survivors of the Genocide against Batutsi everywhere, thank you for showing us that, in this land, Good can triumph over Evil to perpetuate life for the Rwandan family.
@butamire
