try to escape, with death looming over us. They may as well ask why the mouse cowers, quivering, under scanty grass blades while the bird of prey hovers overhead. Why doesn’t the little creature make a dash for safety? Maybe he knows the razor talons and flesh-tearing beak are waiting for just that, daring him to come into the open … Maybe he doesn’t want to exchange fear in familiar surroundings for unknown terror.
We stayed where we were, my mind replaying its despairing reel: I had no way to protect my children from impending peril, nowhere safe for my baby to be born.
2
Roots
MY LIFE WAS MARKED by the conflict between Hutu and Tutsi even before I was born.
In the West, people often ask about the animosity between the two groups. Its roots are in our country’s history; even among us Rwandans, there was disagreement and confusion for years due to differing versions of our past.
I asked my husband’s mother, Consoletia, to clarify our history for me, because she lived through much of it herself. She answered that when Hutu extremists gained power in the late 1950s, as our country was moving toward independence, they introduced a theory that Tutsi were a separate tribe whose ancestors had come up the Nile.
“In my youth, there was no tribal distinction between Hutu and Tutsi; it was just an economic and social distinction,” my mother-in-law explained. “Anyone with ten or more cows was considered Tutsi, and those who worked the fields were Hutu. A person might move from one class to the other if he gained or lost wealth – there was social mobility both ways. As a child, I knew a family where one brother was Hutu and another was Tutsi. In any case, we shared the same language and culture, and intermarriage was common throughout the country. It was the Europeans who invented an ‘ethnic difference’ between us.”
Germany claimed Rwanda as a colony in 1895, as part of German East Africa. From the beginning, these Europeans favored the Tutsi minority, wanting to stay in league with the royal family and upper class. Belgium, which took over in 1916 during the First World War, at first continued this pro-Tutsi policy, offering our people careers and Western-style education. The Hutu majority naturally resented this discrimination. I am certain the colonists deliberately sowed division and envy in order to control the population more easily.
In 1933, Belgium decreed that every man and woman had to carry an ID card stating their “ethnicity.” In cases of mixed parentage, a person’s identity would be that of the father. Ethnic role call was introduced in schools; all Tutsi pupils, or all Hutu, would be told to stand up, so the teacher could see who was who.
Realizing that power was shifting to the vocal majority, Belgium suddenly switched its preference in 1959. So by the time our country gained independence in 1962, free at last from European domination, the reins of the new government were firmly in Hutu hands. That’s when my parents fled the country, which is why I was born in Burundi.
My parents were certainly not the only Tutsi to leave Rwanda. There were two major waves of violence in a fifteen-year period, during which approximately 300,000 escaped to neighboring countries: Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, and the Congo. The Hutu government forbade these Rwandans to come home. It’s important to understand this, because the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which later played a crucial role, was mobilized from among these exiles.
MY FATHER, SIMEON Muganga Rugema, was born in 1937. He grew up with six brothers and sisters on his parents’ farm, near Karengera, in western Rwanda. He left home for a couple of years to train as a nurse, then returned to help support the family.
As a young man, partying with friends was his idea of having a good time; and when he and my mother were getting acquainted, they quarreled about how much he spent on drink. Religion was not particularly important to my father back then. He went to church once a week, mainly to sing and socialize.
In 1960, however, he attended an evangelistic campaign in Bujumbura, led by Billy Graham. That was my father’s turning point; from then on, life became a matter of putting his faith into action, moment by moment. He married my mother on April 4, 1962.
My mother’s name was Kampogo Joyce, but my father called her Mwiza, “beautiful one.” Our neighbors called her Karibu Kwangu, “welcome to my home,” to reflect her generous spirit. Unlike my father, she never even learned to read. She had spent her childhood walking the hills overlooking Lake Kivu, with her family’s dairy herd. Rwandan cattle look nothing like milk cows in Europe or America – docile but massive, they have curved horns that can span six feet. My mother knew just where to take them to find the richest grass at every season. She also knew the name and personality of each cow in her care.
Although Hutu made up eighty-five percent of Rwanda’s population, the region around my mother’s village, Muramba, was almost entirely Tutsi. For my mother’s extended family and their neighbors, life moved to the rhythm of morning and evening milking. As long as they had cattle, they could nourish their families with milk, butter, and mashanja, our version of yogurt.
Each cow was treasured, and giving one away was a statement of lasting friendship. If my grandfather wanted to emphasize the truth of his word, he would name someone who had given him a cow. On the rare occasions when one was slaughtered – before a wedding, for example – every part of the animal was used: meat, leather, organs, and horns. The groom’s family presenting cattle to the bride’s family is still an elaborate part of marriage festivities in our culture.
What my mother lacked in formal education, she compensated for in natural wisdom and common sense. My earliest memory is of several somber adults looking down at me. I was five, I was in bed, and I had measles – frequently fatal in East Africa back then. But my recollection of measles is a happy one, because Mama brought chocolate milk and sat beside me, recounting her childhood adventures and reciting humorous poems she had composed as a girl while watching her family’s cows.
Although my parents were so different from each other – or perhaps because they were so different – they were a great match. We three daughters and six sons never witnessed their earlier strife but only how they worked together to raise us and to care for their neighbors. I remember my father praying that they might live to celebrate fifty years of marriage. His wish was granted in 2012, when our family gathered from several continents to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. My mother even recited one of her old poems for the occasion, about a recalcitrant cow.
3
Refugee Childhood
MY PARENTS VIEWED the date of my birth as a good omen. December 13 was the third Sunday of Advent in 1964, the day they lit three candles out of four in expectation of Christ’s birthday. I was their second child, and the first daughter.
Kibuye Hospital, where I was born, had been built twenty years earlier by American Methodist missionaries to Burundi. Since Papa was on the hospital staff, our home – a solid brick house with wood beams and tiled roof – was part of the mission compound, as were the church and school.
Thanks to an altitude of six thousand feet, Kibuye’s climate is idyllic, and we children spent our days outdoors. My older brother Phocas and I often climbed avocado, orange, and guava trees. We would pick and eat the fruit or just enjoy our leafy world, above the rest of the human race.
At bedtime, we pestered Mama for stories of her childhood. While we huddled under our covers, she would describe volcanoes on Idjwi Island and on Lake Kivu’s far Congo shore. As a young girl, she had seen their glow reflected from the clouds at night.
Sometimes our mother stretched her memories, to describe demon-people and their offspring living in the fiery cones – stirring clay pots in the smoldering heat, eating the seething contents, laughing, singing, and spewing lava over the land. It was too dark to see the smile in Mama’s eyes – night comes quickly at the equator – but I heard