with my doctor, exercised, and read books for expectant mothers.
Charles and I took a day off work to go shopping in Bukavu. Our spree was well worth the twenty-five-mile drive and the border crossing into the Congo. Exploring the modern stores, comparing prices, and finally making our choices thrilled me with anticipation. We could barely fit our purchases into the Cimerwa car. Our bassinet and blankets were the best available, and I sorted the baby clothes several times during our return drive, trying to decide which were cutest. Even their smell excited me.
I went into labor on the first of August. Charles called Oscar and Consolée, and the four of us drove to Mibilizi Hospital together, in a Cimerwa car. Early the next morning, August 2, 1989, our baby arrived.
My husband took our firstborn son into his arms. “You did it!” he said, looking from me to the baby, and back again. “You wonderful woman!” He kissed us both.
I was deeply content. Our child was safely here. We were a complete family.
Charles gave me igikoma cy’umubyeyi. Every new Rwandan mother enjoys this healthy drink, made from milk and sorghum, that betokens future wellbeing. Friends, relatives, and colleagues came to congratulate us and admire the baby. Charles and I named him Rukundo Charles-Vital. Rukundo means love, and Vital was the name of my husband’s best friend.
NINE MONTHS LATER, in May 1990, my husband traveled to Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, on Cimerwa’s behalf. Since my brother Phocas lived there, Charles decided to drop in on him. And since it happened to be Sunday, Charles waited outside the church. There, from the doorway, he listened to the sermon.
As usual, I watched for my husband’s return. He would always park the car at Cimerwa and walk the short distance to our home. This time, I noticed a spring in his step and a sparkle in his eyes. “Denise, I’m a born-again Christian!” he called as he approached.
When he had heard the preacher’s words, “The blood of Jesus has power to wash the dirt from our lives,” Charles told me, all his past sins had appeared before him. Admitting he had been baptized before our wedding primarily for my sake, he now sincerely dedicated his life to Christ. “Denise, I will pray with you from now on,” he said. “Jesus says he gives living water. With you, I will keep going to him for that water, so I’m not pulled back into my old ways.”
A week after his trip, as Charles and I walked hand in hand to the service in Mashesha, I overheard a neighbor say, “What? Educated people believe in Jesus?” I didn’t care what the neighbors thought. I had received my heart’s desire, and I sensed that our family now had a firm foundation.
Formerly, Charles had disparaged Hutu behind their backs at every opportunity. I never heard such talk from him again. Instead, I heard a lot more laughter – until they took him away.
6
Trouble
ON OCTOBER 1, 1990, an electric current pulsed through the land when radios announced that the Rwandan Patriotic Front had invaded from Uganda. The RPF was comprised mainly of Tutsi exiles and refugees who had fled Hutu violence in Rwanda in earlier decades. Successive governments had persecuted them in Uganda, yet they were arbitrarily denied reentry to Rwanda, year after year.
In a renewed attempt to return, the RPF invaded Rwanda this first of October, but the Hutu government, supported by French military aid, rebuffed them. Government leaders labeled them inyangarwanda, “people who hate Rwanda,” and inyenzi, “cockroaches.”
Three days later, radio broadcasts reported that the RPF had attacked the capital city, Kigali. This was fake news; Habyarimana’s forces had in fact stopped the invasion at the Uganda border. Cleverly contriving a link between the RPF and the Tutsi minority in Rwanda, the government spread the word that “inyenzi have infiltrated everywhere.”
Their fearmongering led to arrests throughout the country. Who would be next? With the tension building, Charles and I decided to fast and pray on Saturday, October 6. At two o’clock that afternoon, we were kneeling in our bedroom when the door flew open and two policemen burst in. They grabbed Charles, who gave me a desperate look as they hustled him away to their car and drove off.
Sick and hopeless, I lay down on our bed and wept. That evening I vomited, the beginning of stomach problems that plagued me for the next fourteen years.
That night, one of my husband’s colleagues phoned, urging me to flee the country. He had heard a rumor that the rebels – as Hutu called the RPF – were now attacking from nearby Burundi as well as from Uganda, implying worse troubles ahead. But what could I do? I could not simply take my one-year-old and disappear without knowing what was happening to Charles – or even where he was.
A commotion roused me at five o’clock the next morning. Peeking between the curtains, I saw two military trucks packed with soldiers, as well as several soldiers standing in the road with two-way radios. These were saying that Bugarama had been infiltrated by RPF – another false report.
“Where are inyenzi?” one shouted through a bullhorn as they moved slowly down the street.
During this Sunday morning, a company colleague came by for my husband’s office keys. He did not know where Charles was, but he offered to help me search. We first walked to Muganza to inquire at the local jail, but Charles was not there. Then we drove to the patrol offices at the Burundi and Congo borders; here too no one knew anything. I realized then that Charles had to be at the central prison in Cyangugu. Back at home, I could not concentrate. For my toddler’s sake, however, I fought my fears and tried to keep calm.
After the weekend, I learned that Charles was not the only Cimerwa employee to have been apprehended. At least six other prominent Tutsi had been arrested in the factory town.
That Monday, all Tutsi homes in Bugarama were searched for weapons. I hoped that since Charles had already been detained, our house would be bypassed. But a police car pulled up at my gate, and Bugarama’s mayor got out with a police officer and Sebatware, one of Cimerwa’s three directors. Entering, they told me my husband was being charged with sabotage. Since Charles was responsible for Cimerwa’s explosives, he was particularly suspect, they said – and they had come to search my house.
I opened the doors to all our rooms and cupboards, showing we had nothing to hide. The men confiscated several photos, plus the receipt for a used Land Rover Charles had bought. Before leaving, they arrested Dominique, a Hutu teenager who helped with chores around the house. They kept him in jail two weeks, trying to make him say that Charles had exchanged the Land Rover for dynamite. Dominique was beaten, but he never denounced my husband.
From the day of the search, Cimerwa directors posted a guard at my gate. Alphonse dropped by one morning to ask how I was coping. He was arrested as soon as he left my house and was jailed for two weeks. After that, people stopped coming to see me.
In a matter of days, my neighbors had become hostile. At work, almost no one talked to me. I had never felt so isolated. The whole town seemed permeated with suspicion. Bonafrida, a Tutsi nurse in Cimerwa’s clinic, told me that Hutu patients no longer trusted her to give them injections.
On Sunday evening, October 14, my phone rang. It was Sebatware. In his abrupt manner, he said that prosecutors in Cyangugu wanted to interrogate me. “Be ready in five minutes!” he ordered.
My mind went into a spin. What did they want? As I hastily pulled on some slacks beneath my kitenge, I tried to think what was best for Charles-Vital. Should I leave him with neighbors? But I might not come back … I decided to take him along.
As I lifted my sleeping one-year-old from his crib, the company vehicle pulled up outside. Throughout the thirty-five-mile trip, I battled anxiety: What were they doing to Charles? What would happen to our child? What would happen to me?
In Cyangugu, three prosecutors grilled me about friends, relatives, acquaintances – in this province, in the cement plant, and