Rape divides Rwandan generations
Thousands conceived in brutality struggle with traumatized mothers
KABUGA, Rwanda — Chantal Mukeshimana’s sinewy body, once rigid as a rifle, suddenly begins to tremble and her dark, hollow eyes stare straight ahead, trancelike.
She has stopped mid-sentence — at the part of her history where she was stripped naked from the waist down and savagely gang-raped for the umpteenth time during Rwanda’s genocide. She begins to gag, her body convulsing.
Her 19-year-old daughter, a product of one of those attacks, sits silently beside her, unmoved. Angelique doesn’t so much as lay a comforting hand on her mother’s knee or wrap her arm around her trembling shoulders. Her disgust is palpable.
“I’ve always felt rejected by her and the rest of the family,” Angelique says, her arms folded across her thin stomach. “And now she feels responsible for the problems I’m having, and I feel guilty about that.”
It is December 2013, and the mother and daughter have just attended a meeting of Best Hope Rwanda, anup start local NGO headed by 28-year-old Dieudonne Ganza, a survivor of the genocide himself who saw in these and other desperate souls an urgent need for psychological healing.
At the gathering, Angelique and her mother sat with dozens of other women raped during the 1994 genocide and the offspring of those atrocities. In the room was Richard Kananga, of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, whom Ganza specially invited to hear the heartbreaking stories and to finally, 20 years after the fact, urge the government to act.
According to Amnesty International, between 250,000 and 500,000 women were serially and viciously raped throughout the 100 days of frenzied killing in 1994 during which the extremist majority Hutu tried to rid the country of minority Tutsi and any moderate Hutu who didn’t join in. The United Nations has pegged the rape figure at between 100,000 and 250,000.
The crimes produced at least 20,000 children who found themselves branded with shame and shunned by both ethnic groups — by the Hutu for being born of Tutsi mothers and by the Tutsi for having “genocidaire” fathers. Worse, their mothers rejected them for the daily reminder of the horror they experienced during conception. Many referred to their children as “fruit of the devil.”
“I was vomiting and when I realized I was pregnant, I wanted to kill myself,” Chantal said in a quiet, monotonous voice. “But my mother-in-law said, ‘Don’t worry, the child will die because it’s from the enemy.’
“When I gave birth, I didn’t want to breastfeed her,” she continued, as Angelique sat, unmoved, beside her.
Angelique grew up with an emotionally wrecked and distant mother, and sensed the rejection. Whenever she broached the topic, her mother refused to discuss it. Finally, at eight, Angelique learned the truth.
“I cried every night after that, then stopped talking for a week,” she said. Her dark eyes filled with tears and she continued, her voice quiet. “She’s the only parent I have and when I’m sad, she tries to comfort me. But she can’t give 100 per cent because of what she’s been through.”
Besides raising Angelique and her two children who survived the genocide, Chantal also supports her brother, paralyzed when his spinal cord was slashed with a machete. Her rapists killed her parents, siblings, husband and three children.
Chantal’s fractured family feels overlooked by the government and Kananga, from the Unity and Reconciliation Commission, admits some have fallen through the cracks.
“When we offered support to widows and children we thought we were supporting everyone,” Kananga said.
Like a true government bureaucrat, he calls on Ganza to gather statistics so a strategy can be developed and work shop organized—jargon that frustrates mental health workers in this country. The numbers are already known, they say, and 20 years on, help is long overdue. With just six psychiatrists and one or two mental health nurses or psychologists in each district hospital, huge pockets of people are overlooked.
“We need to find real and comprehensive ways to deal with our community wounds because these problems are complex yet interventions are sometimes superficial,” said Aimee Utuza, a psychologist and genocide survivor who is completing a master’s degree in public health and runs her own NGO called Living with Happiness.
Complicating the issue is the fact so many children of rape aren’t even aware of their origins. Their mothers, too ashamed and traumatized to speak of the past, often lied and said the fathers had died or fled the country.
One survivors’ NGO that was initially set up to help children of rape fund their education (they weren’t considered by the government as victims of the genocide, so didn’t qualify for survivors’ education funds) has now focused its efforts on psychological support.
“There’s a huge need,” explained Albert Gasake, a lawyer who advocates for survivors’ legal rights. “We think that now that the kids are turning 20 they have a right to know their past.”
Gasake works for SURF, a survivors’ organization founded by a British citizen of Rwandan origin. SURF supports 819 Rwandan women who gave birth due to rape. Among those, only 50 have revealed the truth to the children.
It’s a difficult revelation to absorb, he said, and some reactions have been disturbing.
“One young man refused to speak Kinyarwanda and said he was Ugandan, while another woman became a prostitute,” Gasake said. “Some have become violent.”
“We need to find real and comprehensive ways to deal with our community wounds.” Psycholo gist Aime Utuza
Outside the southern town of Butare, in a village called Huye, a woman named Egidie, who didn’t want her last name used to protect her children, pauses while recounting her harrowing story of being raped by eight men during the genocide. But she doesn’t dare allow herself to think about how many raped her daughter, Diane, who was just five years old and imprisoned in an adjacent building.
“The third time I heard them raping her, it was during the night, and I told myself, ‘This is death, I don’t want to see my daughter dying, I have to go die somewhere else.’ ”
When mother and daughter were finally reunited months later, both were emaciated and Diane could barely walk, she was so internally injured. Egidie then discovered she was pregnant, carrying a child from one of her rapists.
“I wanted to abort,” Egidie said calmly about her son Bertrand, who just turned 19. “At first I refused to breastfeed him and was looking away when the doctors gave him to me. I didn’t want to look him in the face, knowing where he came from.”
To survive, she banded together with a handful of other women who also had been raped, calling themselves Abasa, which means “those who look alike” in Kinyarwanda.
A group of about 45 tortured and destitute souls, they occupy a neat row of houses looking over Rwanda’s green terraced slopes, that were built with donor money for widows of the genocide. Because men were the prime targets of the killers in 1994, hundreds of thousands of women had no one else to depend on but one another.
They’ve helped raise each other’s children, shared what meagre belongings they had, cried together over the unspeakable cruelty they endured and watched some of their members waste away and die from AIDS.
In an interview, Egidie, Diane and Bertrand sit in a row. Bertrand, a 6-foot-tall gangly teen who loves basketball, hip-hop and posting selfies on Facebook, nervously straightens and smooths the lace tablecloth on the table.
“In the past I felt rejected and unwanted, but my mother hadn’t explained to me what happened,” he said. “Now I’m trying to move on, help my mom and leave the past.”
Diane is in her third year of development studies at university. Today, she hates men and declines to talk about the past.
Ganza, who is seeking scarce government funds for psychological help for his overlooked group of raped women and their grown children, argues that if the trauma isn’t addressed now, it threatens to become a bigger problem in the future.