RETURN TO RWANDA
Author Will Ferguson offers an unflinching look at the genocide’s aftermath
The genocide of the Tutsis of Rwanda took place over 100 days in 1994 when one million people were killed in the name of “Hutu Power.” Author Will Ferguson notes this is a death rate “five times higher than that attained by the Nazis.” Ferguson, a three-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour, journeyed to Rwanda with his friend Jean-Claude Munyezamu, a Tutsi who narrowly escaped the country just before the genocide began. Their travels are the subject of Ferguson’s newly released book, Road
Trip Rwanda, part humorous travelogue and part unflinching examination of the genocide’s aftermath.
Sugar canes and marshy plains. Papyrus islands in a sea of reeds. A secretive river twists through; we caught glimpses of muddy water in the grass, snaking around this hillock and that. There is beauty here as well: sun-dappled Monet arrangements of lily pads; flamingos lifting off, improbably white against the green; pelicans taking flight; storks in still water.
The clay-hut homes we drove by looked spectral, seeping smoke from every crack, every open paneless window.
“Cooking fires,” Jean-Claude explained. “Gets very smoky inside. Lots of bronchial problems.”
We passed banana-burdened bicycles shepherded by gaunt men, faces thinly stretched, peddlers in every sense. Vignettes appeared and were gone: a procession of brightly wrapped women, gourds perfectly balanced, walking to their local market like a royal cortège. A little boy with a goat on a tether pulls — and is pulled in turn.
We have come looking for a pair of churches, at Ntarama and Nyamata. A red earth road branches off from the main highway, and Jean-Claude follows the ruts past a crossroads tavern named Le Calme Bar, another named Rendez-vous.
An old man offered us a broken smile, more gum than tooth in his grin. He was leaning on a staff and wearing a traditional floppy-brimmed felt hat that marked him as a Tutsi cattle herder. Had he survived in the swamps? In the hills?
When the killings started, Tutsis crowded into the small red-brick church in Ntarama, seeking sanctuary under its sheet-metal roof. This was God’s house.
They thought they would be safe here, that the sanctity of the site would protect them from the Hutu militias. But they were wrong. The killers allowed the Tutsis to gather, encouraged it, in fact. It would make it easier to kill them when the time came. There would be no need to run them down in the marshes, no need to track them through the boggy grass.
In Ntarama they would be corralled into one spot, like livestock. Nor did they need ID cards to separate Tutsis from Hutu; in villages like Ntarama, everyone knew everyone. These were their neighbours.
Jean-Claude pulled over and parked, and we walked up a grassy path to where the church stood in a shaded grove of trees. On the front of the building, blister marks from the grenades were still visible. Sledge-hammered holes in the walls showed where the killers had punched their way through the bricks, with scorch marks fanning upwards from the openings, making the church look like a kiln. It brought to mind images of Auschwitz. Of ovens.
The people inside had fought back with what little weapons they had, with bricks and stones and their bare hands. The killers had grenades and machetes and clubs impaled with nails. Then the Presidential Guard arrived. Those few who managed to break through the circle fled to the marshes, where fresh horrors awaited.
Inside Ntarama Church, a broken cross leans through a window. ID cards marked TUTSI, a scattering of coins, a pair of eyeglasses and a few discarded shoes were scattered in front of the altar.
Caskets draped in cloth were lined up on the bench-like pews. These caskets held the symbolic remains of 100 people, representing just a small portion of the 5,000 who died here. Above the coffins the rafters were hung with the matted clothing of victims, a memorial more haunting than any statistic.
Behind the main building was the church kitchen and Sunday school. Piles of debris. Flip-flops. Broken plates. A wall where the children were killed. “The child of a snake is still a snake!” Toddlers and babies-in-arms, battered into nothingness, followed by immolation.
Alarge cooking pot, brittle from the fire, lay heaped amid the everyday aspects of life. Mouldering blankets, foam mattresses, a fallen kitchen cabinet, a child’s slipper, a hairbrush, a ladle — all of it rendered in grey by fire and dust. The bodies have been removed, but the rest remains as it was 20 years before. Outside, the rest of Rwanda marched ever onward, but here the past was ever-present. In the stillness, time had slowed to a trickle.
Before I left for Rwanda, I met with Lynn Gran. She was with the Nature Conservancy of Canada, but previously had worked for Oxfam, which was among the first NGOs to enter Rwanda immediately after the genocide.
“No one wanted to go, so I volunteered,” she said. “To this day, I really don’t know why. I had a 6-year-old son and a 2-yearold daughter back in Canada.”
Lynn crossed into Rwanda under harrowing conditions and was taken to a church just like this one. When she arrived the bodies were still piled up inside.
“I didn’t want to be there. It felt too personal. But I was told, ‘You are here to bear witness to what happened.’ The iron gates of the church were mangled — you can imagine the force used to blow it open and how it would have felt to be inside. When we entered it was dark, and I had to stand a moment to let my eyes adjust. The smell was overpowering. Bodies were heaped everywhere, in the pews, on the floor, with their clothes decomposing. As I moved through the dark, I tripped, and when I looked down it was a woman’s leg. I started to cry. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop.”
There were children’s toys and human heads on the altar.
“They’d beheaded them and then lined them up and left them there. I’m not a religious person. Spiritual, I suppose. Not religious. But when I was in that church, I knew.” “Knew what?” I asked. “That I was in the presence of evil.”