How Rwandans Cope With the Horror of 1994 / The Atlantic

By lwolfe, April 4, 2014

Consolee Nishimwe has an easy giggle and repeatedly uses certain phrases when we talk: “pain,” “painful,” “it wasn’t easy at all,” “I was only 14 years old.” Bearing in mind what she endured in 1994 during Rwanda’s genocide, some of these are possibly understatements. Now 34 and living in New York City, Nishimwe said she can describe the events that brought her here, but not without difficulty.

“In our culture, we don’t talk a lot about experiences,” said Nishimwe, who is a public speaker on the conflict. “It takes a long time to express how we feel. I am trying to show the other survivors that we need to express that pain we have.”

Today, 20 years after an ethnically motivated genocide in which nearly 1 million Rwandans died and up to half a million women were raped, the government forbids certain kinds of public discussion about Hutus and Tutsis. When I visited the country in February, I heard a lot of chatter about something called “Vision 2020,” which is supposed to transform the country into a thriving state marked by good governance and a healthy economy. Construction is booming in the capital, Kigali, and President Paul Kagame has expressed a desire to make his country more like Singapore—a sort of authoritarian democracy. There is a robust effort, in other words, to deliberately “move on” from the tragedy—a determination to never lose control again.

But what Rwandans endured is so extraordinarily horrifying—in terms of how many people experienced or witnessed brutal acts, and the sheer scale and speed of the killing—that the more time I spent in the country and talking to Nishimwe and others, the more I wondered how such a place could possibly go on after what happened in those horrible 100 days from April to July. How did each person survive? How does a whole country thrust into a hideous nightmare of people hacked to death and raped and tortured survive? What is it like to live in a society in which nearly everyone over the age of 20 has memories of such inhumane deeds?

Consider that 15 percent of Rwandan children were forced to hide under dead bodies to survive.

Consider that 90 percent of those children believed they would die.

“There are others who really had it worse,” she said.

Consider that Nishimwe still won’t wear a skirt because she doesn’t want to show the scars a man etched onto her legs with a sword as he raped her—or the marks the HIV he gave her has left on her body.

Consider that her three brothers—Philbert, 9; Pascal, 7; and Bon-Fils, 18 months—were hacked up and thrown in the septic tank of their burned-down house while Nishimwe was with her mother nearby on May 9, 1994. Her father had already been killed in the first weeks of the genocide, on April 15.

And then consider the response Nishimwe gave when I asked her how she survived: “There are others who really had it worse,” she said.

What is it like to live in a society in which nearly everyone over the age of 20 has memories of such inhumanity?

To read the rest of this article, please click over to The Atlantic.