How Rwandans Cope With the Horror of 1994
“The genocide is not over,” a trauma counselor told me. “The survivors are still living with those who committed the crimes.”
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I had never seen such a rich green color. It was as though the cones in my eyes had never worked properly until then. The green of trees and grass was a blanket that nearly shimmered with vitality. It was the green of new buds, only its sheen emanated from old growth too. I was in Rwanda, and the smell was stunning — the burning of wood combined with the chypre scent of pines. It was the 20th anniversary of the country’s genocide in which more than 800,000 people were killed in just 90 days — mainly hacked to death — and everyone I met over the age of 20 remembered losing someone they loved.
In 1994, the population of the country was just a little over 6.7 million. That means that about 1 in 8 people were murdered in those unthinkable three months 30 years ago this week.
I left Rwanda wondering how to write about something so massive and horrific. Do I go small to explain the larger picture, telling one person’s story? Putting a face to a tragedy, I’d learned from Gloria Steinem and other journalist mentors, is a way to make people care. How could I convey the absolute horror of what this country had endured and how it was still standing today?
I wondered, how does an entire country recover from such fundamental trauma?
As a journalist, “big idea” stories are hard stories to write, let alone sell. If there’s no newsy hook, editors can easily take a pass at your pitch. But fortunately, I had an editor at The Atlantic willing to let me do this story, one that I didn’t even know how to tackle. But I tried. And I’ve long been proud of what I wrote. It’s one of my favorite pieces I’ve done in the last 20-plus years.
As we walk through the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, here’s that article:
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.
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.
This phrase, “others had it worse”—I heard it time and again from other Rwandan survivors. It is hard to understand how someone who has experienced multiple traumatic events in a short period can think their experiences are not as bad as what others have gone through.
“We’re going to be breathless in realizing that they have the capacity to come out of atrocity with this very modest sense that others had it worse,” said Frank Ochberg, a psychiatrist at Michigan State University and a pioneer in the field of trauma therapy. “The Rwandan example is one of endurance.”
But just because Rwandans have endured doesn’t meant they’re living lives free of pain.
To read the rest of this story, please click over to The Atlantic.
To listen to a podcast I did with Consolee Nishimwe, please click here.
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Literally no limit to what humans will do to each other. And how resilient some people are to what they have endured.