A new memoir by Assumpta Numukobwa recounts how the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi transformed the former National University of Rwanda into a place of betrayal, terror, and mass murder, where hundreds of Tutsi students were killed.
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The book, titled "L’Université m’a trahie” - The University Betrayed Me, was launched on Friday, February 27, at Kigali Genocide Memorial. Through personal testimony, Numukobwa revisits the months leading up to April 1994 and the night she narrowly survived an attack inside a student residence.
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"You do not go to university to die. You go there to learn, to dream, and to build a better future,” she writes.
Numukobwa joined the then National University of Rwanda (NUR) in October 1993, fresh from Lycée Notre Dame de Cîteaux. She had enrolled in the School of Medicine and arrived, she says, with confidence and excitement. After years in a strict Catholic school, she was also drawn to the freedom university life promised. She expected structure and opportunity; instead, she found an environment she describes as loosely supervised and increasingly tense.
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At the time, country was already in political turmoil. Ethnic polarisation had seeped onto campuses, demonstrations were frequent, and student politics mirrored national divisions.
According to Numukobwa, Tutsi students were often marginalised, denied scholarships, and subjected to intimidation.
The university, later integrated into University of Rwanda, had long symbolised intellectual promise. But in her account, it became something else. On April 6, 1994, President Juvénal Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down. Numukobwa says students did not immediately grasp the gravity of the event. "We thought it was a normal death,” she recalls. "We did not understand what would follow.”
By the morning of April 7, the atmosphere had shifted. Glances grew suspicious, and meetings were held to reassure students that calm would prevail. Yet Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, the genocidal regime’s hate radio, soon reported killings elsewhere. In Butare, then considered relatively calm, violence escalated after a speech by interim President Théodore Sindikubwabo on April 19. Numukobwa recounts seeing smoke rise from surrounding hills, hearing people scream, and gunshots ring out.
Inside the campus, patrols were organised. The stated aim was to prevent "Inyenzi” — a derogatory term used against the Tutsi — from entering. Barricades were set up at the two main gates of the campus, one near the then Barthos Hotel and the other near the Mukoni neighbourhood.
Students were typically paired — one Hutu and one Tutsi — for patrol duty. But when it was her turn, Numukobwa was assigned alone to the barricade. Friends passing by stayed with her to keep her company and show solidarity during the ordeal.
For many Tutsi students, the message was clear: the danger was now inside the gates.
On the night of April 21, 1994, around midnight, a group of armed students ran through the corridor of her brother’s hostel, where she was hiding. "Only Nyarwaya’s little sister remains,” one shouted. They knocked on her door, and she refused to open. The attackers broke in through the window and dragged her out.
She names some of them in the book.
In one chapter, titled "The Famous Day of My Death,” she recounts waiting in terror, wondering how she would be killed — by bullet, machete, fire, or rape. "It was my turn to die,” she writes.
More than 600 students are believed to have been killed at the university during the genocide.
Numukobwa says she never returned to complete her studies. After the genocide, she hated the institution she once loved. She also assumed greater responsibilities, as all her brothers had been killed.
Despite the trauma, she rebuilt her life. Now married and a mother of three, she earned a Master’s degree in Business Administration and built a career in banking. Writing came later, driven by what she describes as an urgent need to break the silence.
A Rwandan proverb guides the memoir: "Kugera kure si ko gupfa,” which loosely translates to "To endure hardship is not to die.”
The Minister of National Unity and Civic Engagement, Jean-Damascène Bizimana, said the killings were part of a longer history of ethnic persecution in schools dating back to the 1960s. He noted that NUR opened in November 1963, and just one month later, killings of the Tutsi began. By 1964, the then rector had already reported the violence to the Red Cross.
Bizimana said Rwanda is built on its history, adding that those who planned and executed the Genocide against the Tutsi do not want this history to be known.
"We must tell this history — the planning and execution — without hatred. That is what distinguishes us from them,” he said.
He cited earlier expulsions, beatings, and quota policies that restricted the Tutsi’s access to higher education.
"The 1994 genocide was the culmination of what had begun decades earlier,” he said, urging survivors to document their experiences.
MP Francine Rutazana, a former student who studied at the university in the early 1990s, described a climate of intimidation even before 1994. Tutsi students living off campus were also harassed; extremist students sometimes broke into their homes, damaged their personal effects, and stole their money. "You could do nothing,” she said.
Rutazana recalls that on April 21, 1994, a student named Maurice Nyiridandi was shot, becoming one of the first students killed on campus. Some students attempted to flee; a few escaped, but many did not.
Author Antoine Mugesera, who wrote the preface of the book, described it as testimony, homage, and warning. He noted that education alone does not guarantee values, pointing to the role some educated elites played in planning and executing the genocide.
"Hatred was taught,” he said. "That is why it must be unlearned.”