“vroom... vroom... vroom,” echoed the playful sounds of children pretending to drive imaginary cars, their laughter mingling with the dust as they tumbled into each other playing hide-and-seek. The sorghum fields behind their homes in Huye, Southern Rwanda, were their little world, a world that, on April 21, 1994, would begin to unravel. Divine Gashugi, who mostly uses the moniker Tete Loeper, a young girl then, was among those children. The carefree afternoon was suddenly interrupted by the distant, rising voices of their parents calling out their names. At first, the children thought they were being summoned for chores or maybe scolded for staying out too long. They had no idea their world was about to change forever. Loeper remembers the moment vividly. “Our parents started calling us like we were lost,” she says. “Dogs barked in panic, cows mooed strangely, and everything around us felt off.” She and her brother rushed home, guided by their mother’s anxious voice. As soon as they arrived, their mother grabbed them by the arm and said, “Muze duhunge”literally meaning, come, let’s flee. She was four years old when the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi began, too young to fully understand, yet old enough to feel something was amiss. “I didn’t know what genocide meant, but I could sense fear and urgency. I could feel the air changing.” That day, she was playing in the family compound while her mother briefed her older siblings on what was unfolding. Loeper comes from a large family, she was the 11th of 14 children. Her parents were farmers, and her father also served as an assistant pastor at a local Protestant church. In the days leading up to April 21st, the family had started receiving people fleeing violence, mostly from Kigali. At first, they believed the chaos would stay elsewhere. “We used to laugh at the grownups who came to our home, terrified,” she recalls. “We didn’t understand. Why were they scared? Why were they hiding? Why were they crying about voices on the radio talking about cockroaches and snakes?” As a child, Loeper couldn’t grasp the coded hate language being broadcast to dehumanize the Tutsi. The genocide had entered the stage of dehumanization, when people are stripped of their humanity, likened to pests, animals, or diseases. Her questions kept piling up. “Do you know who the Hutu are?” She once asked her older sister, Makumi. But her sister walked away in silence. That evening, screams echoed across the hills, homes were set ablaze, and chaos erupted. “We fled to a church, thinking no one would kill in a holy place,” she remembers. “But they came, even there. So we ran again, to a primary school. There, the horror continued. Killers would come and take the men and boys, never to return.” The moment everything changed for her, when the innocence of childhood shattered, was when she saw her older brother get struck with something that looked like a baseball bat. He collapsed to the ground. That image remains with her to this day. “I remember they undressed me to be sure that I'm not a boy. I think I looked like a boy,” she said. The last time Tete Loeper saw her father was on the morning of April 21, 1994, just before the killers came for him. He was singled out before the mass killings had even begun in their village. “My father was strong-willed, very opinionated, and strict,” she says. “People used to call him Kagarara because of how protective and fierce he was when it came to his family. He cared deeply for us, but if anyone threatened us, he didn’t hesitate to fight back.” Her father’s strength and outspokenness may have made him a target, according to Loeper. He was never seen again. To this day, Loeper’s family has never recovered his body. “I even went back, hoping to find his name among the victims buried at the genocide memorial, but I didn’t see it,” she says. She’s tried to find answers, hoping that maybe someone might come forward and tell her what happened. But silence remains. “It’s not easy for people to confess and say, ‘Yes, I killed him.’” According to her mother, it’s possible that he was killed the same evening, at the primary school where they had sought refuge. Returning home and finding healing It took nearly 30 years for Loeper to find the courage to revisit her past, to speak about it, and to return to the place she once called home. The fear of meeting the very people who may have killed her father and siblings held her back for years. “But after a few therapy sessions, I decided to try. I went with my mother back to our village. I wanted to sit exactly where our family home used to be,” she says. In 2024, she made that journey to southern Rwanda. Together, she and her mother returned to the site of their former home. “We sat where the house once stood, and I asked her to show me around. ‘Where did we milk the cows? Where was the sugarcane field? Where did we sit in the evenings?’ I wanted to see it all through her memory.” Her mother walked her through it patiently, pointing to places where everyday life used to unfold, where laughter once echoed. She also showed her where Loeper’s extended family, including her father’s 42 siblings who were all killed during the genocide, used to live. “We walked through the village and she said, ‘Your uncle Narcisse lived here. Your aunt lived there.’ Every turn was filled with loss.” That day, Loeper was accompanied by her friends, her mother, and two local security officers she had requested, just in case. “I remember I started crying, loudly, like a baby,” she recalls. “I couldn’t believe it. The whole village... all the memories... gone. Nothing left except maybe two avocado trees from our neighbors’ yard—trees we used to run to as kids.” The toughest memory to let go Loeper witnessed many harrowing events during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, but one moment remains especially haunting. It happened at Hotel Faucon in southern Rwanda, near the Rwanda–Burundi border. At the time, large groups of Interahamwe militia had set up barriers to prevent people from fleeing to safety. “I remember being at the hotel when a family arrived, a mother and her daughter. The girl had a deep wound on her head, and they were trying to hide it, wrapping their heads as if wearing hijabs,” Loeper recalls. What struck her most was the arrival of a well-dressed man in a suit. “He looked like someone from Kigali, based on how smartly he was dressed. The killers dragged him out of the car and immediately started threatening and beating him. Then they fired a gun into the air, it was the first time I heard a gunshot that close.” The man collapsed in fear. “They lifted him up again, kept torturing him, and demanded money. When he didn’t have any, they cut him, beat him, and eventually killed him. I don’t know exactly how he died, I never saw him take his last breath. And maybe that’s why his image keeps coming back.” Loeper says the trauma still lingers, often triggered by the sight of strangers in black suits “Sometimes, when I walk into a bank and see someone dressed like that, I wonder—could it be him? Or maybe his son?” She pauses, then adds: “It’s the not knowing the end that haunts me.” Her brother’s death was different, more immediate, more personal. In her memoir Shut and Hide, she calls him by his real name, Muzehe, in a deliberate act of remembrance. “I saw him take his last breath. He was beaten to death. They didn’t have guns, because they only used them if you could pay. If not, they used whatever tools they had. People would pay to be shot, because it was quicker and less painful.” Loeper’s teenage brother had no money. “He fell to the ground, facing my mother. I was lying beneath her, as she tried to shield me. He looked at her and said, ‘Why did you give birth to me, only for me to be killed by a machete?’” She pauses again. “That was the last thing he said. It was my first time to see, like, the look of someone who is dying or dead. It looked as if he was looking at me, but at the same time looking somewhere very far. Something that I couldn't even understand, like, what is he looking at? Where is he seeing? And he had that look for a while until my mother moved me. “Shut Up and Hide”: A Mother’s survival instruction From the very beginning of the Genocide, Loeper’s mother had one rule: shut up and hide. It became both a warning and a mantra for survival. “I was at that age where I asked a lot of questions. I was curious, I didn’t understand what was going on,” Loeper recalls. “But the first time I asked her something, she immediately said, ‘Shut up. Ziba.’ She had no time to explain.” Everything changed after her brother was killed. They found shelter in a classroom, and that’s when her mother finally had a serious talk with her. “She told me, ‘If you don’t want what happened to your brother to happen to you, you only need to do two things: shut up and hide. That’s all. Is that too much to ask? Is it hard to do?’ Then she said, ‘The rest, I will do. I will protect you.’” By then, Loeper had already started to grasp what death meant, even if she couldn’t name it. “I didn’t call it death. But I saw that when people were beaten too hard or lost too much blood, they stopped moving. Their eyes changed. And I knew I didn’t want that to happen to me. So I did exactly what my mother said.” Looking back now, she says with a trace of irony, “Last year, when we talked about it, my mother kind of joked. She said I had become like a well-trained dog, just doing what I was told, no questions, no resistance.” “But it saved my life.” Becoming a refugee twice, life across the border Before she could even begin to tell how she survived, Loeper is quick to clarify that she and her siblings were scattered, forced into different hiding places. Only she remained with her mother. “The younger one didn’t make it,” she says quietly. “She was killed before we even left the house. I didn’t see it happen. But from what I heard later, from family members, when they started burning houses and destroying everything, she was still very small. She died at home. Maybe from the fire. Maybe something else. I’ll never know for sure.” Her family home was also set on fire. “They took the cows, they took everything. Everything happened so fast.” With nowhere else to go, she and her mother sought refuge in a church. From there, they moved to a friend’s home. Her father, a soldier with a gun, tried to protect them for a few days. “But the killers kept coming to his place, checking if he was hiding someone. Eventually, he sent us away to hide in the sorghum fields and other places.” Along the way, they narrowly escaped death at several roadblocks. “There were times we were stopped at barricades. We were so close to being killed. My mother had to tell so many lies. And somehow, they let us go.” They then made their way to Tumba, where her mother’s sister, who was married to a Swiss man, hid them in her house. But that didn’t last long. “The killers started coming there too. They kept asking her for money, for her car, everything. She gave what she could. But when she had nothing left to give, they started killing the others she was hiding with us.” Eventually, her aunt arranged for the Red Cross to evacuate them. They were moved from place to place: a refugee camp at Groupe Scolaire in Butare, then to Karubanda boarding school. “The Red Cross started separating out the children and pregnant women. That’s how we ended up in Burundi, living in a refugee camp. Then from Burundi, we were taken to what was then Zaire, now the DR Congo. We stayed in a refugee camp in Katana.” Loeper and her family stayed in DR Congo for many years before coming back to Rwanda. “We came back to Rwanda in 1997,” she says. “It wasn’t safe to come back earlier. When the genocide ended, many of the same killers fled to Congo too. They occupied the camps.” That time we spent in Zaire was among the hardest, she said. “We became refugees twice. We were running from the same people, again. We were in a camp filled with other Tutsi children, and when news spread that Rwanda had peace, anyone who tried to go back home would get killed. The killers said we were going to report them to the Rwandan Patriotic Army.” According to Loeper, planes occasionally came, evacuating children with relatives abroad. Some were adopted. Others, especially girls, disappeared into Congolese homes. “Many died. Many were taken to work as house helpers or married off very young,” she remembers. “We left so many of them behind.” Loeper says that their rescue came from the same aunt, her mother’s sister, who had managed to return to Switzerland. Working with the Red Cross and UNHCR, she pulled the children out of the camp. “I was with my two siblings. My mother wasn’t with us that whole time,” she explains. “The Red Cross separated children from their parents. In Katana, we were alone.” Hope to see her mother again and returning to Rwanda “We didn’t know. We just didn’t know if we were going to survive the next day, let alone find our mother,” Loeper recalls. At the time, returning to Rwanda wasn’t something she wanted. To her, Rwanda was the place they had fled, marked by death, fear, and the sound of killings. “I didn’t want to come back,” she said. “That country was the place where we ran from people dying.” But eventually, she had no choice. Arrangements were made to bring her and her siblings back as a group. What gave her the courage to return were the letters and photos sent by her mother’s sister, explaining that peace had returned. “It was not easy to go back to those memories,” she said. “In fact, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.” The birth of her Memoir “Shut Up and Hide” Writing her memoir, Shut and Hide, meant confronting the darkest corners of her past, loss, survival, and healing. But Loeper made a conscious decision from the beginning: she would not write from a place of anger or vengeance. Instead, she wrote from a place of vulnerability, a space where the truth could be told as it was, so others could understand what really happened. She didn’t write it all at once. Often, she would start a chapter, then pause, sometimes for a week or two, before returning. “Living in Germany while writing helped,” she says. “Being outside Rwanda created emotional distance. It felt like I was away from those memories. There was space between what I was writing and what I was seeing.” On difficult days, she would simply close her laptop and take a walk in the park. “That helped me realise, hey, it’s okay. Look, you’re in a different environment. You’re not even there.” She often reminded herself to imagine the story wasn’t hers. “That made it bearable.” Loeper avoided writing at home. The quiet and isolation felt too intimate. Instead, she wrote in cafés and public libraries, places where life continued around her. The sound of conversation, the clinking of cups, the distant footsteps, all gave her a sense of safety. “I was very scared to write from home,” she said. “Being surrounded by others helped.” What truly kept her going wasn’t just the need to tell her story, it was her children. A mother of two, Loeper felt a responsibility not only to history, but to them. “If I don’t write my story, the Rwandan history as I experienced it, there’s a risk my children will learn it from someone else,” she said. “Someone who might write it wrong.” That thought gave her the strength to continue. Her book wasn’t just a memoir. It was a legacy. Already, her children were asking questions: Why don’t we go see your father when we visit Rwanda? Why don’t you have pictures from when you were little? Why don’t we have a big family like others? “I try to explain in a child-friendly way,” she said. “Using language they can understand.” Loeper’s memoir, Shut Up and Hide, is available in libraries and bookstores in both Germany and Rwanda—including Kigali shops and the airport. Readers can also find it online via Amazon, her website, or at Inzozi Publishers. As a child, no one explained what was happening. All she could do was stay quiet and hide. That’s how she survived. That’s how the idea of the name for her book came to be, “Shut Up and Hide.”
