The genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 left countless widows behind. They dried their tears, organized themselves—and changed the country. In Rwanda, there was not yet a word for ‘genocide’ when, in the spring of 1994, up to one million Tutsi were systematically killed—hacked to death, beaten, shot, bludgeoned, mutilated, drowned, burned, buried alive, torn apart, disfigured, hanged. There was also no word for ‘trauma’ when Rwanda’s Tutsi guerrilla, the RPF, took control of the country in the summer of 1994 and drove the army responsible for the genocide and Hutu militias into the Congo. Just in time—before all the Tutsi were dead. ALSO READ: A preventable genocide, a denied responsibility: What ‘Corridors of Power’ reveals about Rwanda In Rwandan culture, people do not speak about traumatic experiences, writes genocide survivor Esther Mujawayo in her memoirs: ‘What you keep inside yourself, no one can take from you. But what we went through and survived during the genocide, no one can keep inside—they would explode from it.’ ALSO READ: Genocide against the Tutsi: A moral test everyone failed Immediately after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, 70 percent of Rwanda’s population were women. Many of them were widows; many Tutsi women had lost everything. Their families were dead. In their old homes lived the murderers, unpunished. The bodies of their husbands, children, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, in-laws, friends, and acquaintances were decomposing somewhere—perhaps buried directly in the ground, in the garden latrine, or behind the banana plants by the house. Only the murderers knew exactly where, and they would not tell, while the new RPF government had other concerns. Mujawayo recounts how she found Tutsi widows in abandoned pigsties—vehicles from aid organizations sped blindly past on the road, on their way to a camp for fleeing Hutu. How does one cope with this without ‘everything inside exploding’? ‘There was only crying’ “There was only crying, crying, darkness,” recalls Denise Uwimana, herself a genocide widow who lost her husband and other relatives in the far southwest of the country and gave birth to her third child in hiding. “You didn’t know what would come.” Even after the genocide ended, survivors were repeatedly attacked by roaming perpetrators, and women without family were defenceless. Eventually, the widows began to meet: “In the village, at night. Because during the day we were afraid the killers would find us again. We talked about how to live—alone.” “What we went through during the genocide is something no human being can keep inside.” —Esther Mujawayo Esther Mujawayo, who lost almost her entire extended family, also remembers her first meetings with other widows. In a lecture, she recounts: ‘We came together and we began to cry. To tell, to speak. And slowly we realized: The women had survived because they had been raped. Every day, for three months.’” The widows’ meetings gave rise to the widows’ organisation Avega (Association des Veuves du Génocide), meaning Association of Widows of the Genocide. Agahozo, the Rwandan suffix of the name, means: Dry your tears. Avega quickly made a name for itself. On April 6, 1995, the first anniversary of the genocide, Mujawayo wrote in taz that her association had organized a demonstration in March to demand that the new government takes care of the widows. The women no longer wanted to remain silent. “We have to bury the people, we have to mark the graves of our families,’ Mujawayo reported. “My aunt was killed in a toilet, so we covered her and marked the spot.” She also described the anger of the survivors: “There is nothing left of my parental home—only a few bricks. Next to it are two houses that belong to the murderers—if I were to go and destroy the houses, I would be arrested, but these people killed my family and are not punished. The politicians talk about living together, but that is just talk—the reality is much harsher.” Mujawayo trained as a trauma therapist in the United Kingdom and, together with her friends from Avega, turned it into a large organization with now tens of thousands of members. There are self-help projects, legal and health counselling, support in daily life, and widows taking in orphans. “The widows have developed,” concludes Denise Uwimana, who founded her own Christian-oriented widows’ association, Iriba Shalom – Source of Peace. Unlike in the early years, she notes, today it is possible to bury and mourn the dead. She speaks of her 100-year-old mother-in-law, who lives in a retirement home established by her widows’ association: recently, a choir of children of the perpetrators sang there in front of the elderly women. A man who had taken part in the genocide asked the widows whether his son could celebrate his wedding with them. After some consideration, they said yes. One must overcome evil with good, says Uwimana, and live well with one’s neighbours instead of acting with the hatred of 1994. The elderly women are heroines of a cultural transformation that has spread through Rwandan society from the margins. Commemoration of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda begins every year on April 7. Many of the widows from that time are no longer alive. But they have changed the country. Rwanda has the highest proportion of women in parliament in the world and is considered a leader in gender equality—equal inheritance rights since 1999, equal land rights since 2005, and support programmes for single people, to name just a few examples. This would not have been conceivable without the widows’ associations, nor would the fact that many more women in Rwanda today act with confidence and independence—and also shape how society speaks about its dark past. All of this is also due to figures like Esther Mujawayo and Denise Uwimana, both of whom now live in Germany. This article was originally published in german newspaper taz, die tageszeitung, in its weekly edition of April 4-10. It was written by the Foreign and Africa Editor of taz. This is an AI-assisted translation.
