When people talk about genocide, when people talk about the killings that took place in Rwanda; they are real, they are not just stories. Up to now, mass graves are being discovered, everywhere, all over the country. President Paul Kagame (then Vice President) on the 7th of April, 1995: the first year of commemoration. On the 1st of April, 2025, 258 victims were discovered on lands formerly owned by perpetrators in Huye District. 31 years later, Rwandans were still, literally, uncovering the truth. There was no such thing as a vague Rwandan Genocide. There was a Genocide against the Tutsi. In April 1994, Rwanda entered its rainy season, as it always had. However, that April, and for the 100 days that followed, blood stained the country. Rivers and lakes turned a deep, defiant red: until Tutsi bodies turned white, losing their melanin to waves. The darkest chapter in human history was written on water and written in blood. 32 years ago, on April 15, 1994, 35,000 Tutsi gathered at Ntarama Cathedral in Bugesera District. Among them was a young boy who pleaded: Wambabariye? Sinzongera kwitwa Umu'Tutsi. Forgive me. I will never be a Tutsi again. His final words revealed the core of the crime: people were killed for who they were, or who they refused to kill. As the boy fell to his knees, his mother begged to check if her child was still breathing. The killers responded: How about instead, we dissect you, and see what the fetus of a Tutsi looks like? She was visibly pregnant. What followed was an act of cruelty so severe it defies comprehension – performed on the altar. In the minds of the genociders, Tutsi pain and extermination was the Lord's work. Six-year-old Marianne Mamashenge was one of only 18 survivors out of those 35,000 souls. Today, she is a mother of two. She lost both her parents that day, and was found among their bones in the dry of that blood-soaked silence. She pointed to her mother, but all the camera saw was a skull. Her mother, who fell protecting her infant, whose lifeless body somehow shielded Marianne from the machetes of the Interahamwe. Every year, Marianne remembers. Every year, we listen. She recalls, with great detail, how the pregnant woman died only when the killers pulled her baby out without cutting the umbilical cord and slammed the fetus against the Cathedral wall. Nubu amaraso yanze kuvaho, she says. The blood could not be cleaned away, no matter how much one scrubbed. When the genocide is called simply the Rwandan Genocide, it removes its target. It turns a deliberate, systematic extermination into a vague national tragedy, creating space for narratives that blur responsibility, minimize intent, and deny the specificity of the crime. The Tutsi were not caught in crossfire. They were hunted. To name the Genocide against the Tutsi accurately is not political. It is factual. It is a refusal to participate in erasure. The evidence is not abstract. It lives in mass graves still being uncovered, in the testimonies of survivors like Marianne, in memory, in bodies, in silence, and in speech. Unity does not mean forgetting. It demands clarity. Today, you have read part of her testimony. That is the mission of commemoration: that the generation of us who were not there to witness, use every resource available to listen, and to share. There is no such thing as a vague Rwandan Genocide. There was a Genocide against the Tutsi and our survivors carry the evidence you try to hide. This generation will never allow over a million people to be killed twice: once in reality, and again in denial.
