Advertisement

'How The Rwandan Genocide Changed Our Lives'


“There were bodies washing up in the lake”

Sandy Scheltema was the first Australian photographer to arrive in Rwanda after the genocide began.

“I was on night shift at The Age [in Melbourne] when images began to come through of the genocide in Rwanda. I was only 30 and I’d never travelled to a conflict zone before, but I suggested covering the story to the editor. Eight hours later, journalist Helen Signy and I got on a plane.

We flew into Uganda and met volunteers near Lake Victoria. It was there that I began to understand the extent of what was happening. Thousands of bodies had washed up in the lake – adults and children – having floated downriver from Rwanda. Standing there, you felt like you were bearing witness to an atrocity. It took a while for the extent of the horror to sink in.

We visited a centre that the Rwandan Patriotic Front had set up for unaccompanied children. There were 150,000 such kids in Rwanda.

A lot of them didn’t know their names, or couldn’t speak. Many of them had machete wounds to their heads, and their hands had been chopped off because they’d put up their hands to protect their faces.

After about three weeks we left Rwanda, but the things I’d seen stayed with me, and in 1996 I went back with the late journalist Pamela Bone. We managed to track down one of the girls I’d met at the children’s centre, Juliet.
When [Helen and I] met her in 1994 she’d been very traumatised and had a bandaged head. Two years later she was living in Kigali [Rwanda’s capital] with her uncle, who’d searched every orphanage for her after the genocide. Pamela and I sat there, drinking cups of tea, as this composed, beautiful young woman told a story beyond comprehension.

Juliet told us she was from a wealthy family of Tutsis. They stayed inside their house on the first night of the killing, but eventually ended up in a sports stadium where a lot of other people were sheltering. That’s when [Hutu militia group] the Interahamwe caught up with them. They ordered the Tutsis into a field, told them to sit down and then threw grenades at them. When Juliet recovered consciousness, she was lying in the middle of her family, who were all dead. Her father had been hacked to pieces.

When Juliet finished telling us her story, Pamela and I had tears rolling down our faces. I remember thinking: ‘How can she be OK to tell this story?’

The resilience of her spirit was truly extraordinary; that’s what struck me about so many Rwandans who, amid such horror, were still doing good. I saw such massive generosity of spirit.”


“The memories have never left me”

Pamela Twagiramariya, 32, lives in Sydney with her husband and their two young children.

“For me, the genocide was like yesterday. The memories never leave me. I was 13 when it happened and living with my family in Kigali.

“It was the morning of April 10, three days after the killing started. We were all at home when we started hearing people shouting, ‘We are going to kill all the cockroaches,’ which is what they called Tutsis. My Mum, me, my two sisters and our little brother started hiding under beds and in the wardrobe. One of my sisters hid in the ceiling. I was terrified. I was just shaking.

“When my Dad saw a big group of Hutu men coming through our gate with machetes and sticks, he decided to go out and meet them. I think that’s what saved our lives. They started kicking him and cutting him with their machetes. They took his clothes, and his belt and his shoes. Other people were calling him names, and spitting on him. No-one was allowed to help him. Our mother was told us a long time later that it took Dad several hours to die. I didn’t see him. My mother asked our nanny, who was Hutu, to go and cover his body.

“Our nanny loved us. Afterwards, she took me, my sisters and my brother next door to our Hutu neighbour and asked: ‘Can you please hide them?’ He refused! He refused!

“We felt certain we would die. We were all crying. Our mum tried to hold us and tell us we were going to be alright, but we were terrified.

“We hid in our house and, two nights later, a friend of the family sent three men to come and get us. It took about 10 minutes to get to their house. We walked past dead bodies in the street. No-one talked. The men said ‘Shhh, shhh, keep quiet.’

“I can’t remember how long we stayed at our friends’ house, but it seemed like weeks. We had to stay in one room and go to the toilet in a bucket. But after a while another Hutu came and got us and took us to the Chinese Embassy.

“The embassy was empty. All the staff had left. He said, ‘Go and find a room and stay in it.’ We did, and found another family with three kids hiding there. The mother was a Tutsi. I don’t know what her husband, a Hutu, was doing. I can’t say whether he was one of the killers. But he went to the roadblocks outside every day and came back with food. We were only able to eat because the other family gave us some of their food. We couldn’t go outside the room. We couldn’t wash. We slept under blankets on the floor. I don’t know how my mum kept my two and a half year old brother quiet.

“We were inside the embassy for about a month – until someone from the [Tutsi-led] Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) army arrived. The RPF had been taking control of one suburb at a time, and searching all the houses. He came into the room with a gun and we started crying. We said, ‘We didn’t do anything. We’re just kids!’ But the soldier was there to help us. He took us to a suburb where the RPF had taken over all the houses and gave us a house to live in because even though they’d entered Kigali, there was still fighting and it was too dangerous to go back to our own home.

“We stayed in that house for almost two years because our own house had been totally smashed up. All the furniture was gone. After a year, when it was safer to go out in Kigali, my mum used to go and visit our suburb to see if anyone had survived. My grandmother – my mother’s mother – had been killed. My mother lost most of her family.

“When the genocide ended, I went back to school – and once I’d finished school, my mother sent me to study English in Uganda. There was a beauty school next door, so in my spare time I trained there. Then I got a job in a cosmetics shop. I stayed in Uganda after that, working in the same shop, although every three or four months I went back to see my mother in Rwanda. In 2008, I went to Dubai to visit my best friend, and met Scott, who was living in Australia. In 2009, we got married in Rwanda and then I came to Australia. My first year here I felt very depressed because I didn’t know anyone. But now I have friends, and my own family, and I’m very happy.
Every year, I visit Rwanda. My mum lives back in our old house, next door to the same neighbors.

“Things are not like they were before, when we were kids and used to go over and play with his kids. It will never be the same – it can’t be. We can’t forget, but we can forgive. We just want peace. It’s amazing how Rwandans forgive.”

“Watching Hotel Rwanda inspired me to travel there”

Jessica Wilkie, 29, is the Sydney operations manager with the non-governmental organisation, Hope: Global. She visited Rwanda in 2010 and 2011, before joining Hope: Global in 2012.

“I first learnt about the genocide when I saw the 2004 movie Hotel Rwanda – based on a true story about a hotel manager who saved the lives of more than 1000 Rwandans by giving them shelter. I was 19. I remember sitting on the couch at home in tears, absolutely horrified, thinking, ‘How could something like this happen? How could people do this to each other?’

“I’d dreamt of going to Africa for years and knew I wanted to volunteer. And from the moment I saw the movie, I had a particular interest in going to Rwanda.

“I’ve just started a Bachelor of Social Work, but I went straight from school in Victoria, where I was born, to working in radio – in my home state, then in South Australia, and Brisbane. My main roles were as music director and announcer. I was working in radio just before I went to Rwanda in 2010, when I was 25. I arrived in the capital, Kigali, and there were people, bikes and cars absolutely everywhere, all over the road, all at the same time – and a mix of buildings, huts and shanties. It was completely different to what I’d expected.

“I worked in an orphanage up in the northwest corner of Rwanda, near the town of Gisenyi, and the Congo border. There were some teenagers there, 16 years and upwards, who’d lost one or both parents in the genocide, and had either been delayed in their schooling or were young adults waiting to move on.

“On my very first day, one guy came and sat down next to me. The first thing he asked whether I had a mother and father, and when I said that I did, he said his own parents had been killed in the genocide when he was about one. He wanted to see photos of my family.

“There was definitely a quality of sadness about the young people at the orphanage because they couldn’t remember their parents. But they’d found family with the other orphans, and had dreams and ambitions like anyone else. That’s what I found in Rwanda as a whole: the resilience of the people and their ability to overcome.

“I visited another orphanage when I returned to Rwanda in 2011, and was told about a boy who’d lost his father during the genocide. A few years later (when Hutu guerillas, who’d fled across the border to neighbouring countries were still attacking Tutsis), he was on a bus in one of the border regions with his mother and some Hutu rebels boarded the bus and told him, ‘You kill everyone, or we’re going to kill you.’ He refused, and they cut off his hands and tied his arms together – so tightly that the ropes acted as a tourniquet and saved his life. He ended up in the orphanage because his mother didn’t have the resources to care for him. Today, he runs a centre in Gisenyi for disabled people, teaching them vocational skills and a trade. That, to me, is Rwandan people.

“The Village of Hope is one of our projects. Homes are built for widows and orphans to give them back dignity, family and community. It’s run by a married couple, Nicholas and Elsie. Nicholas was classified as a Hutu, Elsie as a Tutsi. Elsie’s entire family was killed during the genocide and the pair fled the country. They came home because they wanted to help their own people – particularly in the community that Elsie was originally from.

“In the end, she and Nicholas decided to forgive her family’s killers. They went out to this very poor community, and gifted the people there with some cows.

“Rwanda definitely has my heart. It’s the beauty, the simplicity, the hospitality of the Rwandans and their joy and ability to forgive – and to embark on a journey forward. When I go to Rwanda, I feel at home. The people are welcoming, they are protective, hospitable and generous. Their stories are inspiring, and their determination endless.”

- As told to Nikki Barrowclough