USA/Africa Dialogue, No 569: Pulitzer for a Nigerian

Genocide's Child... Dele Olojede's winning entry

KIGALI, Rwanda, Gervais Tuyishime walks in from school. The 9-year-old boy
drops his bag and shakes hands stiffly with his mother. Then he sits
quietly on a wooden stool. No words are exchanged.

Most days are like that, says the mother, Alphoncina Mutuze. Her
relationship with her son is an awkward one, characterised by bouts of
anger out of proportion to the boy's perceived infractions, and frequently
resulting in hard slaps to his face. On occasion, mother and child
unexpectedly allow a hint of affection, and Mutuze embraces her only son,
then quickly lets go, as if terrified of crossing a line she has willed
herself to faithfully observe.

Gervais is the product of the gang rapes and sexual slavery his mother was
subjected to 10 years ago during the Rwandan genocide, when the Hutu
majority slaughtered about 800,000 of the minority Tutsi and their Hutu
sympathisers. The dead included every member of Mutuze's family-her
parents as well as all eight siblings.

As a result, Gervais represents two irreconcilable symbols for his mother.
He serves as a reminder of the terrible violation that drove her to
attempt suicide by drowning. At the same time, the boy is the only known
relative she has left.

"I really don't hate him but I feel this child is not mine," Mutuze says
quietly, a constant refrain over several days of interviews in her
one-room hilltop home in an empty-pockets neighbourhood of this capital.

"This child is not mine. I could not imagine how I would nurse this child.
I wanted to kill this child. I looked at him and I wanted to kill him. I
beat him even when I was still nursing him. I beat him even now.

"At times I try to will myself not to beat him up anymore, and I tell
myself he is the only relative in the world I have. So yes, sometimes I
feel that I am his mother."

Mutuze's fitful attempts to reconcile herself with her unwanted son offer
a ground-level view of a larger struggle in Rwandan society, among
individuals and between communities, to fashion a workable coexistence in
a post-genocide society. Compelled to live together under conditions of
grinding poverty, emotional turmoil and daily desperation, killers and
survivors alike are feeling their way around the possibility that they
could rebuild the everyday trust necessary for the normal functioning of a
community shattered by genocide.

At its most fundamental, the genocide was an act of monumental betrayal,
organised by the government in the service of the ideology of Hutu Power,
which insisted there wasn't enough room in this small central African
country for the Tutsi. The majority of the population proved to be willing
executioners, and priest turned against parishioner, teacher against
pupil, doctor against patient and, often, husband against wife.

"The challenge of the genocide is not simply the killing, but that husband
killed wife and father killed son, and the whole moral foundation of the
country was destroyed," says Domitira Mukantaganda, vice president of
Rwanda's supreme court, who also oversees a grassroots quasi-judicial
process designed to promote reconciliation more than the mere imposition
of justice.

In this traumatised country, few groups are grappling with the legacy of
the genocide with more difficulty than the thousands of women raped by the
militia that spearheaded the mass killings of 10 years ago. While precise
statistics are unavailable, largely because a public discussion of rape
remains taboo and victims are loath to come forward, officials say about
250,000 Tutsi women were victimised. Children born of such rapes are
estimated at between 10,000 and 25,000.

unwanted encounters, and to answer uncomfortable questions from restless
9-year-olds dealing with neighbourhood taunts regarding the peculiar
details of their births.

The House on the Hill

Mother and son share a simple one-room house, a brick and mortar structure
built four years ago with the help of a survivors' group. The main section
holds simple furnishings - two plastic chairs, a wooden table and bench.
Pictures of Christ and a few choice quotes from the Book of Psalms, a
staple of any Rwandan household, adorn the walls. Mother and son sleep in
an alcove to the side. Corrugated iron sheets overhead provide some
defence against the elements. Sunlight streams through a couple of
perforations in the roof.

This was a step up from their temporary accommodations amid disdainful
neighbours, an existence made worse by the arms-length treatment from old
friends ashamed of the unspeakable circumstances of Mutuze's motherhood.
The two had moved from dwelling to dwelling, occasionally even sleeping
out in the open.

"Some of the people, they couldn't bear to look at the child because of
who he was," Mutuze says. Neighbourhood kids called him names. A favourite
was

"Little Interahamwe," after the feared militia of machete-wielding killers
who hacked hundreds of thousands to death during the genocide. Interahamwe
means "those who fight together" in the Kinyarwanda language.

"This boy leads a very difficult life," she says, her granite face
softening briefly as she considers her son sitting on a low stool,
impassive. "He's cheerful enough but everyone knows the circumstances of
his birth. So other children call him Little Interahamwe. They call him
this so constantly that he came to ask me what interahamwe means. I told
him that these were people who killed a lot of people and were mass
murderers."

Gervais just sits, quiet, speaking only when spoken to, and then only
monosyllabically. A slight boy with a happy face, he exists in the
straitened conditions of a child whose mother at once embraces and rejects
him, and whose father is a rapist with an identity impossible to
establish. With his mother's entire family murdered, the boy is even
denied the protective embrace of the typical African extended family,
which could have helped absorb the shocks of his young life.

In anger and perhaps in frustration, Mutuze at times similarly disparages
her son, calling him Little Killer, "when I couldn't bear the sight of
him." When he was 6, she wouldn't let him out to play for an entire year,
even when she was out working and he was alone, because she was tired of
the whispering and name-calling that his sight provoked in the neighbours.

"I was so ashamed of him," she says.

Her emotions boil over and she sobs, startling herself. "Sometimes I just
cry unexpectedly," she says, "without knowing what has caused it."

One Day in April

On the afternoon of April 18, 1994, Mutuze ventured out of the Kigali
confectionery factory where she had taken refuge for more than a week as a
convulsion of killing seized hold of the city. She was desperate for food.

But this was a terrible time to walk around any neighbourhood in Kigali.
Since the genocide began April 7, following the killing in a plane crash
of President Juvenal Habyarimana, the city had been completely overrun by
the interahamwe, backed by government soldiers, who set up roadblocks
everywhere and murdered and pillaged at will.

Mutuze came to a roadblock nearby, in the Kicukiro neighbourhood.

"That was when I saw those people."

The roadblock was manned, she says, by five thugs, all of whom she knew
peripherally at the factory where she worked packing cookies, candies and
cooking oil. They were casual labourers there in more normal times, and
went by nicknames such as Head Coach.

But now they were drunk on banana beer and the genocide had made them

fingers and thumbs to her temple and squeezed. "It was broad daylight. As
soon as the two of them were done with me, a car arrived and they told me
to get up, and I ran off.

"It was the most horrific thing. They were taunting me. I was crying. I
was sobbing, and thinking I was dead. I don't know how I found my way back
to the factory."

Hearing the Story

As his mother describes the first of numerous times she was raped by the
interahamwe, Gervais sits quietly on his stool, face in his arms, looking
up to his mother without any particular expression and without a word. It
is the first time, Mutuze says, that she'd told the story in his presence.

It is not a story she freely tells at any length, even at a support group
she attends with other victims. In fact, when she first broached the scene
at the roadblock, and was asked how many men were involved in the assault,
Mutuze hit a wall. Physically and emotionally shaken, she fell into a
dreadful silence, and the conversation was abandoned until the following
day.

"It is taboo for women to even admit they had been gang-raped," says Mary
Balikungera, executive director of Rwandan Women's Network, which tries to
encourage rape victims to come forward to receive counselling and support.
"The mothers don't want to be visible, and some have had their children
absorbed in their wider families, so the children know they are members of
a family but without knowing exactly who their parents are. Now the
mothers are worried about whether to tell the children the truth."

Escape from Kigali

Not long after Mutuze's ordeal, her factory manager, an expatriate from
the Indian Ocean island nation of Seychelles who was arranging to flee the
carnage with his family, offered to take her, too. He got the governor of
Kigali, Tharcisse Renzaho, an acquaintance, to write them a letter
granting safe passage. Mutuze would pose as his daughter. They fled
overland to Goma, in neighbouring Congo (then called Zaire), running a
gauntlet of roadblocks and easing their way with well-timed bribes.

But such was Mutuze's luck that Goma, which sits across the border on Lake
Kivu, also was the destination weeks later for more than 2 million Hutu
refugees and the defeated army and militias of Hutu Power. They had fled
westward in July 1994, ahead of the rapid advance of the mainly Tutsi
rebel forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which had finally put a stop
to the genocide.

For Mutuze, a young Tutsi woman in a sea of Hutu refugees herded into vast
camps in the shadow of the Nyiragongo mountains, her nightmares had only
just begun.

The refugee camps hastily erected in Goma spread out over an unyielding
lunar landscape of volcanic rock. In the first few days the miserable
multitudes, in shock at their sudden dislocation, milled about as if in a
trance, hungry and exhausted. In their vulnerable condition, a cholera
epidemic struck, killing as many as 7,000 every day for two hellish weeks.
At dawn each day thousands of bodies wrapped in straw littered the camps
or were stacked by roadsides. At dusk, smoke from tens of thousands of
cooking fires rose in the fading light and the volcanoes bubbled
menacingly in the distance, creating a surreal backdrop for the unfolding
calamity.

'Lied to Save Myself'

In a section of Mugunga, the largest of he camps, Mutuze found herself in
the company of 25 others, a lone Tutsi trying desperately to conceal her
identity where exposure guaranteed death. Only she and six others in her
corner of the camp survived the cholera outbreak. The question was whether
she could survive the interahamwe and soldiers of the defeated Rwandan
Armed Forces, who controlled the camp as they'd controlled the country
they'd just abandoned.

"Most of the time I lied to save myself, telling the others I am Hutu,"
she says. "But some people would look at me and say, 'You're Tutsi.' Men

others who were trying to lay claim to me. That man was able to keep me
for some time. I considered this lucky, because there was another Tutsi
girl who was gang-raped and she died. Yes, she did die. My life was like
that."

But inevitably the pressure built on the soldier to get rid of the Tutsi
"snake," and that he should finish the "work" they had started and very
nearly completed inside Rwanda by killing Mutuze.

"The man succumbed after some time and sent me away," she says. "He wanted
to kill me at first, but then looked at me and said, 'Someone else can
kill you.' Another man claimed me shortly afterwards." Thus was the young
woman passed from hand to hand, essentially serving as a sex slave in
exchange for permission to stay alive. Then, a few months later, came the
telltale signs of pregnancy.

Driven Toward Suicide

"I started feeling sick. I had no desire to eat or do anything at all,"
she says. "When I realised I was pregnant, I first thought of suicide,
then abortion. I had many bad thoughts on my mind constantly; abortion was
the main thought. Unfortunately there was no way I could afford it because
it could have been a death sentence if some of those in the camp found
out. They would say that is our child; the child is Hutu."

Mutuze fell into a dark mood, brooding, looking for a way to end it all.
Early in 1995, when she was about five months pregnant - she's lost all
precise recollection of time save the day she was first gang-raped -
Mutuze walked into nearby Lake Kivu, attempting to drown herself.

"I felt my youth had gone away and I was useless," she says. "I had no one
to talk to. Those were terrible moments that I constantly wished for
death. There was no one to confide in, not even God." Some fishermen
nearby spotted Mutuze before she slipped beneath the waves, and thwarted
her. With the cluster of refugees around her by then extra-vigilant, she
carried the pregnancy to term and, in June or July of 1995 - she couldn't
tell for certain - Mutuze gave birth to a son in a makeshift medical tent
run by Doctors Without Borders, the relief agency.

What to call such a baby?

Aurea Kayiganwa, advocacy director for Avega, the main Rwandan association
for genocide widows, says the anger, despair and shame felt by many a
raped survivor can be measured in the names they have given - or have
allowed family members to give - their children.

"In Rwandan culture, a baby's name must fit the circumstances of its
birth," says Kayiganwa. This is equally true in almost any African
society, where names mark a major event, usually heroic, or are
aspirational, a yearning for the good and great things that parents
everywhere wish for their children. But among the rape victims of Rwanda's
genocide, children's names took on a gnarled and bitter quality. In
addition to Little Interahamwe, many children born of rape are called
Jiyamubandi ("The Intruder"); Niyigena ("It's God's Plan," given a child
as if with a sigh of resignation); Mbuzukongira ("I am at a loss,") or
Ntahobitabaye ("It's not only me.")

A 'Thanksgiving'

Such was Mutuze's aversion to her newborn son that she wanted to name him
War, or at least Zaire, as a reminder of the nightmarish camp where she
became a sex slave. But some of the women in the camp prevailed on her to
do otherwise, and she was finally persuaded to accept a name they chose -
Tuyishime, which stands for "Thanksgiving."

"I wanted to call him something bad, but these women said that would not
be good because it was not his choice to be born," she says, casting a
sideways glance at the boy, who seems to be following the conversation
with rapt attention, all the while without losing the gentle smile that
appears to be a permanent feature of his handsome face.

If Gervais feels any emotion other than general happiness, it never is
readily apparent. His is not a particularly active face, save for the

affection for this baby. The thing that prevented me from killing it was
that I would be killed myself, and killed badly, by those who claimed it
was theirs.

"I would love to give him away to somebody else who can take care of him."

The instinct for rejection of a child born of rape is very powerful in
victims, says Jean Damascene Ndayambaje, an associate professor of
experimental psychology at the National University of Rwanda, who has seen
many such patients over the past decade. He speaks of a young woman who
was so insistent on abortion that she had to be tied down and given a
Caesarean.

"She totally rejected the child and the child had to be taken to an
orphanage," says Ndayambaje, who heads the university's department of
mental health, in the southern city of Butare. "I counselled her for three
months. Even the girl's family had to get some counselling so they could
allow the woman and child to be reintegrated back into the family."

Mutuze says she thinks often how much lighter her load would be if any
members of her family had survived the Rwandan Holocaust.

Little Girl Spoiled

She was born in 1974 in the village of Musange outside the central town of
Gikongoro, the youngest of nine children of a cattle rearer, Petero
Gasimba, and his wife, Atanasia Bwumgura, who nursed the young Mutuze
until she entered first grade.

Mutuze was particularly close to her oldest brother, Pierre Hakizimana,
who doted on his baby sister, fended off neighbourhood bullies and bought
her sweets. "He was a trader, and he had the means," she says, her voice a
bit unsteady at the memory. "I am heartbroken when I think of him. He
loved me so."

At the suggestion of her sister, Bridgette Mukamusoni, who had married and
relocated to Kigali, Mutuze moved to the capital in 1987. She never had
more than a sixth-grade education, and it took a while before she found a
job at the factory, called Sakirwa, where she packed soap and other
products. By this time, around 1991, the political temperature was rising
in Kigali and around the country. After more than three decades of
persecution, including periodic pogroms that had forced hundreds of
thousands of the minority Tutsi into refugee camps in neighbouring
countries, the children of those refugees had formed a rebel army and
invaded from Uganda, determined to reclaim their right to live in their
homeland.

As the mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front pushed steadily into Rwanda,
the government mobilised the population into a genocidal frenzy, telling
the Hutu that their very existence was in jeopardy. Between 1991 and 1993,
killing a Tutsi was no longer seen as a crime. "Even in 1990 people were
getting killed," Mutuze says. "At our factory things were getting worse by
1993. Senior Tutsi managers who were termed accomplices began to get
killed. There was a lot of tension and we were very worried. We did not
know what tomorrow would bring."

By 1994, the regime's killing machine was in full cry. The United Nations,
at the active instigation of the Clinton administration, was resistant to
intervention; Washington was still reeling from the killing U.S. Army
Rangers in Somalia in October 1993.

When the downing of the Rwandan presidential jet on the night of April 6,
1994, provided the spark for the final conflagration, every Tutsi in
Kigali was running for cover. Mutuze sought refuge at the factory. But as
supplies ran low and desperation rose, she ventured out on the afternoon
of April 18, and ran smack into the roadblock where the first of her many
rapists awaited.

Driven to Goma with the help of her factory manager, she would endure the
refugee camp for the next two years.

A Long Trek Home

With life increasingly intolerable in the camps in Goma, Mutuze decided in
1996 that she had to find a way back home.

"I was so fed up and decided to walk back to Rwanda," she says. "At that

the trek east through the Virunga range, and then southward to Gikongoro,
and her ancestral village. The journey took three months, and it was all
for naught. Her entire family had been butchered in the genocide, as had
much of the local Tutsi population.

The genocidaires of Gikongoro, as those in neighbouring Kibuye province,
were particularly thorough in their "work" of exterminating the Tutsi.
Even now, the killing has not completely stopped. In October last year a
survivor was brutally murdered to prevent any possibility of testifying
against some of the killers. In early March, five people were sentenced to
die for the murder.

"The whole place was empty; it was ghostly," Mutuze says now. "I did not
spend even a single night in there. I kept walking." After various detours
for another year, she ended back in Kigali.

Mother and Son

Seven years after mother and son arrived in Kigali, their relationship
remains highly conflicted. Gervais is desperate to win his mother's love,
according to caseworkers from Avega, the widows association. "You can see
that the child unconditionally loves his mother," says Kayiganwa, who has
worked closely with both, "even after the abuse she sometimes inflicts on
him."

Mutuze admits to moments of intimacy shared with her son, though these are
few, she says, and usually fleeting. She recalls taking him once to a
wedding in the western town of Kibuye, and both stayed in a hotel for the
first time and seemed to temporarily set aside their daily struggle. On
occasion Gervais makes his mother breakfast porridge, and both sit down to
share the meal. While she has no steady job and money is perennially
scarce, now and then she finds enough to buy him candy - "which he likes
very much" - just like her brother did when she was a child.

Kayiganwa, the Avega official, is not surprised by this. "I can tell you
as a mother," she says. "There is one thing that cannot be erased, and
that is a mother's love."

Nevertheless, Mutuze says, her urge to be physically separated from
Gervais remains close to overpowering.

"I can't say this is a child that brings me joy," she says. "If you know
anyone in America who would like to take this child, perhaps it would be
better for him and for me." Then she feels compelled to add: "I feel like
giving him away not just because I hate him but because I can't properly
care for him. He could end up being a mayibobo (street child). I don't
feel that this is the life I would want for him."

Were Mutuze to actually give the child up for adoption, Kayiganwa says the
mother would likely be miserably unhappy and most certainly lonely. "I
think Gervais is someone that makes her life bearable," Kayiganwa says.

In all the many hours of conversations over several days, Mutuze never
once refers to Gervais as "my son," or even by name. Throughout, she
speaks of him in an arms-length way, calling him "this child," or "that
boy." He is in third grade at an Italian-run school for orphans, but she
doesn't know his teacher's name.

"Sometimes when I get annoyed with him I lash out about how he was born. I
call him interahamwe, and it's out and too late before I can restrain
myself," she says. "He asks, 'But you say interahamwe are killers,' and I
have to tell him he is not interahamwe.

"I have never seen this child being sad, despite the fact that I beat him
and sometimes tell him that I am not his mother. He is an obedient child,
but I don't know why I beat him often. When I go out and have a little
money and I buy him something, I don't know why I do that either."

To cope with her torment, Mutuze attends a support group of fellow
survivors. Members of a Pentecostal congregation with whom she worships
also drop by from time to time, she says, especially when she has
recurring nightmares or thinks every other man she encounters in the

struggle. I don't know how I have survived all this so far."

To fend off the attentions of men, she has worn a wedding band since 1999,
like a crucifix that might ward off a vampire. Her opinion of men remains
extremely low. "Every man is a selfish individual who is a liar and who
wants to take advantage of me," she says, with some vehemence. "So I have
decided I am never going that route in my life. Liars who only want to
create problems for me. And I am not even beautiful. Why would anyone want
someone like me?"

But even in the depths of her despair, she says she has reason to be
thankful which, in retrospect, makes appropriate the choice of a name for
her son. While sample studies have consistently shown a majority of rape
victims were infected with HIV and thousands have died over the past
decade, Mutuze is free of the virus. Her propensity to expect the worst
out of life led her to distrust the initial negative test result. "I had
myself tested many times since I couldn't believe it," she says. "But I
don't have it." What she does have is a son she has convinced herself she
needs to give up.

"I just wish someone will adopt him so he has a chance at a good life in
the future," Mutuze says. "When he grows up and pursues a life of his own,
I hope he will look at me as someone who tried to be a good mother,
despite all the difficult circumstances."

The article was first published in Newsday of April 30, 2004

Pulitzer Prizes are annual awards for achievements in American journalism,
letters, and music. The prizes are paid from the income of a fund left by
Joseph Pulitzer to the trustees of Columbia Univ. They have been awarded
each May since 1917 on the recommendation of an advisory board comprising
journalists, the president of the university, with the dean of the graduate
school of journalism as secretary. Fourteen awards are given in
journalism-$5,000 each for general news reporting, for investigative
reporting, for national reporting, for international correspondence, for
editorial writing, for editorial cartooning, and for spot news photography,
feature photography, commentary, criticism, feature writing, explanatory
journalism, specialized reporting (sports, business, science, education, or
religion), and a gold medal for distinguished and meritorious public service
in journalism. Special citations may also be presented f! or journalistic
excellence and initiative in other categories. The prizes in letters, of
$5,000 each, are for fiction, nonfiction, drama, history, biography, and
poetry; works with American themes are preferred. The $5,000 musical
composition award was added in 1943. Of four traveling scholarships (of
$5,000 each), three are to graduates of the Columbia school of journalism
and one is for a journalism student for criticism. Pulitzer directed that
the winners "study social, political, and moral conditions of the people and
the character and principles of the foreign press."