by Ben Sehene

Special to G21

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[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is the conclusion of a special report by writer Ben Sehene which first appeared in G21 edition #375 two weeks ago. - RA]

Ben Sehene

SOMEWHERE IN RWANDA - In Remera there was a flurry of activity. The RPF civilian administration, now the de facto government, was busy trying to set up a coalition government. Faustin Twagiramungu, a Hutu opposition leader who had been designated Prime Minister by the Arusha peace accords, was mentioned as a likely candidate. There were lots of rumours and intrigue about ministerial appointments, a lot of jockeying for position.

Outside each RPF official's house there were parked cars, madoadoas, armed military escorts and a small crowd of favour-seekers waiting for a chance to present their cases; lesser officials, Tutsi businessmen from Uganda or Burundi with favours to ask. The number of cars suggested the official's importance. These houses stood together across the road from the Centre Christus where several Catholic monks had been slaughtered by the interahamwe militias. Now the centre was being used to house foreign journalists, who could be seen being led away like a flock of sheep to sites of massacres by cadres from the RPF information department.

It was hard to avoid the atrocities committed by the interahamwe militias. Everywhere there were reminders of massacres and rape. Kite-hawks and vultures circled above the city as if waiting for the massacres to resume.

In the evening, a floral scent - that smell of African dusk - was compounded with the warm humid smell of putrefied bodies and hung in the air like an invisible curtain. On Gikondo road I saw a stray dog sniffing at the legless shrivelled remains of a man. Th e man's skull was still partly covered with hair, his rib cage was sheathed with shreds of what must have been a black jacket.

There were hundreds of these stray dogs and some of them were even pedigree. Dogs whose owners were either dead, in exile or evacuated European expatriates. At the height of the genocide, when the streets were still littered with dead bodies, these dogs had eaten and developed a taste for human flesh. Now they moved in fearless packs and would not hesitate to attack people or moving vehicles. On many streets it was common to find a dead dog run over by a motorist.

There were piles of incriminating documents and hate literature strewn about the streets. Official documents were scattered outside looted government offices. The tormented history of Rwanda was piled among the war rubble and dust on Kigali streets. Someone gave me a copy of Kangura ("Awaken"), a Hutu extremist magazine, which contained the notorious "Hutu Ten Commandments".

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Later we drove back into the town centre, to look for S at Radio Rwanda. She was not at work but everyone knew where she lived and we took on a volunteer guide. She and a colleague from the radio had just been allocated a government house. But they had neither mattresses nor furniture, apart from a dinning table and two chairs. They had no water, no electricity and were unable to cook the food rations they received from the RPF.

The house they had been given used to belong to the Director of Radio Rwanda. The house, like Kigali, was a looted shell. All over the house, on the veranda and in the garden were scattered clothes, papers, family photos and other personal effects of the former occupants. Photos of chubby smiling children, a group of adults around a table, a lady in traditional dress, a church wedding in black and white. They lay there waiting to be swept away with the other debris; moments of happiness from shattered lives. The monster of hatred has no patience for personal memories of the happy moments lived and preserved on paper. And it was amidst these episodes from the former Director's life that we improvised a meal of bread and corned beef.

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That afternoon, we drove into Nyamirambo in search of Antoine Mubirigi, the maternal uncle whose name I had got from my sister Helena. Nyamirambo is a vast slum crowded and cramped with back-to-back mud houses on narrow, dusty broken lanes and open stinking sewers. A city within a city. Nyamirambo is also the Muslim neighbourhood, complete with two mosques. It is there that Arab traders from the East African coast had settled, and their descendants also called swahilis like those on the coast, are an ethnic group apart in today's Rwanda. A fact which perhaps explains why most people in Nyamirambo were spared by the genocide.

In Nyamirambo life seemed to thrive unabated inspite of the war, the genocide and the intense afternoon heat. Kite-hawks and vultures circled above. Among the ruins, the litter and war rubbl e there were many open bars teeming with people. There were open air vendors selling the only food, roasted meat. People stood about in small groups. And there were the inevitable hoards of bare-chested children tripping about in the dus t.

Natur ally we got lost. Mubirigi lived near the market, Helen a had told me. But the market we were directed to was not the right one. We found ourselves near the Islamic cultural centre, a donation of the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. T hat part of Nyamirambo is clos e to the Mont Kigali, the highest point in Kigali and up to the last moment a FAR stronghold. It had come under heavy shelling. The mosque at the Islamic centre was in ruins, its minaret bent at the top and holding on by the flimsy steel reinforcements. Its pillared arches were bullet-riddled and its green dome ripped open. Our car got stuck in a deep rut and we had to get out of the car and push. We also had to tread carefully for there were many unexploded shells and rockets strewn about.

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In the vicinity of the second mosque, we asked a group of idle men wearing skullcaps and kanzu - an East African derivative of the djellaba, for directions to Antoine Mubirigi's house. One of the men knew Mubirigi. Yes, he was alive and well, said the man as he gave us directions.

We went down a deeply gullied road which disintegrated into a narrow dusty lane, past a deserted market to the furthest point accessible to a car. We left the car behind, went on foot, passed a noisy bar, crossed a makeshift bridge over a large stinking water drain and stopped in front of a small shop.

The man's directions were so precise that the first house where we inquired was Mubirigi's shop. Mubirigi was a thin, prematurely aged, dark, tall man with greying hair. My self-introduction was met with astonishment.

"Benjamin? Coletta's son? Imana ishimwe ('Thank God!')" exclaimed Mubirigi, embraced me and I was veiled in the smell of alcohol on his breath.

Then the young woman standing next to him stepped forward. "I am Mubirigi's daughter Venancia," she said in a tremulous voice, then embraced me and begun to weep. She would remain hysterical and on the verge of te ars during our visit.

We were led from the bare-shelved, certainly looted shop across an inner courtyard and into a sitting room. The leatherette sofa set, their headrests covered with patterned lace cloth, and the family photographs between crossed arrows on the dirty whitewashed walls reminded me of sitting rooms I had known throughout my childhood. And also hanging on the wall was the inevitable coloured poster of the Pope leftover from an outdated calendar, a favourite icon in Rwandese homes.

Almost as soon as we had sat down, Mubirigi and Venancia started fussing over us.

Oh, they lamented, what will we offer you? We almost have nothing. Some tea perhaps. Maybe some beer or Fanta. For some reason, in Rwanda all bottled soft drinks are called Fanta. Venancia still on the verge of tears sent for some beer and Fanta from the bar next door.

Mubirigi's wife was a small woman with an intense suspicious face. She sat at a distance from us in a manner which seemed to suggest that she did not want to intrude into our conversation: the traditional discretion of an African wife. In the general excitement I had failed to notice her but, once I began taking photographs, she called out to Mubirigi that he was being photographed, as if asking him to strike a pose. People in Rwanda do not like being photographed without putting on their Sunday best.

In relay, father and daughter told us the story of how they had survived the genocide.

At the beginning of the massacres, Mubirigi and his wife had sought refuge at Ruberi's house, Venancia's husband, because he was a Hutu and a government soldier. For months they had hidden there while Ruberi went out to fight every day( and perhaps to participate in the killings).

Here father and daughter chose to differ.

According to Venancia ,they had also been forced to run behind the interahamwe to bury the bodies. Then when the war had gained most of Kigali, Ruberi and his fellow soldiers had come to use the house as a retreat, and shooting from there. Soon the house had come under fire...

But Mubirigi quickly interrupted her, and asked her why she was telling us that. Then he instead told us his version of the story. Apparently as the RPF had advanced, Ruberi along with his three children and Marie-Therese (my step sister) had fled towards Gisenyi. Whil e Venancia and Mrs. Mubirigi had taken refugee at the Sainte Famille church. Mubirigi had come back to his shop, where the interahamwe had looted his stock, stolen his refrigerator and threatened him with death. Then one afternoon they had tried t o chop off his head with a machete, but he had raised his hand in defence. Here he stopped to show us a scar which ran across his left back hand. But he faltered a little when I asked him if they had not forced them to kill in order to be spared like many other Tutsis with Hutu relatives. "Er, no," he said.

About a year and a half later, I would learn that Mubirigi had died after a short illness. But I still wonder why he had prevented Venancia from telling us certain things.

On successive visits to Kigali I would often meet Venancia in Nyamirambo drunk in broad daylight. I would ask her about her parents. But I could never bring myself to ask her what she had wanted to tell us that afternoon. Up to now I still wonder if she and her father had not been forced to participate in the killings, or about her husband and children languishing in a refugee camp in Goma. I wonder what deal she and her parents may have done to be spared. It was not unusual for Tutsis with Hutu relatives to strike bargains and take up a machete to kill on another hill in order to be spared.

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The "Barundi" were very enterprising and had gone into the only viable business in Kigali at the time, the bar business. With spirits from looted stock, beer imported from Bujumbura and meat from God knows where; appropriated shops, butcheries, pharmacies, and residential homes were transformed into bars. It was surprising to discover that in a city short of food, some businessmen had managed to import beer. I was able to count at least twenty bars. And business was booming. Prices were astronomical but still the bars were always packed at all hours. As there was no water, no food and nothing else to do, people began drinking early in the morning and went on until late in the evening. They had beer and roasted meat for breakfast, beer and roasted meat for lunch, then beer and roasted meat for supper.

The meat was tough, leathery, of uncertain origin and you had to eat it directly from the skewer. D., who was very fastidious about Tutsi food restrictions would later ask: "How can you people eat meat whose origin you do not know? Do you realise that you could be eating anything, mutton, or one of the many stray dogs? Who knows? You actually maybe eating human flesh, a Tutsi relative you never met."

He was right, there was absolutely no way of knowing where the meat came from, the cows had all been looted and eaten by the interahamwe. I never touched that meat again.

Even in those early days, the"Barundi" exclusively patronised bars run by fellow Burundi and the Bagande - returnees from Uganda - patronised Bagande bars. Burundi francs, Rwandese francs or dollars were accepted at Barundi establishments, but not the Uganda shilling, that was only accepted by Ugandan establishments. Seeds for future division were already being sown.

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BEN SEHENE says of himself: "I am a Rwandan writer, born in Kigali, Rwanda in 1959, of Tutsi parents. At the age of four my family was forced to flee into exile. I grew up and went to school in Uganda. In 1984 I immigrated to Canada where I started writing in 1988.In 1994, I was living in Paris, France when the genocide begun in Rwanda. And I undertook a journey back to my country of birth in the midst of the genocide and civil war about which I was to write a book (in French) called: Le Piege Ethnique (The Ethnic Trap)."