![]() It was fear that saved me, it was fear that allowed me to flee, to run wildly down the halls of the school, cross the barbed wire fence without a scratch, and hide myself in a small eucalyptus forest until nightfall. Our Hutu classmates had fed them information and encouraged them. We knew it was the boys from the neighboring high school who were hunting down the Tutsi. A classmate suddenly opened the door: “Mukasonga, Mukasonga, quick, quick.” Outside, in the school hallway, I heard a great clamor, shouts. It happened one afternoon, during a math class. The targets were the few Tutsi still employed in administration and education, as well as the 10 percent. Grégoire Kayibanda’s government thought it had found a solution to the widespread discontent in Rwanda: the age-old method of scapegoating. That year decided the course of my life-I won’t say of my destiny. In 1973 I was in my second year of a social-work program in Butare. For reasons I still don’t understand, I was among the 10 percent of Tutsi students who were allowed to attend secondary school. I can speak about all those who were murdered because I was no longer in Rwanda in 1994. All those who had been deported in 1960 and their children were massacred in 1994. For thirty-four years, the “refugees from the inside” who gathered in villages around the small center of Nyamata suffered bullying, persecution, and repeated massacres. In the early morning we were unloaded in that unknown and sinister site on the border with Burundi that would henceforth be the place of our exile: Nyamata. The trucks full of Tutsi families drove all night on gravel paths. When I close my eyes, I see trucks with all their headlights illuminated soldiers, white men who jostle us, rush us, force us into the trucks: “Quick, quick, get in!” I’ve lost my mother, my brothers, my sisters, my jug has slipped from my hands, it rolls under the feet of those being pushed into trucks I’m truly alone, lost forever, I’m crying, it feels like those tears of exile are still flowing down my young cheeks. It all came to an abrupt end one evening, after nightfall. My mother was able to salvage what was considered the family treasure: a metal cooking pot that our father had bought off a peddler supposedly from Zanzibar, a beloved piece of kitchenware we had given the pompous name Isafuriya ndende, “the cooking pot with the long neck.” I slept next to my mother, and I always had a little milk jug with me. But it was really strange: my brothers and sisters no longer went to school, the children all played together in the square of the mission church, I ate what I had never eaten at home-rice! I wasn’t old enough to worry about what might happen. Of course, I didn’t know then what a vacation could be. In my book Cockroaches, I described this stay as being like a strange vacation. My first place of exile was the Mugombwa mission. I close my eyes, or maybe it’s my mother who covers my face with part of her pagne. ![]() I hear the crackling of the flames, the calves mooing in the barn. And still in the distance, howls that I don’t want to hear…Īt the edge of the path I see a big hut in flames, I don’t want to believe that it’s our house that’s burning. My mother looks for my brothers, my sisters. On the path, there’s a stampede, a crowd in panic, calls, cries, children wailing, cows mooing. We go back up the slope to the path along the ridge. ![]() Smoke rises from the dense swell of the banana plantations. Suddenly, there’s this rumble, this hum coming from the hills. I’m scampering behind my mother, who’s bent over her hoe. If I close my eyes, I see those images flit by like a time-lapse movie. It was 1959: the year the first pogroms broke out against the Tutsi, which would culminate, after many massacres, in the genocide of 1994. ![]() When I was three I experienced exile for the first time. ![]()
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