Granta 125: After the War Read Online Free Page A

me.’
    Rose had mended her broken life through bearing witness.Rejecting shame and silence, she had testified at courts in Canada and the US, where
genocidaires
from Butare had fled, as well as at the ICTR in Arusha and at
gacaca
. She was especially valuable in legal cases because she had witnessed far more than most survivors. As the genocide unfolded, a local official called Pascale Habyarimana had decided that not only should she be his to rape at will, but also that she should provide some kind of warped validation to his intent. He had put her in the back of his car, driven her to where her fellow Tutsis were being tortured and murdered and forced her to watch.
    ‘I want you to see everything,’ he had said. ‘Then when I kill you, you can go and tell the Tutsi god that Hutus are strong and have power.’

    R ose and I drove along rutted roads, splashing though puddles in the potholes. It was just before midday and children were streaming home from school in their royal-blue uniforms and green plastic sandals. They had been born more than a decade after the genocide; theirs was the generation that was meant to know nothing of Hutus and Tutsis. She was taking me to Mukura, her home village, where she had formed a supportive community of women who had been raped.
    In the years following the genocide, widows found themselves isolated in remote villages, often the sole survivors living among those who had killed their families. Haunted by memory, too weak and traumatized to earn a living, they were unwelcome envoys from a time that others want to forget, deny or exploit. Rose showed me a dozen cream-coloured cement houses that she had persuaded the government and non-governmental organizations to construct in Mukura. The women found that living together as a community eased the pain of survival.
    Life in rural Rwanda was brutal even before 1994. As a girl, Rose said, she had dreamed of a life in the convent but that had been impossible. I asked why.
    ‘My husband loved me for a long time so one night he just took me,’ she said. ‘It’s a traditional way of marriage but it’s really like rape. It meant I couldn’t become a nun.’ She spoke as if to kidnap a young woman and assault her was normal, and in a way it was. So many terrible things had happened to Rose that forced marriage was nothing.
    In fact, she had grown to love her husband, Innocent, and had been happy when their three children – two boys and a girl – had come along. Although she hadn’t finished her secondary education, she taught literacy. The genocide destroyed all that. Pascale Habyarimana, her rapist, forced Innocent, who was a construction worker, to build him a house. He raped Rose in front of her husband and then killed him in front of her. He threw her two sons to the dogs outside, but she rescued them and hid them in giant traditional milk pots. The details of her story were almost too grim to listen to: girls tortured, men skinned alive, her own toddler daughter strangled with a rope and dragged along the road.
    ‘For a long time I didn’t want to see any Hutus,’ she said. ‘I wanted them all to stay in prison. And I hated all men.’ She wouldn’t allow male doctors to examine her, nor could she bear the idea of being touched by a man. Habyarimana had forced her to milk his cows – she still couldn’t drink milk. Unable to sleep, for years she had no peace. But eventually Rose found that hatred itself was the heaviest burden.
    ‘A time came when I realized that I had two sons so I couldn’t hate men because I couldn’t hate my two boys,’ she said. ‘Now I’m better. I told them everything and they have heard me giving testimony. They say all men are not the same – do you think Kagame is bad? Or our dad? Or your father? They are good men. Kagame helped us. You’re free and considered as a human being. Now I am beginning to think they are right …’
    Few of the people I met could reflect on their feelings and