Granta 125: After the War Read Online Free Page B

remake their lives as Rose had done. In the nearby village of Kibilizi I met a group of women who had given birth to children conceivedof rape. Their counsellor, Marie Josee Uweye, herself a survivor, had written an academic paper in which she quoted the mothers and their children:
    One day when the rains failed people said it was because of these children, of which there are many in this area. Everything bad that happens is because of them.

    I don’t know what that child is thinking. He doesn’t speak often and when he does it’s to insult others. I think he is bad like his father.

    Sometimes my mother looks at me and cries. I don’t know why, and it’s only me not my little sisters. When I ask her why she just cries more.
    Marie Josee took me to meet Epiphane Mukamakombe in the half-built adobe house where she lives with her son.
    ‘It used to be the best in the village,’ she said. ‘But my father had a reputation for disliking Hutus so it was the first to be burnt down.’ She was rebuilding but didn’t have the money to complete it. Her son, Olivier Utabazi, otherwise known as Ninja, had written in pidgin English, NO GOD NOT LIF , on one wall. On another, he had stuck up posters of Tom Close, a popular Rwandan singer, and Miss Rwanda 2012. She wore a strapless red dress and a fixed smile. There was no electricity and the plastering around the window was crumbling.
    Ninja half bounced, half slouched into the room in his yellow-and-blue football shirt and black shorts. Real Madrid was his favourite team, he said, but he also liked Liverpool. He spoke confidently and looked me in the eye. An air of unchannelled aggression hung about him, like a delinquent boxer before a fight. He was polite but I felt that at any time his mood might change. He preferred karate to football, he said, but didn’t like fighting. Sometimes when I asked a question, his gaze wavered, and his eye slipped from side to side. I got the impression he was lying. He shifted in his seat. This was a restless, angry boy.
    ‘I don’t know who my father is,’ he said. In fact, he knew exactly who his father was. Although his mother had not told him his father’s identity nor how he was conceived, others in the village had ensured that he knew.
    ‘When I’m asked to name my father I get a certain anger in my heart,’ he said later. ‘My father’s family don’t like me.’
    Suffering had robbed his mother of mercy.
    ‘I didn’t love him when he was born and I don’t love him now,’ she told me when he had left the room.
    Epiphane was a frail, tiny woman but she used to beat Ninja, she said, because he reminded her of his father and the other men who had raped her.
Utabazi
, the name she had given him, means ‘he belongs to them’. Now that he was eighteen she wished he would leave home, because she felt people, including her only surviving sister, avoided her because of him. They called him ‘son of the snake’ and
interahamwe
. He was a curse. The only useful thing he did was protect her when the men shone torches through her windows and threw stones at the house at night.
    ‘What men?’ I asked.
    ‘I think it’s those I witnessed against in
gacaca
,’ she replied. ‘I have nothing to steal so it can’t be robbers, but those people wish we were dead. They always say if they had killed us all they wouldn’t face the problems they’re facing now.’
    Intruders had killed a neighbour, Anne Marie, just a few days before I visited the village. A
genocidaire
against whom she had testified in
gacaca
and who had recently been released from prison had been arrested.
    Epiphane began to cry. She had no choice but to live with the men who had raped her, the son who acted as a perpetual reminder of her torment and the families of those who had killed her parents and siblings.
    ‘We talk with their families to show we’re all right, but we’re not really all right,’ she said. ‘We have no wounds you can see, but our injuries are