MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Bridget Conley-Zilkic, Project Director of the Committee on Conscience, conducts an interview with Louise Mushikiwabo, a native Rwandan about her new book, Rwanda Means the Universe: A Native’s Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines. Mrs. Mushikiwabo discusses what it was like to be in Washington at the time of the genocide while her family was in Rwanda. She also reads from her book, and discusses what it was like growing up in Rwanda.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum's Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: This April marks the 12th anniversary of the beginning of genocide in Rwanda. In the course of 100 days, from April to July 1994, some 800,000 Rwandans were murdered, mostly members of the Tutsi minority. Among the victims were the mother, siblings, nieces and nephews of Louise Mushikiwabo. Louise herself was living and working in the United States when the genocide began. She has just published a powerful memoir of her family and her country called “Rwanda Means the Universe: A Native’s Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines.” She recently discussed the book with my colleague Bridget Conley-Zilkic at a program at the Holocaust Museum. Here are excerpts from their conversation.
BRIDGET CONLEY: For some of the people in our audience who may not know what the Rwandan genocide is, can you give them just a basic overview?
LOUISE MUSHIKIWABO: Thank you. As you can see, Bridget is a bias person, but thank you for the generous introduction. I was born and raised in Kigali which is the capital of Rwanda, and I came to the United States in 1986 to go to graduate school, and I have stayed since. When the genocide started in Rwanda in April, I was out of school and I was working here in Washington, and I did lose many family members. It is very difficult to pinpoint what caused the Rwandan genocide. There are many circumstances that I think came together and contributed to the genocide, but I think it is important to understand that the Rwandan genocide did not happen overnight. It a result of a pattern of discrimination within Rwandan society. It is important to understand that the genocide was a very well planned and sophisticated plan by the state of Rwanda to get rid of a group of its citizens, the Tutsi, as well as any other member of society that would not go along with those plans. Many people, I’m sure in this room and all over the world, have heard of the Hutu and Tutsi as two tribes hating each other to death and killing each other, but one should wonder why if these two groups have lived together for so long, it was only 1994 that they decided to get up and fight. The element of a planner and the element of a sophisticated, modern plan to eliminate a portion of the Rwandese population is very important. I talk about why the genocide in Rwanda is not a Hutu-Tutsi thing, which is the common question that I get each time I talk about the genocide. The Rwandan genocide is a state crime. It is a crime of the Rwandan state against its citizens, and it functions just like genocide functions. The legal definition that Bridget gave awhile ago applies to Rwanda very well, but we will get more into some of the elements that contributed to the genocide. There is a group of leaders in Rwanda that had been in power for about 30-something to 40 years who decided they wanted to keep the status going, keep the privileges and the benefits that they had, and it became very easy for them to use the ethnic differences and so that is basically how the Rwandan genocide started.
BRIDGET CONLEY: In general, it is assumed that during the Rwandan genocide about 800,000 people were killed in about 100 days, but I wanted to ask you about that question of numbers and counting because a theme that comes up again and again in the book is who can count, who counts, and what are we measuring? This question of the measure of knowledge; at one point in your book it is counting as a measure of greed, in terms of breaking Rwanda up as colonial enterprise; and then also the question of numbers that are beyond comprehension. I wanted to ask you to respond to three quotes.
One, you quote in your book, “A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic,” by Stalin.
Another one, “Six million Jews were not murdered during the Holocaust; one Jew was murdered, six million times,” By Holocaust Survivor Abel Herzburg. We have this quote in our Wexner Learning Center as part of a display on justice.
Then the third one actually comes from your book, so I will quote you to yourself. You write, “There comes a point when my brain freezes up; all I hear are numbers, numbers so great they stand between me and the people they stand for.”
LOUISE MUSHIKIWABO: When I started paying attention to the word genocide, I was not really sure what it meant. I was aware of the Genocide Convention. I knew pretty well what mass murder was, but what was frustrating for me was trying to tell everyone around me that this difficult word, genocide, and whatever the legal implications of the word were, really is something more personal to me than people think. When I was going through the genocide in 1994, I was working up here in Washington, on K Street, and people would read stories about Rwanda in the news, and come up the next day and ask me, and I was trying to prove to them that it is not as complicated as I think. I started disliking numbers. Fifty-thousand people, twenty-thousand have died in the city of Kigali, and you kind of really do not see what that means, but for me, having family in Rwanda and being here—Manya talked about something that I know so well—anxiety; the anxiety of knowing what is going on. Then you start looking at individuals in your own family, your neighbors, your brothers, and you start breaking down those numbers and it is very important. One of the main reasons for me wanting to write this book was to sort of capture these individuals and talk about them outside the context of genocide because I felt like I had fallen into a trap and I could not get out of it. One of the ways to get out of it was to look at, let us say, my sister’s daughter that I had known as a baby and carried on my back. She was the only survivor in the family—there were four kids and she survived—and I wanted to sort of capture her and what it was like to be with her; while she was in school in 1994, is she trying to run from school to home, is she going to be able to get home, so it is very important, at least for me and I think for a lot of people, that I have talked with about Rwanda and Darfur and all these places where human beings are being abused and killed, it is very important to look at them as individuals. It is important to, when you watch Hotel Rwanda for example, to concentrate on that small group that was at a hotel—which was not at all representative of what was happening—but it gives you a better idea; the wife trying to tell the husband, should we flee, should we stay? That is what genocide is. It is not some foreign word and something that is so legal and incomprehensible. Genocide happens to human beings.
BRIDGET CONLEY: Louise, can you set up for us a little bit, when the genocide began, you were here in Washington you said, and your family—so that means your brothers, your mother, nieces, nephews, one brother who was quite a prominent politician and his Canadian wife—where were they? Also, what was it like for you here? You hear that the President’s plane was shot down on April 7th, and then begins this time where you have to try and discover what is happening, and where your family is.
LOUISE MUSHIKIWABO: That is an amazing time. One thing about losing your loved ones is that it does not really matter how long it has been; you kind of remember things very vividly. I think Manya mentioned that last moment where you looked at your family and you kind of knew you would never see them again. When the genocide started, when the presidential plane was shot, I was in the office, right here on 20th and K Street in Washington, and a lot of things went through my mind, but the first thing I wanted to do was to grab the phone and call and see what was going on, but it took me a while. I tried to pick up the phone, I hung up; I was afraid. Should I call? Should I wait two hours? Maybe by that time, people would know what was going on. It was a time of unbelievable anxiety, but also a time where I did not know what the best thing to do was. Let me read from the book. The beginning of this book is the last six days before the genocide starts, and it is one of those days when I am anxious and I am trying to figure out what to do.
“Half the globe away, it is half a day away, a long night just beginning. ‘Have you heard?’ a disembodied voice calls ask. Try as I might, I cannot get through to Kigali. At one point, I get a helpful operator, but she has never had to deal with an entire country, entirely cut off. She is confused, and I conflate her confusion with so much other confusion about Rwanda, right down to all those confused efforts to get our names straight. I place the flat, portable phone in hand. I talk to the walls, ‘Maybe we should change our numbers, our names to something simple. Maybe then the world will get it straight.’
At the Kabuye mission, where I went to high school, the nuns thought it, at best, impolite to use the words ‘Hutu’ or ‘Tutsi,’ so we called each other hippies and tourists. Just think of me as a tourist, that tourist Louise, if you prefer, Lu Lu the tourist. Mind you though, I do not much like Lu Lu, and in any case, Louise is not my real name. Nobody knows my real name. My real name is hiding as a family name, Mushikiwabo, which is not in fact, a family name at all.
BRIDGET CONLEY: Thank you. You end this beginning section that you talked about, which starts with the immediate time about finding out the genocide is beginning. I remember a phrase you use in there at one point. You talk about the need to get to the bottom of things; that moment of confusion of not knowing what to do, how to get the information that you need, how to help, how to be there, but how to not make things worse, and to be close to the people that are now caught up in this. In getting to the bottom of things, you go back then. You start with your youth in Rwanda. Here again was one of the times when as someone who has known you mostly here in the United States, it was amazing to see this youth and this Rwanda I had not known come to life. I wondered two things; one, are there any particular parts of growing up in Rwanda that you think would surprise Americans? You know Americans pretty well having lived here a long time. Is there anything that you think would surprise us to learn what it was like to grow up as a Rwandan female Tutsi in Rwanda? Then also, is there something in that part that you felt that you had to convey about Rwanda? What did you want us to read, to learn?
LOUISE MUSHIKIWABO: I think, and my husband started reading this book and he was telling me, every little girl growing up is basically the same, whether you are in Washington or Kigali. It is the same, and that really made me pay attention to the word “humanity.” A human being basically wants things and has a surrounding, and I think what is different as a young girl growing up in Rwanda is just my surrounding, but I think a young girl growing up in Washington in different surroundings probably would act the same way I acted as a little girl. There is nothing particularly surprising other than you are in a different place and you play with different toys, although in the book I talk about this doll that a Spanish nun who was my neighbor had given me. A doll is probably a very common toy for young girls. You play with balls made of dried banana leaves instead of rubber, but it is the same games; it is the same toys, and pretty much the same mentality I think, for young girls. I will read from a section of the book where I remembered being young, as a little girl in Rwanda, and that one particular time, which I think is pretty much the same. Your second question, I am not sure I remember it, other than what would be surprising.
BRIDGET CONLEY: I think you probably got both of them actually. This I am hoping is the cinema?
LOUISE MUSHIKIWABO: Yes. People are very surprised at how young kids in the third world will be watching cowboy movies. Where I went to school, it was a Catholic Mission School, and it had what we called the “Culture School,” and it was a small room where we would go every Wednesday afternoon to watch Charlie Chaplin, John Wayne, people that we did not even know, but we kind of really got into it and especially my brother who was sort of turbulent and loved to scare girls and play with guns, imaginary guns. I think while I was writing this book, I wanted to recreate that part of Rwanda that is probably not known. I sort of refused the fact that people would know Rwanda only as the place where the genocide happened and I went through these scenes of childhood and family scenes with my relatives, going as far back as I could just to, for myself first to relive moments, but also to show that Rwandans were just normal human beings going about their daily business, so I will read from a scene at those cowboy movies in Kigali. One thing I wanted to mention about these films is that they were shown by white priests, and in this particular scene it is a Belgian priest, and my sister, Anne-Marie was translating from French into Kinyarwanda because we were little kids in elementary school and we spoke very approximate French. There was a sort of summary before the film started and as I was writing this book, these are some of the memorable times where I could basically see my sister standing next to this very, very tall Belgian priest speaking in French with a very deep voice. Abbé Massion was his name.
“Now here is a priest! The sound of his crisply precise French is far more fascinating than what he’s saying. I have no idea what he’s saying.
Her head—my sister’s—straight ahead, big sister uses her sidewise eyes to show she is listening to him (as we all know we should), then on cue she shifts her eyes back to the audience… Grand orchestral music taxes both sound track and speakers. Grandly sweeping orchestral cacophony blows up the little thirty-by-thirty-foot building like a brick balloon. Twisting around backward in the first row, all I can see in the black is the brilliant white circle of the projector lens and the wide white eyeballs of fifty children staring straight ahead.
The sound of galloping hooves yanks my head back around. Horses kick up shining white dust. It overwhelms the first row. I wave my hand and squint to see. The dust clears and I see the strangest of all landscapes, a desert, sand and rocks, rocky mountains, and all those Bazungu on horses, firing pistols like the ones brandished by the comic-book cowboy Dangerous Danny, who brother Wellars says is really him, Wellars, dressed up to look white. Not too long ago, I believed quite firmly that the world’s only white men were priests. Now I’m quite disabused of that notion. Now, after all, I’m six. But I’m certain that plenty of these poor benighted children who are my neighbors, especially these strange rough boys, still suffer from the same delusion. If nothing else, this movie should at least demonstrate that somewhere out there beyond this Kabuye mission there are white men who are not priests.
But then again, these are actors. Maybe these are just priests, acting. Maybe priests are the world’s only white men. I turn around with a question mark on my face for Wellars in the second row. A pistol cracks and yanks my head back to the screen.
BRIDGET CONLEY: Louise, could you just take that section just one or two steps further. You do not even necessarily have to read it; but tell everyone the scene sort of coming home.
LOUISE MUSHIKIWABO: This was a very common occurrence. After these cowboy movies, my brother and his few friends would leave probably five or ten minutes before the film ends and they would go hide in the bushes behind the Cultural Center. Usually we would get out around six so it was sort of dark. They would try to scare us. Coming out, the lighting was very minimal and we were trying to get on the main road to go home, and they would be playing cowboys and using these imaginary guns. My brother would tell me on the movie day, which was Wednesday, “Look, do not be scared. When you come out, we will be hiding in the bushes on such and such a side, so if you hear noise just keep walking, but do not tell anybody about it.”
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
