THE DEVIL WAS IN US
Daniel Uhagaze T’08 escaped Rwanda’s genocidal madness, fleeing to the safety of a refugee camp. But that was before he was branded a Tutsi spy, stabbed and left for dead.
Edel Rodriguez
BY JOHN T. WARD
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T
he minivan that Bahati Daniel Uhagaze T’08 steered into a spot outside a T.G.I. Friday’s one afternoon last year was no Chrysler Sebring convertible, the car he tagged on his Facebook page as “Ma Baby.”
Peter Murphy
Uhagaze’s mother was Tutsi, his father, Hutu.
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Now that, he says with a broad smile, was a sweet ride, an open-topped taste of the American Dream. But the dream dies hard sometimes, and Ma Baby turned out to be a real heartbreaker, demanding one repair after another before she became too costly to hold onto. Anyway, his minivan suited him just fine, Uhagaze said, the windshield reflecting the red-and-white stripes of a restaurant awning. Besides, what’s the relative luxury of automobiles to a survivor of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide? Uhagaze (pronounced “yoo-huh-GAH-zee”) had come to lunch to talk not about cars but the horrors that wiped out nearly a tenth of that country’s population in just 100 days, his own mother and a sister among the 800,000 slaughtered. It’s a story that he would parcel out in his French-marbled accent with no small amount of reticence. But over a mesquitesmoked turkey and bacon sandwich in a noisy strip-mall restaurant, and continuing periodically over the ensuing months, he would also shed light on what can become of a refugee from unfathomable bloodlust when fate tosses him up onto America’s shore, soon leaving him with a master’s degree in divinity studies, a car he can’t afford to fix and a bicycle to ride to his two minimum-wage jobs. Yet even as he sometimes longed for the simplicity of his home village of Nyanza, where, he explains, “everyone always had something to eat” because every family grew its own crops, Uhagaze said he felt fortunate to be in the United States. After all, he was alive and pursuing ordination as a Methodist minister to fulfill a promise he made to his creator in exchange for sparing his life.
“I am not a victim,” Uhagaze says. “The people who died, they were the victims. I am blessed.”
Bahati: His father had given him the Swahili word for “lucky” as a first name. But “lucky” is not the word Uhagaze, now 33, uses to explain how he survived when so many died. He attributes that to divine intervention and sees the genocide as the work of its opposite. “The devil was in us,” he says. “The devil planted its seed, and it grew up and consumed the humanity. People became animals and savages.” Today, Uhagaze says, forgiveness is key to preventing a return of rampages that tore through the country in 1959, when longoppressed Hutus seized power from the reigning Tutsis, and again in 1994, when the Hutu Power movement stoked fears that the Tutsis were bent on revenge and re-enslavement of the majority. Still, tribal tension had almost no presence in Uhagaze’s boyhood, he says. Born of a Hutu father and Tutsi mother and raised as a devout, Bible-carrying Seventh Day Adventist, he grew up in relative comfort with six siblings in a small mud-and-brick house on “big land” covered with banana and potato fields. His paternal grandfather, though a Hutu, had been a devoted employee of the last Tutsi king, close enough to the monarch “to be able to insult his hunting skills,” Uhagaze says. His mother’s father, a Tutsi, had managed to pass as a Hutu after the revolution and win respect as a mayor. At the government-run boarding school where Uhagaze was a 10th-grader excelling in biology and chemistry, there was little evidence of inherited enmity among Tutsi and Hutu boys.
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In mid-May, Uhagaze and “the entire town” left, heading toward a French-controlled zone in the southwest. “Everybody was walking,” he says. “There were goats, cows, sheep being stepped on by cows. Children crying. It was like Exodus.” Along the way, he peeled off from his mother and older sister, Katherine, heading with another sister, Gemma, and her husband, Zacharia, for Zaire, where Zacharia had friends. Theirs became an epic journey. At a roadblock, Gemma, who has the long-nosed features of a Tutsi, was unable to produce her official ID card, the type that since 1935 had indicated whether one was Tutsi or Hutu. The guards started shooting their AK-47s into the air, saying, “We got some cockroaches here.” When one lowered his weapon at Gemma’s midsection, Uhagaze pleaded for her life. “You can’t kill my sister. I followed her in my mother’s womb,” he says he cried, even as he was being beaten. “I am a Hutu. Here is my ID. Here is our father’s ID with all his children’s names here.” It was only the intercession of a passing school headmaster that prevented their being killed on the spot, Uhagaze says. Later, on his own in a refugee camp in Zaire, Uhagaze was accused of being a spy for the RPF, hauled off in the middle of the night, beaten, stabbed in the gut and left for dead. Passersby found him barely alive the next day and alerted the Red Cross, which nursed him back to health. Later still, a reunited Uhagaze, Gemma and Zacharia landed in a Zambian prison as undocumented persons. After six weeks there, he was sure he would die of starvation. Writing in the French-language Bible that he had carried all along, he pledged one night in September 1995 to devote his life to the Almighty if he survived. United Nations aid workers soon won the trio’s release, and Uhagaze spent the next several years in a refugee camp, cultivating rice and making clay roof tiles.
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You can’t kill my sister. I followed her in my mother’s womb,” he says he cried, even as he was being beaten. “I am a Hutu. Here is my ID.
Uhagaze doesn’t know exactly where his mother, Zelpa, died, or who killed her. A “sweet, very Christian” woman who had endured widowhood, displacement and unfathomable loss, she was slain as she headed home from the French zone, thinking the senseless killing had ended. As to how, and who might have done it—it’s not something that’s even discussed. Uhagaze believes his sister Isabel witnessed the killing, but she has remained silent about what she might have seen. “There are many things Rwandans do not like to talk about,” he says. “They just tell you, ‘this person is gone.’” He arrived in the United States in 2000 as part of a refugee resettlement program and, impatient to get on with his life, earned his high-school
Peter Heineck. Facing page: Peter Murphy
The abrupt start of the killing was thus all the more shocking. On April 6, 1994, a plane was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali, the capital. Among those killed was Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana, who was returning from signing a peace treaty with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), exiled Tutsis led by now-president Paul Kagame. Who brought down the plane remains a mystery, but what’s clear is that extremist Hutus, angry over the prospect of sharing power under the treaty, had for months been stockpiling crude weapons and fomenting rhetoric hateful toward not just Tutsis but moderate Hutus. That night, electricity in Kigali was cut, and tens of thousands of otherwise average Rwandans, armed with machetes and nail-spiked clubs supplied by the government and stoked by hateful propaganda broadcast over the nation’s most popular radio station, took to the streets after the “cockroaches.” “I remember a journalist screaming in French on the radio, ‘People are cutting, killing in the streets. It’s like surgery without anesthesia,’” Uhagaze says. “We were in the village wondering, ‘What the heck is going on there? How can people kill each other like that?’” Two weeks later, refugees from the massacre began flooding outlying villages like Nyanza, the wave of rage close behind. The menace came barreling into town on four wheels. Uhagaze tells of a carload of Hutu militiamen and government soldiers racing past the sweet potato field where he and his mother were working and onto the property of a prominent Tutsi family. Shots were fired, and the soldiers returned, triumphant. Local leaders who refused to participate in the spreading slaughter were summarily killed by the military, their bodies left in the street to let citizens know what awaited them if they also refused. Soon, mobs were going from house to house. If even one Tutsi was found among Hutus, all present would be killed. Uhagaze’s aunt and uncle on his mother’s side were killed. A young Hutu uncle had a wife who was a Tutsi; when the uncle banded a group together to check on his in-laws, 17-year-old Uhagaze went along. They found the family murdered—all but a 4-year-old daughter, who was “still breathing” despite savage machete cuts. She survived. “In my area, it swept,” he says of the violence. “In two weeks, every Tutsi, now gone. Now people started hunting who else to kill.”
equivalency degree within months. He pushed himself through a bachelor’s program at Centenary College in just three years and segued into the M.Div. program at Drew, graduating in 2008. Though he, too, remains reluctant to discuss his Rwandan nightmare, Uhagaze says he feels his ministry now compels him to do so. He once sat on a panel with Dith Pran, the late New York Times photographer who survived the Pol Pot genocide in Cambodia, and has addressed criminal justice classes at Centenary about the violence directed at women and children. “People want to know how it was to be in the midst of genocide,” he says. “People want to know how it felt to see members of your family being killed. But I don’t find ways to express when you hear machetes crushing the bones, you hear people screaming or somebody tells you, ‘your school friend is lying dead. They just killed him.’” Of course, audiences also look for insight that might help them comprehend the incomprehensible, something he, too, wrestles with. “I still feel that maybe there was supposed to be another way,” he says. “To hit each other in the face but not to cut the neck. It was not supposed to go that way—not to kill your neighbor.” Uhagaze favors the efforts of President Kagame, whose RPF returned from 35-year exile to recapture the government and end the genocide, to bring about a hybrid of justice and reconciliation. Kagame is overseeing a controversial experiment using local, informal courts known as gacaca (pronounced “ga-CHA-cha”)—tribunals often held in the open air by local citizens, sometimes at the scene of killings, and without the help or hindrance of lawyers and judges. In exchange for full confessions—including details about who they murdered, where, when and how—killers may win their freedom from the country’s teeming prisons and return to the communities in which they committed their atrocities. It’s an imperfect system, engendering no small amount of bitterness, but necessary and “something to build on,” Kagame told the New Yorker last year. Uhagaze is keenly aware of how divisive gacaca has been. At the time of the T.G.I. Friday’s lunch, he was dating a Rwandan woman who was adamant that the killers should be prosecuted and jailed. The issue, Uhagaze said with regret, was increasingly a flash point in their relationship.
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Several months later, Uhagaze relaxed at a Dunkin’ Donuts a couple of blocks from the house he was sharing with two roommates in Madison; he didn’t know it yet, but within weeks, he’d wind up working at the doughnut shop, supplementing his part-time job in the produce department of a supermarket. He’d shed 30 pounds. He and his girlfriend had split, he said, “because of differences in our backgrounds.” Careerwise, Uhagaze found himself stalled, hoping for an appointment as a pastor to a church, but the near-term prospects didn’t look good. With the economy ailing, older ministers were delaying retirement, and other ordination candidates— natives without challenging accents, for starters— seemed better positioned than he was to get whatever spots might open up, he says. So he was planning a trip to Ohio, where there are clusters of Rwandan immigrants in Columbus and Dayton, and hoping to network his way into a church job, as soon as he could get together the cash necessary for the trip. Over coffee, Uhagaze returned to an earlier topic: naming customs in Rwanda, where no two members of a family have the same last name. Inspiration, not patrimony, rules the day. His last name, he says, translates from Kinyarwandan as “the one who is still alive,” though it’s less triumphant than it sounds. Instead, it’s more a reminder, he says, always to be patient. Says Uhagaze, “It means, if you are still alive, still breathing, you can find what you are looking for.” John T. Ward is a Red Bank, N.J.–based freelance writer.
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