God Sleeps in Rwanda: A Journey of Transformation - Hardcover

Sebarenzi, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416575731 ISBN 13: 9781416575733

Publisher: Atria Books, 2009

Synopsis

A harrowing tale of survival and reconciliation by a Rwandan Tutsi who flees his homeland before the 1994 genocide and later returns to be elected speaker of the Rwandan parliament, only to be forced into exile once again

This memoir tells the story of Joseph Sebarenzi, whose parents, seven siblings, and countless other family members were among 800,000 Tutsi brutally murdered over the course of ninety days in 1994 by extremist Rwandan Hutu -- an efficiency that exceeded even that of the Nazi Holocaust.

Outbreaks of ethnic violence had been occurring in Rwanda since colonial times when the Belgians ruled the region. As a child, Sebarenzi twice hid with his mother during episodes of killing, narrowly escaping with his life. When he was a teenager, his father sent him away to school in Congo, telling him, "If we are killed, you will survive." Sebarenzi returned to Rwanda after the genocide and was elected speaker of parliament. But he then learned of a plot to assassinate him, leading him to once again flee the country in a daring escape.

The poetic title of the book is taken from an old saying, "God spends the day elsewhere, but He sleeps in Rwanda," but this African nation is not alone in having had a shameful history of ethnic violence. God Sleeps in Rwanda demonstrates how horrific events can occur when the rest of the world stands by and does nothing. It also shows us how the lessons of Rwanda can prevent future tragedies from happening in that country and other parts of the world. Readers will be inspired by the eloquence and wisdom of a man who has every reason to be bitter and hateful, but chooses instead to live a life of love, compassion, and forgiveness.

About this title

About the Author:

JOSEPH SEBARENZI is the former speaker of the Rwandan parliament, a position he held from 1997 until 2000. In this role he represented his country all over the world,  including as a speaker at the United Nations, the European Union Assembly in Belgium and France, the Inter-parlimentary Union in Egypt, and the U.N. Human Rights Commission in South Africa.

A survivor of the 1994 genocide, today Mr. Sebarenzi is a professional public speaker who has spoken about reconciliation and conflict management to thousands of people at high schools, colleges, universities, and fundraising events across the United States and Canada. He has also provided expert commentary on National Public Radio, BBC, and the Voice of America on matters related to genocide, reconciliation, and restorative justice.

In addition, Mr.Sebarenzi serves on the faculty at the School for International Training in Vermont, teaching reconcilation and conflict management courses. He holds a master's degree in international and intercultural management from the School for International Training and is a doctoral candidate in peace studies at the National University of Ireland. In 2001, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of law from Marlboro College in Vermont.

LAURA MULLANE is a freelance writer who has been published in the Washingtion Post and Hemispheres magazine. She also authored a book, Bridges of Opportunity: A History of the Center for Adult Learning (American Council on Education, 2001) and serves as editorial consultant for the American Council on Education's Center for Lifelong Learning, writing extensively about issues related to higher education. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
The Drum Beat and We Were Saved


The most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL
I’M NOT a storyteller. In Rwanda, it’s too dangerous to tell stories. There are thousands of stories to tell—about birth and life, and far too many stories about death. Stories that wrap around the hills and skip like stones across the abundant lakes and rivers. Stories that whisper through the banana and coffee plantations and eucalyptus groves. Stories that are carried on the heads of women walking barefoot to market, or swaddled on their backs with their children. Stories that run through the sweat of men as they cultivate the land, rhythmically turning the rich soil with their hoes. Stories that sing with voices raised at church.

But you don’t tell stories. You listen. You listen to your parents. You listen to your teachers. You listen to the drumbeat that echoes from hilltop to hilltop before an official announcement is made. But above all else, you listen to your leaders. In the United States, a presidential address gets less attention than a football game. Unless there is a crisis, most people don’t really care what the president has to say. In Rwanda, when the president speaks, everyone listens. In rural areas where radios are scarce, people gather at neighbors’ houses to hear what he says. And you listen closely, for what he says could mean the difference between life and death. When you hear him, you don’t form opinions. You nod your head in agreement.

So you listen. You don’t tell stories. You don’t need to. Everyone knows you. Everyone knows your family. Everyone knows if you are sick. Everyone knows if you need help. And they will help. They will take turns carrying you on a stretcher for the two-hour walk to the hospital. They will give you milk from their cow if yours is dry. They will share their cassava if you are hungry. They will share their beer, brewed from bananas, to celebrate a wedding. They will work side by side with you in your fields. They will give you shelter. But the very thread that knits Rwandans so closely together is the same one that can so quickly unravel the country.

I first learned what Hutu and Tutsi meant when I was not yet a teenager, sitting on the floor of our cooking house with six of my brothers and sisters while my mother prepared our evening meal of beans and cassava. The glow of the fire and the oil lamp cast long shadows on the walls. My father sang his evening hymns next door at the main house, his voice traveling the short distance between the two mud-and-brick buildings. We could hear our cows breathing quietly in the paddock in front of our house, where they were enclosed for the night. Outside, a blanket of stars spread from horizon to horizon.

It was March 1973 and this night was like any other, except it wasn’t. Something was wrong. My mother and older siblings were unusually quiet. As my mother worked, she focused entirely on her chores, rarely looking up. The light in the cooking house was dim, so I couldn’t see her face very well, but I could tell she was worried.

As my sister Beatrice and I joked with each other, my mother pointed a stern finger at us. “Keep quiet!” she snapped.

We stopped talking and looked at one another, wondering what we had done wrong. My mother was rarely strict with us. It was my father who was the disciplinarian of the family. For her to snap at us when we had done nothing wrong was unlike her. Our older brother and sisters kept their eyes down.

Then my mother looked at me, her eyes wide with warning. “Did you know that I spent nights hiding in the bush with you when you were a baby?”

This seemed ridiculous to me. We had a nice home—I couldn’t imagine why we would sleep in the bush, where poisonous snakes hid in the tall grasses. “In the bush?” I asked. “Why?”

My mother looked down at her cooking and said simply, “Because if we stayed at home, we would have been killed.”

I had never heard anything like this before. I was shocked. “Killed?” I asked. “Why would we be killed, Mama?”

My mother’s voice became small. Her eyes did not meet mine. “Because we are Tutsi,” she almost whispered, as if she wanted no one around to hear, not even herself.

“Because we are Tutsi?” I had heard the word before but didn’t know what it meant, and could see no reason someone would want to kill us because of it. “Why?”

My mother said nothing.

“Who?” I asked. “Who would kill us?”

Again, my mother’s voice was low. “Hutu.”

“Who are Hutu?” This was another word I had heard, but I had no idea of its meaning.

My mother paused. “Abraham and his family are Hutu,” she said.

This did nothing to clear my confusion. The Abrahams were close family friends. Before I was born, my father gave Abraham a cow—a strong symbol of friendship in Rwanda. Cows in Rwanda were not used to work the land. They were not bred for meat or even milk (although we do drink it), but for beauty. And giving someone a cow as a gift was cause for great celebration. Abraham called my father Rutabeshya, meaning “truthful,” in admiration of their friendship. My younger brother played with Abraham’s grandchildren. I couldn’t begin to understand why they would want to kill us.

“The Eliackims, the Nyakanas, and the Ngarambes are also Hutu,” she said.

These were also good family friends. It didn’t make any sense. “So the Abrahams and the Ngarambes want to kill us?” I asked.

Beatrice jumped in, “Oh, Mama, the Abrahams are very good, I don’t think they would kill us.”

“No, I don’t mean that they will kill you,” my mother said. “Not all Hutu are bad. When I hid with you in the bush, the Abrahams hid our things for us so they wouldn’t be stolen. They’re good people. But some Hutu may try to kill us because we are Tutsi.”

I couldn’t understand what she was saying. We had always lived peacefully with our Hutu neighbors. We shared drinks with them. We worked our fields together. We celebrated weddings and births together. Hutu would come to our aid and we would come to theirs. We felt welcome in each other’s homes. What she was saying didn’t make any sense. Again I asked, “Mama, why? Why would they want to kill us? Because we are Tutsi? What did we do?”

My mother took a slow, deep breath and waved her hand as if she was shooing a fly. “Oh, this child, asking so many questions. Eat your dinner and then go to bed.”

With that, my mother stopped talking. She didn’t tell me more about how she hid in the bush with me as a baby in the early 1960s, while tens of thousands of Tutsi were killed and hundreds of thousands were driven into exile. She didn’t tell me how she watched as homes were burned and Tutsi neighbors were beaten. She didn’t tell me how loved ones—including my father’s brother—fled with their families to neighboring Congo. She didn’t tell me about Tutsi men, women, and children being killed with machetes. She didn’t tell me that it was about to happen again; that word of violence was spreading through the country; that it was only a matter of time. She didn’t tell me how afraid she was there in the cooking house, preparing the evening meal with her small children around her. She told me none of this. Perhaps she didn’t need to. I would soon learn it all myself.

One of my fondest memories of my childhood in Rwanda is of swimming in Lake Kivu as a boy. It’s the largest of Rwanda’s twenty-one lakes and serves as the boundary between Rwanda and Congo. My family’s land bordered the lake and on weekends, I would bring our cows there to graze on its banks and drink from its waters. While the cows rested, I would dive into the lake and feel its cool wash over me. I would turn over and float on my back, stare up at the vast expanse of blue sky spread above me and listen to the waves lap against the shore.

From the lake I could climb a steep hill to our house, which was surrounded by avocado trees. Eucalyptus trees dotted the farm, their sweet scent carried on the breeze that slipped between its branches and blew across our banana and coffee plantations. We were considered a wealthy family in our village of Butimbo in the Kibuye province. We had no electricity or running water. Every day we would descend the steep incline to the lake, fill our jars with water, and carry them on our heads back up the hillside to the house. We had no cars, no tractors, no bicycles. In fact, my first car ride would not be until I was sixteen years old. We traveled everywhere on foot, padding along the narrow paths that linked homes and villages. A walk to the market took two hours, so we went no more than twice a month to buy small things like sugar and sell our crops. All other food we grew ourselves on our land. But we were rich in ways most Westerners don’t understand. My father owned what was considered a large amount of land in a country where land was scarce. Rwanda is one of the smallest countries in Africa—roughly the size of Maryland or Belgium, its former colonizer—but the most densely populated on the continent, with 9 million residents, or 547 people per square mile. Land was like gold. And just as blood has been spilled all over the world to acquire that precious commodity, so has it been spilled in Rwanda for land. My father also owned about thirty cows, another symbol of wealth and status in Rwanda. Our roof was corrugated metal—a luxury in a village where most homes were covered in grass or wide, sturdy banana leaves.

My father was a self-made man. He had inherited a small piece of land from his father, but through hard work he was able to purchase more. He was a respected man in the community, someone other villagers would turn to for advice and help. Like other wealthy men in Rwanda, he had three wives, who had given him a total of sixteen children. Although polygamy had been frowned upon since Christian missionaries first began arriving in 1910, it was still practiced. But few men could afford it. In Rwandan culture, no more than one wife could live in a house, so for a man to have more than one wife, he had to have enough land and money to build homes for each one. An additional tax on multiple wives was further disincentive, ensuring that only wealthy men could afford it. My father, who was a devout Christian, did not intend to have three wives. But when his first wife was unable to bear children—suffering repeated miscarriages—he felt that he had no other choice. So he met and married my mother, a decision that cost him his teaching job at a Seventh-Day Adventist school. Soon after he married my mother, his first wife got pregnant; then my mother discovered she was also pregnant. Within a few weeks of each other, both his first wife and my mother delivered beautiful baby girls. He married his third wife in the 1960s, after his brother fled to Congo. My father asked the local government official to grant his brother’s land to him so it would stay in the family. The official agreed, on the condition that he marry a third woman who could live on it. So my mother helped him find his third wife: one of her cousins. My stepmothers, as I called them, and their children lived in other homes adjoining our property, just a few minutes’ walk away. Although we lived apart, we would interact daily, borrowing food or doing chores together. My relationship with them was similar to most Americans’ relationships with their aunts and cousins.

To reach their homes, I would descend another hill. As I walked, I could see Lake Kivu stretch all the way to where its shores became Congo. Beyond it I could see the imposing volcano range that divides east and central Africa. Even as a boy, before I had traveled more than a few miles from my home, I knew that I lived in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Our ancestors knew it, too. Before European colonizers arrived in Rwanda at the turn of the twentieth century, Rwandans thought their country was the center of the world. They thought their kingdom was the most civilized and their monarchy the most powerful. When Europeans arrived, they were impressed by the efficiency and organization of its government, its politics, and its military. It was that organized and obedient military that so fiercely protected the nation. Slave traders were pushed back from the borders. Few immigrants settled there. It was one of the few African nations to live virtually in isolation from other cultures. Rwandans spoke one language—Kinyarwanda—worshipped one God, and answered to one king.

That king was a Tutsi. It is unclear when Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa—the native hunting and gathering pygmy populace—first arrived in Rwanda. Most historians estimate the cattle-raising Tutsi arrived sometime between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. Somehow Tutsi established a monarchy led by an all-powerful mwami, or king, who was not mortal, but a divine creation. The mwami not only ruled Rwanda, he was Rwanda. If he was sick, it was believed that Rwanda would suffer. If he was threatened, the entire country was thought to be at risk.

The king appointed both Hutu and Tutsi to positions of authority in his administration and in local communities, but Tutsi enjoyed more power, social status, and influence than Hutu. Despite this, the two groups lived peacefully together—working together, marrying one another, having children together. The only large-scale violence in the country was within the ruling Tutsi clan, specifically during a coup d’état at Rucunshu in 1896. But relations between Hutu and Tutsi were peaceful. Unlike other tribal nations that have endured centuries of sectarian violence, the people of Rwanda—whether Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa—saw themselves first and foremost as Rwandans. There is an ancient Rwandan saying, Turi bene mugabo umwe, meaning “we are the sons and daughters of the same father.” For centuries, Rwandans believed this and lived accordingly.

Then in 1885, in a distant land no Rwandan even knew existed, white men sat down with a map of Africa and pencils and started drawing borders and writing names. It was the Berlin Conference, and although no European had ever set foot on Rwandan soil, the country was given to Germany. It wasn’t until 1894 that the first white man officially visited the country, a German official who politely informed the surprised mwami that his kingdom had been under German rule for the last nine years.

Germany established a few government offices in Rwanda, but largely ignored it, having little interest in this small landlocked farming country. Because Germany governed through the existing monarchy, few changes were imposed on the day-to-day lives of Rwandans. More changes were brought by the incoming Catholic and Protestant missionaries who established schools and hospitals and, of course, churches.

Then came World War I, after which Rwanda was taken from the defeated Germans and given to Belgium. Belgium took a keener interest in this country of rich soil and mild weather that sits just below the equator. The Belgians marveled at Rwanda’s cohesive government and strong national identity. In the 1950s, the missionary Monsignor Louis de Lacger wrote in his history of Rwanda, “One of the most surprising phenomena of Rwanda’s human geography is surely the contrast between the plurality of races and the sentiment of national unity. The natives of this country genuinely have the feeling of forming but one people.”1

Belgian colonizers put an end to that. They were fascinated by the physical differences between Tutsi and Hutu and decided to make a “scientific” study of them: their height, their wei...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1416575731
• ISBN 13: 9781416575733
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272