Rwanda remained an unforgotten testament to the ultimate breaking of the human heart, the depths of barbarity to which humankind could sink.
Three decades have passed and the shock of it all never goes away. Rwanda did not leave me. It remained for me, and for the world, an unforgotten testament to the ultimate breaking of the human heart, to the depths of barbarity to which humankind could sink.
It is our remembering and our lived experiences of covering the genocide in Rwanda that haunt us so. Let’s be clear from the outset: our feelings are nothing — and I really mean this from the deepest part of my humanity — absolutely nothing in comparison to those who were the actual victims of this boundless slaughter.
Stories are the way we try to make sense of the world. Their meanings, the incidents that make up their narratives and, often, even their very endings, shift and flow as we learn new facts about what happened, we are reminded of extra things or see them in a fresh way as we experience the growth of our lives.For nearly 16 years now, I have had a particular story unfolding in my life that emerges from being there, in Rwanda, while the genocide was taking place.
To stand against this, and against the agonising fate of nearly a million more hounded to their deaths in so many gruesome ways, that was incredible — he appeared as a miracle to us, and we told our story that way. “Yes,” she told me. “There is no doubt that he saved people, but he also killed.” She hesitated for a moment. “It’s just one more example of how incredibly complex the situation in Rwanda is.”
I wanted that tape so that through its recorded images, I could remain always at least partially sure of what it was that I had seen. In June 2011, shortly before another trip to Afghanistan, I learnt that the Tribunal had found Nsabimana guilty of aiding and abetting genocide, of crimes against humanity, and of serious violations of the Geneva Conventions.
The court maintained that the charges against him were indeed serious and although he deserved “substantial mitigation” for participating in the crimes “indirectly through his omission” of his duty, this did not absolve him from guilt as an aider and abettor of the killings.Jean-Baptiste Habyarimana, who was ethnically Tutsi, tried to protect people as the genocide began on the night of 6 April 1994.
On 17 June we filmed around town and spoke to people who were wary and defensive, blaming Tutsis for the carnage, one even saying to us it was the Tutsis who killed their own and then showed us the bodies. The atmosphere grew more hostile as each hour passed. I felt the same arriving home in Johannesburg, somehow the world had shifted irrevocably for me. I had seen things that no human should ever see and, for a time, I could not relate to ordinary life. I felt constantly that I was falling off a shelf, plunging into a nightmare, while others around me carried on oblivious as if in a dream that surrounded my nightmare.
I cannot truly understand; I can only tell, again and again, of what I saw and heard. And in that very telling and retelling of it as the years go by, I take meaning from the fact that I reported on such suffering and such horror. I reached into the pocket of my camera vest and took a few pictures. I knew, even then, that they would one day be a record of this confusing, terrifying journey. In what little light I could find as the door was opened from time to time, I wrote some of the children’s names in my notebook. I had no clear plan as to what to do with these jottings, but some deep instinct in me wanted to write them down so that they would not be forgotten.
Four years later, I was in Lesotho running a seminar on journalism and I told the participants about Rwanda, about the convoy and about the email that had seemingly gone nowhere. They were deeply moved by the story that was still incomplete, without an ending, and they encouraged me to follow up. A few years ago we talked by Skype, seeing one another for the first time, at least on computer screens.is today a sophisticated-looking French intellectual. I told her some of what I recalled of Rwanda and of that convoy. I hadn’t expected it, but the emotion of that time flooded over me. I cried as we spoke, and then felt ashamed of my lack of control. I felt that somehow I had transgressed her memories, that I had overwhelmed her pain with my own, far less important, distress.
It is a potent symbol of resilience and human agency. Beata, and others, survived. That shadow, too, is a metaphor for the murky underworld of Nsabimana’s own choices. She is alive today partly because of them. Her latest email prompts me to go back to photograph number 56 after so many years. I see what she had mentioned that she thinks she can even see something of her mom’s Afro hairstyle. We can’t be sure, either of us, of exactly what we can see now, 30 years later, but certainly, the small child standing in front of that dark shadow is bravely hiding something — someone — Beata’s mother, even Beata herself.
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