Devil's Spawn / Innocent Offspring

"I wanted to abort. At first I refused to breastfeed him and was looking away when the doctors gave him to me. I didn't want to look him in the face, knowing where he came from."
"The third time I heard them raping her, it was during the night, and I told myself, 'This is death, I don't want to see my daughter dying, I have to go die somewhere else."
Egidie, Rwandan Tutsi

Egidie, far right, stands with daughter Diana and son Bertrand. Diana was five during Rwanda’s genocide and was raped in a building next to where her mother was being raped. Egidie and Diana were separated for months and when they finally were reunited, Egidie was pregnant with Bertrand — whose father was one of the many men who raped his mother. The family is healing from their trauma through therapy. Photo and story by Sue Montgomery

 

"I've always felt rejected by her and he rest of the family. And now she feels responsible for the problems I'm having, and I feel guilty about that."
Angelique Uwasa, 19

Angelique Uwasa, 19, (centre) was born to Chantal Mukeshimana, who was raped during Rwanda's genocide in 1994. Both traumatized, they are trying to heal their troubled relationship which is rife with resentment.  Photograph by: Sue Montgomery, The Gazette

 

"I was vomiting and when I realized I was pregnant, I wanted to kill myself."
Chantal Mukeshimana, Angelique's mother

Vestine Mukangamije (left) was raped by the man who killed her husband and five children during Rwanda's genocide. Poor, homeless and still traumatized by the horrors of 1994, she leans on other rape survivors, such as Chantal Mukeshimana. (right)

 

During the 100 days of the 1994 genocide that took place in Rwanda, despite the presence of United Nations Peacekeeping troops, unarmed and unable in their paucity of numbers to physically restrain the Hutus of Rwanda from attacking their fellow Tutsi Rwandans, almost a million men, women and children were slaughtered by their neighbours using crude implements to effect their murders.

The genocidaires -- as they are now called; Hutu men and boys of age -- slaughtered, pillaged and raped. Tutsi women, between 250,000 and 500,000 of them, according to Amnesty International, were serially raped throughout the months of viciously frenzied killing. The aim of the majority ruling Hutu was to destroy the presence of the minority Tutsi.

An estimated 20,000 children were born of the mass rapes. These were children who understood themselves to be different by the way in which they were viewed by their mothers, by their families; branded with shame, dreaded by both ethnic communities as representing neither one nor the other. The children were living reminders of the horrors that were compelled upon them. Many thought of their children as representing "fruit of the devil".

In the southern town of Butare, a woman named Egidie was raped during the horrors of the genocide. Her daughter, all of five years of age at the time, was kept imprisoned in another building. And the child was raped repeatedly, the mother able to hear the voice of her little girl screaming in agony and pain and fear that would not stop. Months afterward, Egidie was able to see her child again, when both survived their dreadful ordeals.

The little girl could barely manage to walk, as a result of the internal injuries done her. And that's when Egidie realized she was pregnant. Her son Bertrand, has just turned 19. Donor funding allowed for widows of the genocide to live in neat rows of houses along Rwanda's terraced slopes. Hundreds of thousands of women survived, their husbands having been butchered. They helped to raise the children of others and shared what they could.

"In the past I felt rejected and unwanted", explains Bertrand, 6-feet tall. "But my mother hadn't explained to me what happened. Now I'm trying to move on, help my mom and leave the past." If that is at all possible. Diane, the five-year-old, now is in her third year of development studies at university. She hates men. But not her father. "My father loved us, especially me", she says, smiling.

As for Angelique Uwasa, whose mother was savagely gang-raped repeatedly, the memory of which has almost destroyed her, the mother and daughter are attending meetings arranged through a local NGO, Best Hope Rwanda. At the meeting, Angelique and her mother were among dozens of other women raped during the genocide, along with their offspring of those atrocities. They are all doing their best to find hope in life, to tamp down the bitter gall of memory.

These are women and their children who live in a country where those who considered them to be enemies, less human than themselves and deserving to die horrible deaths, now live among them as they did before the madness erupted. That, in and of itself, forcing accommodation with the fact that neighbours took part in such monstrous atrocities as mass murder, rape of children and women, is bitter fruit to taint the future.