Born of hate, raised in love :"I am thankful that God has chosen to spare me"

[krsna]

Born of hate, raised in love

 

 

BY DELE OLOJEDE

FOREIGN EDITOR

 

May 2, 2004

 

 

KIGALI, Rwanda - The genocide was over, and Grace Chanzaire gathered her six children around her. Her husband was dead and other relatives were either dead or missing. She had something to tell the children, and she could count on no one else to help break the news.

 

Mother was pregnant, she told them, as a result of several weeks of rape by a neighbor, a member of the Hutu militia that spearheaded the nearly total extermination of members of her Tutsi minority.

 

It was the price she had to pay, she said, to save the children and to save herself.

 

"I was in tears when I told them," Chanzaire says now, 10 years later. "They began crying too. They could see my pain, and we cried together."

 

Nadine Tumukunde turned 9 in February, and her six older siblings, ages 17 to 25, have over time formed her defensive line against a sometimes hostile world. She is being raised in a protective cocoon, made to understand she shares the same father with her siblings, and to feel that she is a normal child in every respect.

 

That her immediate family appears to have come to terms with the facts of Nadine's life is highly unusual in the charred emotional landscape of Rwanda, where an estimated 250,000 women were raped during the genocidal frenzy of 1994. Between 10,000 and 25,000 children were born of such rapes.

 

According to survivor groups and organizations tending to the country's rape victims, more typical for such women and their children has been social ostracism and familial dysfunction. An advocate for genocide widows speaks of a mother of two who was raped by her husband's killers. She then has to raise a child conceived from that rape along with the two older children, who knew that their father was killed by the biological father of their baby brother.

 

The most convoluted of Greek tragedies hardly begin to compare with such catastrophe.

 

"Many survivors get disappointed and feel quite depressed," says Adela Bamuzinre, a case worker with Avega, the association of genocide widows. "And they think life is not worth living."

 

In her Kigali neighborhood in 1994, some of Grace Chanzaire's Hutu neighbors, men and women alike, had joined the interahamwe militia, ready for the national assignment of wiping out every trace of the minority Tutsi from the land. Over 100 horrific days, some 800,000 people were murdered before the genocide was halted by Tutsi-led rebels.

 

But even as the capital turned into a necropolis, and dead bodies were stacked neatly on street corners and boulevard medians, a few of Chanzaire's neighbors remained loyal and sought to protect her and her children.

 

"Some good Hutu friends we used to go to church with took four of my children and pretended they were theirs," she says. But the other two children stayed with their mother because "they looked too Tutsi" to pass - tall, thin, with the aquiline features of Somalis or the Fulani of West Africa.

 

They stayed home and cowered under beds while the genocidal fever raged on the outside. Chanzaire's Hutu tenant, a man named Mupanda, offered his protection, in exchange for her sharing his bed.

 

"This man was taking advantage of me, and after a while I discovered that I was pregnant," says Chanzaire, now 45. "I could not afford to upset him, because my life depended on him and so did my children's."

 

As with most pregnant rape victims, the Catholic woman at first felt shock, revulsion and panic, followed by shame and thoughts of abortion. "I asked myself, what would I tell my children?"

 

Unusually, even miraculously, all of Chanzaire's six children, including the four in the custody of kindly Hutu neighbors, survived the genocide. In late July 1994, when she had to break the news of her pregnancy to them, the very fact of their survival, and the hints of humanity shown by the rapist, became the basis for her plea for the children's understanding, and their eventual acceptance of their baby sister.

 

Chanzaire says the rapist in fact did not initially force himself on her, until other members of the neighborhood interahamwe began to demand that he do so lest they handle it themselves. And when he finally did, Mupanda had first to fortify himself with strong drink, she says. He was no longer so reticent after the first time.

 

"I tried to impress the children that since the rapist did not kill me or the [two] children, perhaps he was not irredeemably evil," she says. "For this reason, you should love this child, your sibling."

 

It was a nervous and unhappy time. Nonetheless, she says, once Nadine was born, her brothers and sisters rallied around her.

 

"The older ones are so protective of her that they would not allow anyone to tell her that she has a different father," Chanzaire says.

 

But in a neighborhood so congested that most everyone's window opens on a neighbor's, inevitably whispers about Nadine sometimes penetrate the family's protective shield. A neighborhood drunk once told the little girl of her "real" father, but when she asked her siblings they told her to disregard it as the rantings of a drunkard.

 

"But by now she's aware that something is not quite right," her mother says.

 

Still, Grace Chanzaire seems determined to leave as much of the past as possible behind, concentrating instead on the sunnier aspects of life. A tall woman with the bearing of one who considers herself exceptionally fortunate, she smiles often and tries to cry little. Her children are doing well and she expects to be a grandmother in the next few months, thanks to her eldest daughter, Claire Umutoni, who recently got married.

 

"I am thankful that God has chosen to spare me and all my children," she says finally. "I have to tell myself that I am not the worst off at the end of it all."