Virginie Ingabire was still wearing her mother’s shoes when her turn came. The shoes dangled from her 10-year-old feet as the two strangers carried her towards the thick bush behind the house. Everyone who had been taken before her had not returned and Ingabire knew the men with machetes had come for something.
She remembers thinking she had done nothing wrong, and that the men must have wanted money, so she cried, “I know where Mommy stashes her money, I can just go and get it for you.” But the killers ignored the offer. They forced her on the ground and informed her she was going to be killed. The last thing she saw before they spared her was a spiked plank of wood being lifted above her.
Two decades after that harrowing episode, the little Tutsi girl has come a long way.
Ingabire is almost 30 and cuts an effortlessly elegant figure. She’s an administrative assistant at the Rwandan Mission to the United Nations (UN). The eldest of her two children, a daughter, turned seven in May.
But for many years, after those frightening moments with the men in the bush, she couldn’t talk about it.
“I managed to bury my feelings when I was a teenager, but as I grow older, it gets more difficult,” she says.
At one point, Ingabire planned to write a book about those days, but she could never bring herself to do it.
Finally, a year ago, she found the courage and the forum to share her story. She spoke at a small gathering at UN headquarters in New York, the only survivor on a panel commemorating the genocide. It wasn’t fully satisfying, though; Ingabire rushed through her story, and she felt the audience didn’t really get to a chance to understand how she lost her family – and how traumatic it still is, years later, to survive without them.
Still, for her, it was a cathartic experience, and so she agreed to tell her story again, for only the second time, on the eve of the 20th anniversary.
“I don’t think I am ever going to move on, but now I feel like I should face it,” she says.
Ingabire grew up in the capital, Kigali, with her parents and five siblings. As the bitter civil war was ending in 1994, peace negotiations droned on in Tanzania, but Ingabire’s mother began to believe that the city was no longer safe for the children. Then there were the frightening visits from gangs of men, the Hutu militia known as the Interahamwe, or those who work together. In early 1994, they were surveying homes that they would later return to, with murderous intent.
It was after one such unsettling visit that Ingabire’s pregnant mother pulled the children from school and moved with them to rural Gitarama, 23 miles south of Kigali. They stayed with their aunt who had seven older boys of her own. Ingabire’s father, optimistic things in Kigali would change, remained in the capital.
The village was a harsh change for Ingabire and her siblings. There was no electricity, and they passed their days playing with their cousins and helping with the chores.
“I felt safe. The whole family was there.” On April 6, 1994, just as the family was about to go to bed, the radio delivered news to her aunt’s kerosene-lamp lit living room: the president had died in a plane crash.
“Mom screamed and was like ‘We’re gonna die, we are all going to die!’” says Ingabire. Her mother, now nine months pregnant, knew the crash was a sign of worse things to come. For a while, though, Gitarama was calm. People kept going to the market, and Ingabire’s eldest cousin, Kagame, still ran his shop in the center of town. In late April, her mother gave birth to a son, Emmanuel, who became the family’s seventh member.
But the quiet was interrupted by a night-time visit from unknown men. Ingabire’s mother offered them money to leave but they were unmoved. “I heard one of the guys say, ‘You think we are after your money? You inyenzi!’ They called the family cockroaches, or inyenzi, made some threats, then left.”
After that, the family hid in the bush at night; the time when Interahamwe were most likely to come. “In the morning at six, we would come back home and take a shower. People would go to work and go to the market. But then at 6PM, everyone goes inside. Today, we would hide in the trees, tomorrow we would hide in an abandoned house,” she says. It was the rainy season, so often they would spend nights in wet clothes.
Then one day, Ingabire’s cousin, Kagame, didn’t come home from work. In the afternoon, the family heard that “Kagame is killed and they are circulating his body in
Gitarama city”. Suddenly, hiding out at night seemed pointless to her mother. So the family stayed at home that night – only to be invaded by another gang of strange men.
Seven of them surrounded Ingabire’s family as the youngest children slept. Ingabire, her seven older cousins, her two older sisters, her mother and her aunt stood in single
file in the front yard. The men chose their first victims: her older cousins, Rutajengwa and Rujira. “We are starting with these two,” they said, and led the boys away.
“I guess they were professional killers. We didn’t even hear a sound,” she recalls. The women were taken next, and one by one the entire family was led to the forest behind the house. Ingabire was the last. When the men picked her up, “my feet weren’t even touching the ground”. She remembers asking the men, “Where are you taking me?” Then came the moment when the men refused her offer of money. They continued to the bush, finally forcing her on the ground and lifting the spiked plank above her.
In the end, the men could not bring themselves to kill a 10-year-old girl, says Ingabire, who was the youngest family member on the lawn that night. They pointed her toward a hill and told her to flee to Mushubati, a place she did not know. She ran, but not far, and when she stopped, she could hear the voices of her family “crying, dying, I guess it was”.
“It’s the worst sound you can ever imagine,” she says.
Ingabire ran back to her aunt’s house where the baby, now just a month old, was crying. She thought it was her mother. “I went in calling, ‘Maman, Maman, Are you there? Maman, Maman’. She didn’t answer.”
That was the night when Ingabire became mother to her three younger siblings: baby Emmanuel, her eight-year-old brother and a sister who was about to turn three.
The next morning, the four children fled the house, taking nothing with them, and joined a procession of refugees walking to a church in the nearby village of Kabgai. For more than four months, they wandered, in search of safety. On the way to Gisenyi, two Hutu women took Ingabire’s brother, promising to care for him. The baby was left with an elderly woman in Gitarama.
Finally, in September, a full two months after the genocide had ended, Ingabire’s father found her and her sister in Goma, Zaire, where they had taken refuge. He took them home to Kigali – though their family home had been looted and burned to the ground. “There was nothing,” says Ingabire, not even a photograph of the mother and sisters she had lost in the genocide remained.
The months of the genocide were harrowing, and yet it is the aftermath – those days, when she returned to Kigali, that most haunt her today. “My story and my experience during genocide, it was all about surviving, trying to get to the next point. What touched me a lot was life after, when we got back home [and] how it changed us.”
In 2010, Ingabire emigrated to the United States. She now lives in New Jersey with her husband and two children. She and the other family members who survived have never spoken with each other about what happened during the genocide. Even her father, who lives in Kigali, didn’t know her story until she spoke at the UN last year.