The speaking bones of Nyamata

The church bells peal on a late December afternoon in Nyamata, a pleasant, small town with clean streets and gardens full of flowers, about an hour’s drive south of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali.

Charles, 23, spends his weekends showing tourists around Nyamata’s Catholic Church, within whose walls and gardens nearly 10,000 people were slaughtered over the course of a few days in April 1994. “I am a volunteer here”, Charles tells me. “I come on Saturdays, Sundays, but sometimes I don’t like it. My head hurts. I get very sad.”  Charles is one of just a dozen people who survived that massacre.

Merciless

The Tutsi of Nyamata took refuge in their church after hearing that the then President, Juvenal Habyarimana’s aircraft had been shot down over Kigali. Habyarimana was on the brink of sealing a power-sharing deal with the rebel Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front headed by current President Paul Kagame.

Last week, details of an investigation conducted by a British team revealed that Habyarimana was almost certainly assassinated on the orders of his own political advisers. Within 20 minutes of the plane crash, interahamwe (killer squads) were killing Tutsi and moderate Hutu on the streets of Kigali.

The Tutsi of Nyamata knew the plane crash spelled doom. Nearly one million people were butchered over the next 100 days across Rwanda.

The church itself is a large, brick building, with high ceilings and stained glass windows, by whose light a memorial to the dead comes to life. All around stand long benches, piled high with dusty, torn, blood-stained and threadbare clothes.

These are bundles of belongings brought by victims to the church in the vain hope they would evade the killers and escape. From above the altar, a statue of Mother Mary stares down beatifically. Her expression is one of gentle piety: of which there was none, the day the killers came.

Terror

Charles recalls two lorry loads of government soldiers pulling up outside the church, and the force commander ordering the Tutsi to come out. When they refused, his men blew open the church doors with grenades. The gaping shrapnel holes are still visible in the walls and ceiling.

With a faraway look, Charles remembers how the commander swore he would torture his victims.
“We are going to show you what it means to be a cockroach or a snake (derogatory references to Tutsi)”, the commander apparently yelled. “We are going to show you how we kill snakes and cockroaches.”

His soldiers first lopped the arms off a few victims and waved the bloody limbs at the crowd. Next, they selected a local priest, a teacher and Charles’ own father who was a community nurse, and beat them with hammers until they collapsed.

A sturdy wooden cross lies on piles of clothing near the blood-stained, rear wall of the church. “This is where babies and children up to four years were killed, by swinging them from the legs and beating their heads against the stone,” Charles says simply. On the opposite side rests a gruesome relic: the cement altar, fronted with a metal carving of Jesus and the Apostles, and covered with a white cloth splashed with dull brown marks.

Charles saw pregnant women, both Hutu (those married to Tutsi or perceived to be Tutsi sympathisers) and Tutsi, stretched out on it, their wombs ripped open, the foetuses pulled out and bayoneted.

Behind the church is a mass grave, around which small white and purple pennants, colours of genocide remembrance, flap in the breeze. Some of the remains have been identified and most not. Descending a short flight of stairs underground, I come upon glass cases full of cracked skulls, many bearing jagged holes: evidence of machete blows to the head.

Then, there are rows of coffins overflowing with thigh and arm bones. Inside one coffin, I am told, rest the skeletal remains of a Tutsi woman who refused to marry a Hutu man, as the genocidaires demanded. 

As punishment, she was raped, and speared through the genitals and stomach. Everywhere else are skulls, places several rows deep. Occasionally, a trinket is preserved: bead bracelets, crucifixes, and the infamous national identity cards that marked Hutu from Tutsi.

Survivor

Charles was just eight years old at the time, and was hidden from view somewhere at the front of the church, near the altar, covered with blood and dead bodies. When he emerged nearly two days later, after the killers had gone, he found the decapitated body of his elder brother.

Crazed with fear and anguish, he stumbled across the corpses, and came upon the broken but conscious body of his father, at death’s door, who told him to leave immediately and save himself. That night, Charles and other survivors escaped Nyamata and hid in a swamp some miles away.

For thirty-one days they shivered in the wilderness, emerging at night to forage food from abandoned homes or pick raw cassava and potato from the nearby fields. They were finally rescued by the RPF.

Charles cannot forget; even his dreams are filled by these events. His mournful, deep-set eyes reveal a lack of sleep. Yet he is a young man with plans. “I want to go and live in Kigali, and study electronics,” he confides. The cherished life of normalcy may at least silence his ghosts, if not erase his tragic tale. 

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