25. NYAMATA GENOCIDE CHURCH

After leaving the school we drove a few hundred yards to the Catholic Church. It was always the place where Nyamata Tutsis ran whenever hate against them was riled up by President Habyarimana who accused them of conspiring with the Tutsi Army (RPF) who had invaded Rwanda in 1990 after thirty years in exile. So when Habyarimana's plane was shot down on April 6th, 1994 (and Hutus started killing Tutsis again) they ran to the church for sanctuary but instead ten thousand of them (almost all) were slaughtered on April 11th & 12th.

Thoughts of survivor stories (excerpted at bottom of page) filled my mind as we toured the Nyamata church. It's no longer used as a church but is a National Genocide Memorial and a guide is there to greet visitors and explain what happened here.

Church Front

Inside the church the altar cloth is stained with the blood of some who died here and the bones of some whose blood was shed are displayed in a crypt below the floor:

Altar

Skulls

In the churchyard at the back there are memorial graves and another underground crypt where dozens of coffins each contain dozens of skeletel remains and some are on display in glass museum-like cases:

Church Back Tomb

Bones

excerpts from stories told by Nyamata survivors:

Survivor Cassius

...The day the killing began in Nyamata, in the street of the market, we ran to the parish church. A large crowd had already assembled there, because when massacres begin it is Rwandan custom to take refuge in houses of God. Time granted us two peaceful days, then the soldiers and the local police came to patrol around the church, yelling that we would all soon be killed. I remember that you would think twice about breathing and speaking. The interahamwe arrived before midday, singing; they lobbed grenades, they tore down the railings, then they rushed into the church and started chopping people up with machetes and spears. They wore manioc leaves in their hair, they yelled with all their might, laughing scornfully from the throat. They thumped left, right and centre, they chopped randomly....

The interahamwe finished off the killing in the church in two days; and immediately after they set off into the forest with machetes and clubs to track us down. With dogs in the lead, they searched to catch runaways hidden beneath cut branches. It was here that I was caught. I heard a shout, I saw a machete, I got a blow on the head and I fell into a hollow. First, I ought to have been dead, then I insisted on going on living....

Survivor Innocent

...The day after Habyarimana's plane crashed, we continued teaching in the daytime but for fear of underhand tricks, slept far from our homes in the bush at night. On the morning of the 11th of April, there was a great commotion in town. Soldiers had started doing some very serious shooting in the streets....

Women, children, and the weakest began walking to the church. As for me, I said to myself: "Things are completely out of hand. They are going to kill there too for sure, and in any case I do not want to die in a church." Which is the reason why I ran all day without destination. I spent the night in the undergrowth and the next day reached Kayumba. Up there, two or three kilometres from the town, there were about six thousand of us in good health, waiting in the eucalyptus forest to see how events would unfold.

On the day of the massacre in the church, from up in Kayumba you could hear the grenades and see the smoke. My wife and child had taken refuge inside....

I could not have brought my wife and my son up to the hill of Kayumba, because they could not run fast enough. I did not follow them to the church which by custom was reserved for the weakest persons. I said to myself: "Since you are going to die, you must nevertheless try and last two or three days longer." This is why we parted ways....

In the end, there were only us sprinters left. We had begun as five or six thousand; one month later, when the inkotanyi arrived, there were twenty of us alive. That's the arithmetic. If the inkotanyi had lingered on the road one week more, our exact number would be zero. And all the Bugesera would be a desert, because the Hutus had grown so accustomed to killing they would have gone on and started killing each other too....

Survivor Marie Louise

...At that time, Nyamata was a small town of mud brick houses with sheet metal roofs. It was only in 1974 that the first solid houses were built. Leonard built his first house on our plot, then a warehouse in the high street, then new shops....

On the morning of the 11th of April, the first day of the massacres, the interahamwe turned up in a great uproar right in front of our gate. Leonard took the keys and went to open up without delay, thinking that in this way he could save the women and children. A soldier shot him dead without uttering one word. A mass of interahamwe came into the courtyard, they caught all the children they could, they laid them in rows on the ground, they began to cut them. They even killed a Hutu boy, the son of a colonel who was there with his friends. As for me, I managed to skirt around the house with my mother-in-law and we lay down behind piles of tyres. The killers stopped before the end, because they were in a great hurry to start looting....

I returned to Nyamata at the end of the genocide in July. Not a single member of my family in Mugesera had survived, not a single member of my family in Nyamata either, the neighbouring folk were dead, the warehouse looted, the trucks stolen. I had lost everything. I was indifferent to life. Nyamata was very desolate, since all the roofs, all the doors and windows, had been taken off....

Survivor Edith

....In Nyamata the dead were on display on the ground when I arrived; at the church, in the middle of the streets, in the undergrowth, in every dwelling. If you went into the fields looking for something to eat, you tripped over corpses; the same for the forest trails. The air you breathed was thick with death....

Survivor Berthe

...When the inkotanyi freed us one afternoon, they escorted us - a flock of filth - to Nyamata. I can find no other words. I was dressed like a thief, in rags and scraps of fabric scratched by branches. We walked in a slow-motion dream because although we were walking in broad daylight, we did not run for fear of being chopped down.

In the evening, in Nyamata, some young men caught a goat, lit a fire and handed me a kebab. So I tasted grilled meat again - I took my time, ate very slowly; I calmly lay down on a mattress, closed my eyelids, then I felt that once again I was myself....

go next to 26. BUGESERA SCHOOL HUG-A-THON or back to INDEX

Jackie Jura
~ an independent researcher monitoring local, national and international events ~

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