Content warning: This article contains mentions of violence and sexual harassment.
Over 60 NYU community members and New York City residents gathered for the university’s first-ever Kwibuka, an annual commemoration of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, at the Kimmel Center for University Life on Tuesday.
Titled Kwibuka 31, the event was organized by NYU’s African Graduate Students Association, African Students Union, Association for African Development and John Brademas Center. The commemoration featured four speakers, including survivor Consolee Nishimwe and Deputy Representative of Rwanda to the United Nations Robert Kayinamura, and screened a short video on the history of the genocide.
Kwibuka, the Kinyarwanda word for “to remember,” is an annual 100-day period beginning on April 7 where communities mourn the lives that were lost and teach generations of Rwandans about the genocide and its colonial history. In the aftermath of the genocide — in which nearly 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered by extremist Hutus and up to 250,000 women were raped over the course of 100 days — Rwandans embarked on a massive effort to rebuild their community. With little to no support from international leaders, Rwandans strived for justice through community-based gacaca courts, used in the country before German and Belgian colonialism, to promote reconciliation by creating a space for perpetrators to confess their crimes and for survivors to learn what happened to their loved ones.
Survivor testimonies have been central to Kwibuka since its inception as a devastating but critical means of education. At the heart of Kwibuka 31 was the gripping 30-minute speech of Nishimwe, a survivor of the genocide and author of the memoir “Tested to the Limit: A Genocide Survivor’s Story of Pain, Resilience and Hope.” Exactly 31 years before Tuesday’s event, Nishimwe, only a teenager at the time of the genocide and the oldest of five siblings, had been in hiding with her family when her father was tortured and murdered. The next three months of Nishimwe’s life were marked by constant fleeing, knocking on people’s doors and hiding anywhere possible — trying to survive in the face of overwhelming physical and sexual violence by people that she and her family had thought they knew.
“My dad was my best friend,” Nishimwe said. “To see him in a position where he couldn’t do anything and was scared — that image never left my mind.”
CAS senior Tacia Mazimpaka, also a lead organizer of Kwibuka 31, said that no Rwandan was left unaffected by the genocide. Civilians were exterminated not only at the hands of the National Revolutionary Movement for Development — the ruling political party in Rwanda at the time — but also by those that victims had once called their neighbors. Mazimpaka herself was born in the United States, but her parents grew up in Burundi as Rwandan refugees.
“I don’t think I know someone who didn’t lose a family member,” Mazimpaka said. “It was kind of like everyone did.”
Jessica Mwiza, a Rwandan researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York and the event’s opening and closing speaker, said the trauma of the genocide has reverberated through generations. Mwiza grew up in the south of France watching her mother grieve the murder of her parents after she had buried them with her own hands upon returning to Rwanda following the genocide.
“When she came back to France, she was not the same person,” Mwiza said. “She was always sad, always sitting on the couch and I lost her a few years after I was nine due to mental health issues because her heart was so broken. The fact that we grew up in the south of France with no Rwandan community, not even Black people around us, was even more difficult. But when I was a kid, I had no understanding of all of this.”
It was not until years later that Mwiza returned to her history, joining nongovernmental organizations focused on helping survivors and organizing events like Kwibuka in France. Her Ph.D. focuses on studying the post-genocide generation in Rwanda — specifically how young people identify themselves, now that the Hutu and Tutsi labels are no longer socially accepted.
The inciting factor of the genocide is often attributed to a plane attack on April 6, 1994 that killed Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, both of whom were Hutus. However, in her opening speech, Mwiza emphasized the importance of recognizing that racist ideology was first born out of and instrumentalized by colonial powers. Ethnic division was not innate to the Rwandan community but rather a colonial tactic historically used to dominate Rwandans united by the same culture and language, Mwiza explained.
“What followed was the logic of hatred, meticulously reinforced by political, religious, cultural, educational and family discourse,” Mwiza said. “Death [became] a civil service to the nation, the majority of which, back in 1994, considered that taking a life was a positive social value, and that saving the life of a Tutsi constituted a vile complicity.”
As much as Kwibuka is a time for mourning, it is also a time to honor the resilience and steadfastness of survivors and the Rwandan community at large. Nishimwe said the process of sharing her story — to put words to the pain she and so many other women experienced — was not easy, but necessary for her to heal and ensure that the next generation would not allow a genocide like this to happen again.
“The work I’ve done on myself, I’ve been able to love life and see myself as a person who deserves to be happy, and I’m not defined by what happened to me,” Nishimwe said.
For Zora Kings, a second-year Steinhardt graduate student, Kwibuka 31 was her first time attending a Kwibuka. With very little knowledge of the 1994 genocide, Kings said the event, specifically Nishimwe’s testimony, served as an educational experience — one that left her overwhelmed yet incredibly moved by its end.
“It was so inspiring to see her courage, her strength and her positivity,” Kings said. “That was honestly the biggest thing — seeing how she was able to walk away and use this as an opportunity to inspire others. [My friend and I] were talking about how it’d be so easy to just be so hateful and to hold onto that. The fact that her message was encouraging us — all the young people — to not hold on to that hate, to hold on to that positivity, it was very emotional.”
Agnes Kalissa, a member of the Rwandan community in New York City, further emphasized the educational component of Kwibuka as a key aspect of the tradition.
“It happened before I was born, so it’s something that my parents would tell me and my siblings about,” Kalissa said in an interview with WSN. “It’s just really important to keep the memory alive every year, especially through new generations like mine and younger, so that they know about this history.”
In line with Nishimwe and Kayinamura’s calls to action, SPS professor Olajumoke Ayandele, a speaker at the event, left attendees with the message that addressing the genocide requires a continuous refusal to look away. In the midst of increasing denialism of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda as well as ongoing genocides in other parts of the world, Ayandele called on her audience of students, researchers, policymakers and advocates to remain committed to the struggles for education and prevention.
“We are all responsible,” Ayandele said. “We are not powerless. We cannot undo what we saw in 1994, but what we can do is refuse to let inaction be our legacy … Remembrance is not passive, it is active. It asks something of us, so I encourage each one of you to do something about it.”
Contact Julia Kim at jkim@nyunews.com.
This story ‘A vile complicity’: Members of the Rwandan community recount 1994 genocide appeared first on Washington Square News.
