Becoming Umwana – a son

In a house once filled with 15 souls, only three of us remain: my mother, my five-month-old uncle and me.

I set that sentence down as plainly as I can, because plainness is what it deserves. No flourish. No rhetorical preparation. One moment, there were 15 people who had names and histories and habits and faces I knew. 

Then, in the particular efficiency of organised slaughter, they were gone. The Interahamwe militia and the Presidential Guard had done their brutal “work” and moved on, leaving in their wake a silence that was not the silence of peace but one of erasure and ruin.

My mother ran into the street. I do not know what she expected to find there; perhaps she expected nothing and was simply obeying the oldest animal instinct — movement, action, the refusal to remain still inside a catastrophe. 

A United Nations peacekeeping truck passed by. She pleaded with the peacekeepers. She begged with whatever remained of her voice. Her cries were met not with compassion but with cold indifference. The peacekeepers pointed their guns at her and drove on.

I have returned to that image many times in the years since. The guns pointed not at an enemy but at a woman kneeling in a street in Kigali, asking to be helped. There is something in that gesture — the deliberate aiming of a weapon at grief — that seems to me to contain the whole moral catastrophe of the international response to Rwanda in 1994.

The UN had been deployed to protect. On that day, in that street, protection wore a uniform and looked the other way.

I was too young to grasp the full weight of that moment. What I understood was my mother’s face. I had never seen her collapse like that — not her body but something deeper: the interior architecture of her belief that the world might yet respond to suffering with care. 

I watched that certainty leave her. It left quickly. It was then she understood, her spirit stripped bare, that she was utterly alone.

Desperate and shaken, she made the only agonising choice available to her. She entrusted me to a Hutu family she had considered a friend. “I had to take a chance,” she told me years later. “All I could see was death.”

The family set out for Cyangugu, in the south-west of Rwanda. I became, for the purposes of survival, their umwana — their son.

Akazi: The grammar of slaughter

Along the road to Cyangugu there were roadblocks. Many roadblocks. At each one, the family referred to me as umwana — their son. I, too, played the role, because the role was the only thing standing between me and a machete. 

I do not use that word carelessly. I mean it literally: a machete, or a club, or, if one were fortunate, a firearm. The tools were varied; the outcome was not.

I want to pause here because I think it is important to be precise about what “playing a role” means for a child. It meant reading the atmosphere of each roadblock — the mood of the men with weapons, the quality of their attention, whether they were bored or energised, whether they had already killed that day or were yet to start. 

It meant performing a kind of ordinary filial normalcy while your entire nervous system was lit with terror. It meant learning, at an age when most children are learning the names of animals and the shapes of clouds, how to calibrate the precise expression that would keep you alive.

We reached Cyangugu. And there, the nature of my situation clarified itself; everything shifted.

The husband and wife began akazi. In Kinyarwanda, akazi means simply work. It is an ordinary word — the kind you might overhear in a market or a kitchen. 

During the genocide, it became something else entirely. It became the coded language, the grammar of slaughter: an everyday word used to conceal the unspeakable, to wrap the mass killing of Tutsi in the familiar syntax of daily life. 

Foreigners might not have caught its meaning but every Rwandan — victim and perpetrator alike — understood what akazi meant in those months. It meant killing Tutsi. It was the ordinary made monstrous, a mask for extraordinary horror.

They did not kill me swiftly. Instead, the family’s days fell into a rhythm: leaving at dawn for akazi, returning home for lunch, setting out again in the afternoon. 

I have thought a great deal about this rhythm — the domesticity of it, the terrible ordinariness. 

What strikes me most is the texture: the way it was slotted into the routines of an ordinary day, indistinguishable from the outside from any other kind of labour. 

The men and women who committed genocide did not, for the most part, spend their days in a state of sustained frenzy. They worked. They came home. They ate. They slept.

The evenings they reserved for me — a sinister ritual within their insidious plan. I had to maintain my performance as their son, especially whenever other genocidal militia, the Interahamwe, came by. 

It was a theatre of survival, a fragile shield against an ever-present threat. I was both actor and audience, knowing that a single faltering line — a wrong word, a wrong expression, a flicker of visible fear — could end the performance permanently.

Bukavu: Another kind of captivity

As the Rwandan Patriotic Army advanced, liberating town after town, the family joined the vast exodus of Hutu across the border into Bukavu, in South Kivu, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

They were, by the standards of that migration, fortunate. Their connections in Bukavu allowed them to secure a small house, while hundreds of thousands of others were swallowed by the sprawling refugee camps that had sprung up overnight around an overwhelmed city.

There, my forced kinship took a new form. I became their domestic servant, marking the beginning of another kind of captivity. My days were structured by chores: fetching water over long distances, collecting firewood and queuing for meagre food rations at the distribution centres. For nearly two years, I lived at the margins of survival — barefoot, hungry, subsisting on scraps.

And yet, even in Bukavu, the performance continued. I was still umwana. The city was thick with genocide perpetrators, with soldiers of the defeated genocidal army, with people who had killed and who might kill again. 

A single doubt cast upon my identity — a single moment in which someone looked at me too carefully and wondered — could have been fatal. 

My survival depended not merely on concealment, on not being seen but on active inhabitation: on being the son, publicly, convincingly, every single day.

Nelson Gashagaza is a survivor and writer.