OLIVES
STORY

OLIVES STORY

Olive, who’s 50, lives in a simple home on the outskirts of Kigali. She is a quite, understated woman; yet holds an inner strength and aura the like of which I’ve rarely encountered. Yet at times she is also the life and soul of the party. What you soon see is how respected and loved she is in the community. After visiting her a couple of times she sits, looks at me and states, “I’m ready; I’ll tell you my story now.” With Olive you feel each action, each word is considered.

I gather my notepad and pen.

“My story,” she asserts, “ is in three phases. This is phase one, the genocide……”

What is to follow, uninterrupted over the next few hours, is one of the most remarkable stories I’ve ever heard.

Phase 1: The Genocide.

The 6th April 1994 should have been a day of celebration for Olive Mutetamfura. Heavily pregnant she had gone to the hospital accompanied by her best friend Clementine. In the moments as she was giving birth just a few miles from the hospital where she lay, President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. After years of violence between the Hutu and Tutsi, and an on-going civil war; everybody knew this assassination of the Hutu president would lead to more violence.

Olive, a Tutsi, was nervous was desperate to get home to the safety of her family. Her best friend Clementine, a Hutu, wanted to get home too. She left, promising to send news as soon as she could.
As Olive lay there that night she listened to the radio as Hutu leaders urged Hutus to rise up and kill the “cockroaches among them.” With her baby, named Jonathan, crying in her arms, Olive was overcome with a sense of foreboding.

Olive was right to be nervous, she was right, violence was soon to erupt across the country. But what she, Clementine and the majority of Rwandans couldn’t have known was the sheer scale and violence of what was about to happen. This was no suddenly outbreak in response to the President’s death; in secret extremist Hutu leaders had been planning for this moment. They had one goal, the extermination of all Tutsi.
Even as Clementine made her way home roadblocks were appearing across the city, gangs were starting to gather, an air of terrible menace was filling the city. Several times she was stopped and asked to show her identity papers; a legacy of Belgium’s colonial rule, the papers identified the holder as either Hutu or Tutsi. These documents would be the death sentence for thousands in the weeks ahead. For now Clementine was safe, she was Hutu.

Phase 1: The Genocide.

Olive, a Tutsi, was nervous was desperate to get home to the safety of her family. Her best friend Clementine, a Hutu, wanted to get home too. She left, promising to send news as soon as she could.

As Olive lay there that night she listened to the radio as Hutu leaders urged Hutus to rise up and kill the “cockroaches among them.” With her baby, named Jonathan, crying in her arms, Olive was overcome with a sense of foreboding.

Even as Clementine made her way home roadblocks were appearing across the city, gangs were starting to gather, an air of terrible menace was filling the city. Several times she was stopped and asked to show her identity papers; a legacy of Belgium’s colonial rule, the papers identified the holder as either Hutu or Tutsi. These documents would be the death sentence for thousands in the weeks ahead. For now Clementine was safe, she was Hutu.

On the morning of 7th April there was panic in the hospital. The nuns who ran it where running around, there were screams, doors being bolted and barricaded. In the street of Kigali and across Rwanda the genocide had begun. Soldiers, police and Hutu militias were quick to kill Tutsi and moderate Hutu leaders; hit lists had been made in the proceeding months. And Hutu civilians were being armed with machetes and told to kill the Tutsi neighbours.

Over the next hundred days in one of the most violent and depraved chapters of human history somewhere between 800,000 and a million Tutsis were killed. Most by machetes or blunt instruments. Most were killed in their own homes, often by their neighbours. Rape was widespread, with some estimates putting the figure as high as 500,000. Those Tutsis and moderate Hutus who survived were forced into hiding in neighbouring countries.

Just hours after the killing began, Olive received the news she was dreading. Her village had been attacked and her family killed. Everybody; her two children, her husband, her parents, her brothers and sisters, all her in-laws; all were dead. Olive just remembers a sense of numbness and shock; “Everybody I had ever loved was gone.”

In the following days Hutu gangs started gathering outside the hospital. They were shouting for all the Tutsis to come out, they scraped their machetes on the ground, drew their hand across their neck menacingly at anybody who looked out of the window. The fate for the Tutsis sheltering in the hospital was clear; but for now the nuns stopped them from entering.

Across the country many were doing the same. Sheltering in schools, hospitals, churches even UN compounds in the desperate belief these institutions would keep them safe. They didn’t. In the days ahead many of these ‘sanctuaries’ were to become death traps. To the Hutu gangs no place was sacred, and the UN was to pull out as the world turned its back on Rwanda.

After three days the Nun’s gathered those hiding at the hospital. They could no longer protect them. In six days they would have to leave and find somewhere else to go. They talked of slipping away at night, ways to avoid the militias and roadblocks; but the reality everybody knew was that this was a death sentence.

It was to prove irrelevant anyway. The day before the deadline to leave, the militia stormed the hospital anyway. They ran from ward to ward checking id papers, gathering the Tutsis and forcing them out into the street. In the panic Olive made a decision she says still haunts her. As she was grabbed and puled out of the hospital she left her baby, Jonathan, on the bed where he lay.

Why did she do it? Olive says she has no idea; she was confused, dazed and panicked. The reality though is it was the only chance the baby had of surviving. By leaving the child, who had no ID paper, nobody could be sure if he were Tutsi or Hutu, maybe therefore he’d live.

In the street the Tutsis were gathered, they were the sick, the elderly or new mothers carrying their babies. They were forced along to a market, and there the killing began. As the militia started to strike these unarmed women and children with their machetes, Olive knowing what was coming, fell to the floor. To this day she suffers from the back injury caused by the bodies that fell on to her. But hiding under them, they saved her life.

Olive pauses from telling her story, she sits quietly, her head lowered, then gathers herself again; “when I talk about that time,” she explains,” my mind throws me back to those moments.”

Over the next few hours the killing in the market continued. For three days she lay under the bodies, feigning death, before she felt it was safe to leave. 1200 people had been gathered in the market, only 15 had survived.

Olive made her way to the Nyabarongo River. Though not far the journey took her a couple of days as she could only walk at night to avoid the militias. On the journey she saw dismemberd bodies, burned villages, the bodies of children and babies in the road, lying where they had been killed.

When she finally reached the river, she climbed down the muddy banks and slipped into the water. Her plan was to hide there and could go under the water if anyome came close. The river wide there, the banks thick with vegetation. From the river she watched maurading gangs on the other river bank, watched the glow of buring villages at night.

At night she would sleep on the river bank, the days spent in the water. She would eat plants that floated by on the river; one especially, she can’t remember the name, had water in it and tasted salty. It was what she ate most of.

She was scared and as the days went by she grew increasingly exhausted and sick. In the water things bit her and insects started to burrow into her legs.

Olive doesn’t know how long she was there, days blurred into each other.

She grew increasingly sick. She had malaria, insects had burrowed in to her legs, and the bites had become infected (she shows me her legs which are still swollen ad scared all these years later). Some were so deep they would later have to operate on her to remove them. Infections in her uterus meant she could never have children her again. Though incredibly weak, she knew she would have to try and find help.

She decided to go to a village where her mother had close friends. Again she could only do the journey at night, but in her weak state she became more desperate. She tried to walk the last few miles to the village in daylight. She was stopped at a checkpoint, just meters rom the house where she hoped to find safety in the home of a family friend.

The militia at the checkpoint put her in a line and she watched as one by one those in front of her were taken to the side of the road and hacked to death. By this time, and exhausted, she accepted her fate.

It was then that a man (the ‘killer’ as Olive refers to him) appeared from the house where she hoped to find sanctuary. He was a close friend of Olive’s mother and Olive herself had spent many days in the house. What Olive did know is that he was now the leader of the local militia an it had been he who’d ordered the killing of her family.

He pulled her out of the line telling the militia that “it doesn’t matter. We’ve killed her family anyway. She is not a threat to us.” The killer of Olive’s family had become her saviour.

Over the coming weeks she hid in his house. Often through the crack in the door she would witness killings and torture in the garden outside. On several occasions other Hutu’s would come to get her, but ‘the killer’ always protected her. In the end though he moved her to a new by wood where he hid, bringing her food and supplies.

It was there that she was found when the RPF (the Rwandan Patriotic Front) liberated the area from the Hutu militias. It was the 15th May; five weeks after the genocide began.

She was taken to the Rwamagana hospital where she spent the next few months recovering. The doctors told her it was a miracle she was alive, but to Olive it didn’t matter; inside she said she felt dead. One day I asked Olive what kept her alive those four weeks in the river, what strength did she draw on? She shrugged; in her mind all she’d wanted to do during this weeks was die, she hoped to be discovered or to succumb to the river. It as something inside, something she did not know or control that had kept her alive.

“Now,” Olive states, “is phase two of my story. What happened after the genocide…..”

Phase 2: After the Genocide.

When Olive was finally strong enough to leave hospital, she returned to Kabuga, her village. She just wanted to bury her, the family that had been taken away from her. In her mind she needed to say goodbye to them all.

She found the village destroyed, all the Tutsis that had lived there were dead, many of the Hutus had fled, fearing reprisals. Everything was burnt down, destroyed, empty. In what had been a busy, mixed community; there was now no life.

When she asked around, those that did remain would talk of what happened. Nobody knew, or wouldn’t tell, where the bodies of her family were. There were no graves, nowhere she pay her last respects. She knew she couldn’t stay there.

She had though discovered six young children and babies, children from her extended family. A nephew’s boy, a cousin’s baby….. these six were the only survivors. She adopted them all and together they moved to Kigali.

Life was hard. Her health was poor, a back injury and swollen knees made work hard; she had to keep going back into hospital. There was no family to support her.
“I committed so many sins to feed the children,” Olive explained, “I worked as a prostitute, didn’t know how else to get money.”

She was just 24 years old. Although she did not know it, Olive was suffering from severe PTSD. She blamed herself for the loss of her family, the child she left at the hospital, her own survival.

The men, who had sex with her, felt to her like one of the killers. It’s what she felt she deserved.

“I was not human, I was a dustbin. Everyman that slept with me felt like a perpetrator (Hutu militia). But I didn’t care”

For ten years she lived in this hell. She made money to feed her adopted children, but lived a life that was lonely, isolated and often violent.

Then she started to get some psychological support from the charity Handicap International. They had set up a support group for sex workers in Kigali. Little by little, as she attended these group sessions, and listened to what the counsellors were saying, she began to realise that all that happened was not her fault. That the years of suffering and pain were not her doing.

It took several years of this counselling, but finally Olive felt strong enough to move away from the city and to start rebuilding her life with the children.

“I had gone from being dead, to being a person once more”

A charity relocated her to a small village built for orphans of the genocide. And with a group of other survivors and former sex workers, she se up a small business selling fruit and eventually their own field where they grew potatoes to sell.

Phase 3: Forgiveness

“Everyday when I thought about it, it was like yesterday. Genocide took my family, my husband and his family, my two children, my neighbours. Everything.

“It’s like a wound, an inside wound that wont heal”

And despite now being away from Kigali, life was tough. From the weeks hiding in the water, her legs still swell. Her back was damaged when the bodies fell on her in the market. Infections meant she could never have children. And each day she struggled to accept and cope with what had happened to her family.

Her new home was just miles from her home village. Many of the killers still lived there. Some days she would pass them on the street or at the market. Others were leaving prison and returning to be her neighbours again.

So Olive made a decision. “I couldn’t live with the anger, or I will always be harming myself”

So she decided to forgive them.

Some she would go and find, others came to her house asking for forgiveness.
And in her mind, after forgiving them, she saw them as humans again. Some even started coming and helping her cultivate her land.

One night there was a knock on her door. It was one of the killers. Scared she stood there in front of him. He had come to tell her where they ha buried the bodies of her family.

And it wasn’t just her family. The government exhumed the bodies, now nearly twenty years after the genocide. In the mass grave they found 350 bodies. Those that remained of Olive’s village could finally burry their loved ones.

“Because I had forgiven him, others found peace”

And there is one final twist to Olives remarkable story.

In 1998, four years after the genocide, when Olive was living in Kigali, Clementine, her former best friend and neighbour turned up on her doorstep. She had fled the village during the fighting and had been living as a refugee in DR Congo. She had assumed that Olive was dead.

When she heard a rumour that Olive was in fact still alive, she returned to Rwanda to search for her. Eventually she found her, and gave Olive the news. She had her son.

As Olive was pulled from the hospital, Clementine had returned there searching for her best friend. She found the baby and assuming Olive was dead, adopted him as her own, taking him to the relative safety of Congo and the refugee camp. Now though, she could return Jonathan to his mother.

As I leave I ask Olive if there is anything I can do for her.

“Never again.” She says. “I just ask one thing from you – to tell this story. Teach them what happened to Rwanda, so that this will be known as the last one”

So ten years years after the genocide, Olive made the brave decision that she and her adopted children would return to her village and what was left of her community. Olive was determined to build a new life.

But when she returned she found a community in crisis. May of those that led the killings had been released from jail or had avoided convictions, they were living amongst the survivors, many of whom wanted revenge. Neighbours who had turned on each other in the most brutal way, were finding it hard to leave together in peace, the ghosts of the genocide still with them each day. Tensions were growing and it seemed as if the violence might return.

Olive’s arrival back at the village brought these tensions to the surface as both sides of the community wondered what her intensions were. What they didn’t know is that Olive had a secret, a secret that only she and the man that ordered the killing of her family knew. A secret that could end his freedom and ultimately destroy her community.

For Olive herself each day was torture as she would be reminded of her own loss each time she saw the see the killers of her family – when she took the children to school, or as she shopped in the market. Seeing these men each day brought back the horrors of what had happened a decade before.

Its now that Olive made an incredible decision. She decided the only way she could move forward with her life and to find peace, for the whole village was to forgive the killers.

Which is what she did, she visited all those who had been involved in the killing of her family and forgave them.

One night the leader of the Hutu militia, who instigated the massacre, started knocking on her door. Terrified she opened the door and faced him.

“I forgive you too,” She said

Unable to even look her in the eyes he nodded and mumbled, “I know, that’s why I’m here. I’ve come to tell you where we buried your family”

She led her to an unmarked grave, and when it was exhumed over three hundred bodies were found.

And in that moment, the whole community was able to lay their ghosts to rest.

As the community began to heal and move forward, others who had fled the village during the genocide followed Olive’s example and began to return. Many of the Hutus, who had fled to DR Congo fearful of reprisals after the war, hearing of Olive’s forgiveness, also started to return from the refugee camps. Amongst them was Olive’s former neighbour Clementine.

On discovering that Olive was still alive she went straight to her house, falling to her knees in tears when Olive answered the door. She had always assumed Olive had been killed in the first days of the massacre – but it was more that just relief at finding her friend alive that had overcome Clementine. She also had a young boy with her.

“Jonathan,” she said, “meet Olive, she’s your mother.”

For in those first days of the genocide Clementine had looked for Olive at the hospital. She hadn’t found her, but she did find her baby.

For the past ten years she had brought him up as her own, now though, Jonathan could be reunited with his mother.