Rwanda ... in memory of those, who died in 1994

By Coen van Wyk, Kampala, Uganda

Meintjeskop Ditaba No 1/1998

Dedicated to those who died in the massacres of 1994, all the other massacres past and present in Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa.

Against the hill the breeze sang through the branches over the church. As the trees swayed, the people came to pray, for peace, for security. Today the breeze still sighs. The trees still sway. But the people no longer pray. They are silent, in the church under the shadows of the trees.

Scattered among the stone benches, they are quiet. Quiet except for the mute cry against the horror that struck in this house of worship. In the empty eyes of a child's skull sounds only the mute plea for help, asking: “Where were you, that night?" 

In the shattered skull, the quiet despair screams. From a crushed rib cage, the rusty knife still clenched in its last agony, the cry against the unspeakable horror rises, and echoes, silently, through the cluttered pews.

A floral dress still clothes the pelvis of a woman, speaking of the life, the joy, that should have been.

But the light, filtered through the swaying branches, plays indifferently over the bones of mothers and children, locked in a last eternal embrace. 

Over fathers, gunned down in a last futile attempt to protect, on arms raised in supplication, on the scattered bones of fists raised in defiance.

The smell of death still hangs in the air, and will hang in the wind for generations, reminding the survivors, the refugees returning from exile, that they are alive by accident, by fortune. Life has little meaning, here, where your family, your little wealth, your history, your future, was wiped away in one night of horror, of unspeakable and unimaginable bestiality, a holocaust visited on a people by themselves, their neighbours, their relatives. 

A holocaust by friend on friend, by shopkeeper on client, by teacher on student. The survivors are, also, dead, in their minds.

The silence has reigned here for four years now. Those villagers who survived walk by, mute, silent. They do not laugh, cannot laugh, with the weight of the silent church on the hill, of the shadows in their minds, their hearts.

How are these people to be made alive? Can the life, the vitality, the future, be reborn? Can those who 3till breathe, be brought to believe that they are part of the world where there is laughter, where parents play with children, where grandparents celebrate birthdays, where there is food shelter, happiness, music, dancing?

The silence in the church is in my mind. In yours, too. As long as the memory of that silent church remains, dark under the trees dark in the inside, so long will that death be part of me, of you. For Africa cannot live, while that death hangs in the air, like the stench of the death, four years ago. The many deaths, over the years. 

The future cannot come to us while that horror lives on in the minds of you and me, of the children of the villages against the hill, the valleys, the mountains and the lakes of Africa. While parents do not see the future in the face of that horror in the nights of our continent, the night will reign, there will be a future where there will not be a great difference between death and life.

It is silent there against the hill, in the shadows under the trees. It is quiet, there.