Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

“What? You never dated a Hutu?”

Dominique (name has been changed) frowned and shook his head. “It’s very complicated,” he said. We were in the sitting room of Dominique’s home in a suburb of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city, sipping ribbed bottles of bright orange Fanta and nibbling at skewers of roasted goat.

Perhaps it was Dominique’s statement about how beautiful Tutsi girls are, or perhaps it was his question about interracial marriage in the United States. Either way, he unexpectedly declared: “I could never marry a Hutu.” The ruling political party continually stresses the irrelevance of the ethnic titles, Hutu and Tutsi, in post-genocide Rwanda. I cannot say how many times I’ve been told, “There is no Tutsi; there is no Hutu. Now, we are all Rwandese. There are no more problems. That was history and now we must work together for the development of our country.” 

So I couldn’t leave Dominique’s frank statement unquestioned. “Why?” I implored.

First, Dominique said, there was the matter of attraction: The thin, elongated features typically associated with Tutsis are prized marks of beauty. “Have you ever seen a beautiful Hutu?” Dominique pointedly asked. I couldn’t really say—after all, there had to be cute Hutus and ugly Tutsis, right? I quickly countered him: How could he even be so sure of any individual’s ethnicity when so-called Hutus and Tutsis had been intermixing for centuries? But Dominique simply replied that I hadn’t been in Rwanda long enough to tell the difference.

After attraction, there was the issue of Rwandan history: Any potential Hutu wife wouldn’t understand key events, such as the genocide, in the same way as Dominique. Would she call it a “war,” instead of “genocide,” as others did? What did she grow up hearing about Tutsis? In his family, Dominique’s grandparents told the children that Hutus were “bad people.” Had she heard the same things about Tutsis? Had she been taught to hate The Other? He had.

And most importantly, Dominique said, how could he be so sure that the potential grandfather of his children—that is, the father of his Hutu wife—had not killed in the 1994 genocide? I rebuked his argument matter-of-factly: “Not all Hutus killed. Many politically moderate Hutus died in the genocide too.” But in his mind, nearly all Hutus were somehow implicated in the genocide, even if they had been small children in 1994.

“There is no family that doesn’t have blood on its hands. Even if a Hutu child didn’t kill, she could have shown others where Tutsis were hiding. People who didn’t kill ate the cows of the dead.” To him, not only were all Hutu families somehow guilty as a whole, Hutu individuals were guilty by association. “And many normal people just sat back and smiled about their Tutsi neighbors being killed.” Dominique demonstrated this by leaning back in his chair and smiling approvingly at the imaginary slaughter going on around him.

I frowned and swatted at a mosquito buzzing loudly above my head. I opened my mouth to speak but Dominique moved forward in his chair, bending his body toward me and gesticulating insistently. “Anna, even if this imaginary Hutu wife is innocent, what am I going to do when she goes to visit her relatives in prison? What am I going to say to my children?” His tone betrayed a sense of puzzlement, as if he really didn’t know what he would do in such a situation.

Family connections are very important here in Rwanda. “If I married a Hutu girl,” he asserted, “none of my family, or her family, would come to visit us or our children. What kind of life would that be?” He continued, “What happens if her ex-genocidaire father dies?” Attending his funeral would mean honoring the death of a killer, while failing to attend would surely cause a rift between himself and his wife. “She wouldn’t understand. How could I tell her why I couldn’t go to her father’s funeral?”

I began to understand Dominique’s point of view. While he has plenty of Hutu friends and devotes much time to peace-building, marriage is a different story. Marriage represents the union of two families in Rwanda. Because families are so large, and because so many people did participate in the genocide, he does not feel comfortable entering into a lifelong union with someone who may be related to killers.

Perhaps for the time being, I thought as I chewed on the last of my roasted goat, Tutsis and Hutus will just have to be friends.