Many people may not remember events when they were six years old, but experts suggest that adults can typically recall memories from around 3-4 years old. This applies more when the events were either very thrilling or extremely painful and traumatic--two extremes.
Such is the case for Felix Nduwamungu, who was just six years old when the Genocide against the Tutsi started on April 7, 1994.
Born in the Nkanka sector of Rusizi District, Nduwamungu witnessed the massacre of many of his family members. He saw his mother, younger brother, sister, and other relatives killed in broad daylight. At six, his survival instincts saw him through miraculously.
As Rwanda commemorates 30 years after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, Nduwamungu reflects on a very difficult journey.
Rusizi District, formerly Cyangugu Prefecture, is one of the places where horrendous massacres of the Tutsi happened.
"It was a difficult journey because the Genocide happened when I was young. It started when my father was not at home. He had woken up early the previous day for work, but that night he didn't return home," Nduwamungu said.
When his father did not come back, he kept asking his mother about his whereabouts, but on the morning of April 7, when the mass killings broke out, he returned home--but for the last time.
"We were sitting in the yard talking about him when he showed up, but he looked like someone who had not slept in a house. He had specks of grass and dew like he had spent the night in the bush," Nduwamungu recalled.
"The first thing he told my mother was that we should find a place to hide immediately, revealing that he spent the night hiding in the forest in Nyove, a village which was close by. He then went to warn our neighbours and relatives of the impending danger," he said, adding that it was the last they saw of him.
All hell breaks loose
No sooner had his father left the compound than Interahamwe came in, armed with clubs and machetes.
"My little sister, who was crawling at the time, crawled towards the killers. They picked her up and threw her in the air. On her way down, she fell on a sword-like knife which pierced through her body as she landed on the ground. We saw the baby's blood flowing towards us," Nduwamungu said.
His first thought was to run, but the Interahamwe militia immediately grabbed his mother and made her kneel. They also caught Nduwamungu and his younger brother and tied them to a banana stem as they tortured their mother.
"I remember they tied us with ropes on the banana stem, each one of us facing in the opposite direction, with our backs against each other," he said.
From where he was, Nduwamungu was able to see his mother kneeling, begging the killers, and asking them what they wanted so she would give it to them. But they did not spare her.
"They hit her with a club which had many nails on it on the head. I saw blood and white matter, her brain I guess, splashing out of her head. When I saw my mother hit the ground, I became numb, like a tree," he painfully recalled.
The killers continued in the house to loot and search for money which they suspected the family to have. At the time, Nduwamungu's family was living in a grass-thatched house but his father had plans to build a better house.
Encountering death
While they ransacked the house, Nduwamungu wiggled his way out of the tight ropes and managed to free himself and his brother.
"I took my brother and hid him in the area below the house in a garden of beans. Even though he was my younger brother, he was bigger than me in size.
"But as we tried to hide, the killers came back from the house and realised that we had escaped. They immediately chased us, but my brother was kind of heavy and he couldn't outrun them. They caught him," he narrated.
The killers then stabbed him with a knife through one ear and it came out from the other, and they dragged him towards a nearby latrine at a neighbour's home where they dumped him.
Nduwamungu kept running, unable to resist glancing back to witness his brother's fate. He watched as his younger sibling was tossed into the pit latrine, still alive.
The Interahamwe left after ransacking, and that is when Nduwamungu went back to check the pit where his brother had been thrown, to see if he could rescue him.
"Along the way, I met a lady called Kankindi, a neighbour, and she said 'come over'. Instead of helping me, she immediately got hold of me and called the killers back who were searching the area.
"Before they could come, I struggled to free myself from her and somehow, she lost her balance and fell. I don't know how that happened," Nduwamungu said.
When the killers arrived, he had already run to a nearby banana plantation where he quietly hid. Luckily, they could not find him and they continued moving around the village, hunting for more Tutsi to kill.
"I remember I went to this pit at least three times and every time they nearly caught me because it is in this pit that they dumped bodies of most of the people they killed, including my little sister and brother," he said.
Nduwamungu stopped trying to save his brother when he was almost captured. This occurred throughout the day until the murderers went back home, planning to continue their activities the next morning.
Dead people everywhere
Now, Nduwamungu was by himself as everyone else had been killed. He couldn't go back to the house due to the risk.
"It was dark and I had nowhere to go. I was all alone," he said and spent nights hiding in leaves and branches.
"Wherever I went there were either bodies or they were killing people. I saw many dead bodies, and I saw them discarding bodies. They killed a lot of people and I saw it," he recalled.
Upon arriving at his mother's birthplace, hungry and traumatised, he found that the Interahamwe had killed everyone, and the person who killed them was still there, with a machete drenched in blood.
On the fourth day of the killings, Nduwamungu met his grandmother, who is still alive today. She is over 90 years old.
While they were talking, another group of killers arrived and everyone scattered in different directions, but Nduwamungu remained with his grandmother.
Survival struggle
Together with his grandmother, they fled to Kamembe town, to a family friend's place, after a night of cutting through bushes and moving clandestinely.
They stayed with the woman for a while. Then they moved to a refugee camp in Nyarushishi, run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), where they stayed until RPF-Inkotanyi stopped the Genocide.
"We stayed in the camp for nearly a year and a half as people were being resettled in their old properties or new dwellings. The resettlement process also lasted nearly a year and we went back to our ancestral land.
"When we got there, the memory of my mother being killed came back. Every time I go to that place the images replay in my head," Nduwamungu said.
Tough life
"Getting back the land alone wasn't enough, it was just me and the old lady, and she was partly disabled, having broken one of her arms jumping ravines as we fled. It was a difficult start," he said.
During that period, Nduwamungu and his grandmother, who are devout Catholics, would go to a nearby church to pray, and a nun known as Ma Felicite offered to put him in school.
She provided all educational materials, and all Nduwamungu had to do was take care of the rabbits. In P4, the nun was relocated to a different mission, and she transferred the children to another nun, Ma Immaculee.
"The day she left is the same day the new nun told me that there was no room for me in the school anymore and that she should never see me around again.
"Life became very hard after the nun left. The new one took away all the support including books and food. My grandmother was weak and old, she could not afford my needs," Nduwamungu said.
Nduwamungu who was about 10 years old was going through very hard times. He lost interest in education and started doing odd jobs to support his grandmother.
He partly believes trauma led to this, as at one point, life held little value for him. He did not even seek assistance from the Genocide Survivors Fund (FARG).
He started hopping from market to market seeking odd jobs and, eventually, joined fishing crews to fish 'Isambaza' in Lake Kivu.
Surviving death in DRC
At one point, someone invited him to join the same business in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but during his time there, he discovered that this individual was scheming to kill him.
"They plotted to kill me in Lingala. I didn't know what they were talking about. After some time I was approached by a soldier with a gun who spoke to me in Kinyarwanda and asked me what I did to my boss."
"He gave me money to kill you, but I will not do it. Find a way of escaping. Don't sleep here tonight," the soldier told Nduwamungu.
He fled in the dead of the night, swimming for four hours in Lake Kivu to cross back to Rwanda. After his harrowing ordeal, he abandoned the fishing trade and someone promised to bring him to Kigali for better opportunities to begin a new life.
From the village, Nduwamungu, who was now focused on fending for himself, found life in Kigali very hard and took up a job as a waiter in one of the once-renowned restaurants in town. That was in 2006.
After three years, Nduwamungu was offered a better opportunity in Simba Supermarket where he worked for another three years and saved up to start an airtime dealing business, selling airtime cards of all telecom companies at the time. When airtime cards and landlines became obsolete, he quit the business.
Aching for revenge
However, throughout this period, he remained angry, displaying no emotions. He was consistently quiet and serious. Despite inquiries from many individuals about his demeanour, he remained silent. Frequently, he found himself picturing the deaths of his mother and relatives, battling to quell his rage. Witnessing the deaths of his siblings and peers had left him broken.
What was even more unsettling was that he knew all those involved in the massacre of his people and their whereabouts.
"I knew them all by name. I remember some men called Kirusha, Antoine, Muryango, and Cyuma, who was their leader. I know them all," Nduwamungu said.
He couldn't imagine seeing them every day, living their lives with their children.
"Every time I would see their children I would be reminded that their parents killed my parents and I always felt the urge to avenge the killings," he said.
"For many years I befriended and lived with soldiers intending to grab a gun one day to avenge my family," he said, mentioning a specific person named Antoine Gatuza--the man who killed his mother--as his primary target.
During the Genocide, the man repeatedly expressed anger over one child, (Nduwamungu), managing to escape. He (Nduwamungu) believed he could never forgive him for that.
Change of heart
For years, he harboured sadness and anger, desiring vengeance against the families of his own family's murderers. However, a pivotal moment came when he engaged in conversation with one of the killers' wives.
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Their conversation and the many programmes on unity and reconciliation he often followed gave him a change of heart, coming to the understanding that children are innocent and cannot be punished for their parents' sins.
"Slowly, I got some closure and had a mind-set change and focused on my survival rather than seeking revenge," he said, adding that life was not easy, and killing more people was not a solution.
"It was not until I had my child that I smiled again. I saw the child as a reincarnation of my mum. Today I have three children. I had my first born when I was 23," Nduwamungu said.
He said the moment his wife told him that she was pregnant, he felt something lift off his shoulders, and this gave him reassurance that there was more to life. He felt the loneliness go away and the more children he had, the happier he became.
Meeting the perpetrators
In 2018, Nduwamungu went back to his village when he heard that Gatuza had been released.
"When people heard that I was going to meet Gatuza, the first thing that came to their mind was that I was going to get revenge. Even when my grandmother heard about it, she was worried," Nduwamungu said.
When he got there, he first talked to Gatuza's wife and children and eventually, Gatuza emerged.
"When he saw me, he asked his wife 'who is this?' and the wife said 'you don't know him? This is Ntoranya's son'. He buried his head between his legs. I spent more than 30 minutes there but he never raised his head to look at me again," he recalled.
"He didn't talk to me at all, but I was relieved. I felt like I had forgiven him. For the first time I felt the forgiveness the President had always talked about. I said bye to the wife and left without any burden on me."
Over the years, Nduwamungu was able to meet all the killers, including those who killed his mother's family. Every April 18, he goes back to Rusizi to commemorate and on several occasions, he has encouraged the killers to publicly testify. Some have. Some haven't.
One time he contacted one of the killers and asked him to testify but he refused. Nduwamungu did not cut the call immediately.
"I overheard the wife asking him in the background who he was talking to and he said it was Felix, the other son of Ntoranya. What hurt me most is that I heard him say 'what have they achieved with forgiveness all these years?' Honestly, it hurt me but I did not dwell much on it. I hung up and moved on," he said.
Embracing forgiveness
Today, Nduwamungu says he has forgiven all of them, much as some still feel guilty for their actions and avoid even meeting him, but the burden is on them, not him.
The 36-year-old who works with a private security company, says the focus now is on building a better future for himself and his family in a safe and secure country, rather than being held back by his sad past. It is a choice he deliberately made.
