Remembered: The genocide of the Tutsi was not the product of primordial tribal feeling but it was the product of a political project, carefully constructed over decades. Photo: Rwanda Government
People often assume — and I understand why — that events of the magnitude of genocide shatter all social norms, including gender and kinship, reducing human relations to pure, undifferentiated violence.
But this is not entirely what happened in Rwanda. What happened was both simpler and more disturbing: the genocide, though extreme, did not entirely rupture ordinary life. Rather, it bent the ordinary into new, violent shapes.
Kinship — the web of obligations and identities that structures Rwandan social life — did not disappear during the genocide. It was repurposed.
Some Hutu drew on it as a moral resource, risking their lives to hide Tutsi, acting from what the philosopher Michel Foucault called prise de conscience — a sudden, clarifying awakening of conscience: a moment in which a person, steeped in an atmosphere of violence and dehumanisation, nevertheless finds within themselves the capacity to recognise the humanity of another.
These people exist. They deserve to be remembered and honoured.
Others, in their perverse ingenuity, found ways to weaponise those kinship ties. They used the structures of family — the roles of son, wife, daughter-in-law — to create a veneer of protection that served simultaneously as a mechanism of control and abuse, without a flicker of guilt.
My mother’s friend, for instance, found refuge with a Hutu man she knew — a family acquaintance. At his house, she was coerced into the role of umugore (wife) to the son who had brought her home and umukazana (daughter-in-law) to his father.
Her captors invoked kinship to shield her from harm by other Interahamwe militia: she was family; she was not to be touched. And the same imposed kinship was used to justify sexual assault against her.
I cannot compare my suffering to hers. I will not. The horror of what was done to her and to the tens of thousands of women who endured rape during the genocide is not a scale on which any other suffering can be weighed.
But there is something her tragic experience and mine share: the
fact that our survival required us to perform an identity that was not our own. We became kin, not by blood but by necessity, enacting roles we had not chosen because the alternative was death.
We, the victims, were not passive. We were active participants in our own preservation — calculating, adapting, inhabiting roles we had not chosen. The alternative was death.
What ordinary life reveals
I have spent years trying to understand what my experience means — not only for me but for how we think about what happened in Rwanda.
The dominant narrative of the genocide — the one that travels most easily, that fits most neatly into available moral frameworks — is a narrative of pure, primal hatred: two tribes, ancient enmity, inevitable catastrophe.
The narrative is not only incomplete; it is, in important ways, false.
The genocide of the Tutsi was not the product of primordial tribal feeling. It was the product of a political project, carefully constructed over decades, that deliberately mobilised ethnic identity and directed it towards mass murder.
And it unfolded not in a vacuum but amid ordinary social life, through the exploitation and distortion of structures — kinship, neighbourhood, community — that had, until very recently, served purposes of connection and belonging.
What my experience of performative kinship reveals is the extent to which the genocide was simultaneously extreme and ordinary, cataclysmic and mundane — both a rupture and a continuation.
The family who sheltered me was, by any measure, participating in genocide: they were killing Tutsi every day.
They were also, in their own logic, maintaining a family, going to work, returning home, sitting down to eat. These things coexisted.
The horror and the domesticity did not cancel each other out.
This complexity matters — not to excuse, not to relativise but to understand. Because understanding is the only thing that gives the dead what they are owed.
I am still becoming
My mother survived. My uncle survived. I survived.
We did not survive intact — no one does — but we survived.
In the decades since, Rwanda has rebuilt itself with a determination that is both admirable and at times, unsettling in its deliberate insistence on forward motion.
There are things that have not been said, things that cannot yet be said — silences maintained because the full reckoning with what happened, how and why, is too much to bear collectively. I understand this. I do not condemn it. I only note it, because I believe the silences are where the most important work remains to be done.
The word umwana means child. It means son. It means the person who belongs to you, who carries your name forward into the future. For two years, I was someone else’s umwana, performing a belonging I did not feel in order to remain alive long enough to eventually become my own.
I am becoming.
Becoming umwana – a son: Part 1
Nelson Gashagaza is a survivor and writer.
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