Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Unlike most women with enfants de mauvais souvenir, Uwamahoro remarried. Her new husband is a polygamous Congolese man who keeps another wife. “I couldn’t marry a Rwandan after what had happened, not even a Tutsi,” she said. “I couldn’t bear to be touched by a Rwandan man. At first, I tried to hide my history from my new husband, but eventually I told him all about it, and he has been very kind. When I get sad, he takes me out for a walk. When I have flashbacks and bad dreams, which happens often, he reminds me that I could have been killed, and he comforts me. I love my daughter more and I am a better Christian since I got together with this man.” He even proposed that the rape-conceived child live with them, but Uwamahoro didn’t want that. “I have a new daughter, eight months old, from this marriage,” she told me. “It’s a struggle not to play favorites. I know my older daughter would like to live with me, and my father says that she needs a mother’s love. It’s important to keep reminding myself that the kid is innocent. I pray hard for love. Slowly by slowly, I love her: she is my daughter, who spent nine months inside me; but it’s always hard.”

I sometimes ask interviewees, especially those who seem profoundly disenfranchised, whether they want to ask me anything. The invitation to reverse roles helps people feel less like experimental subjects. In Rwanda, these mothers’ questions tended to be the same: How long are you spending in the country? How many people are you interviewing? When will your research be published? Who will read these stories? At the end of my interview with Uwamahoro, I asked whether she had any questions. “Well,” she said a little hesitantly, “you write about this field of psychology.” I nodded. She took a deep breath. “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more? I want to love her so much, and I try my best, but when I look at her, I see what happened to me and it interferes.” A tear rolled down her cheek, but her tone was almost fiercely challenging when she repeated, “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more?”

Only afterward, too late to tell Uwamahoro, did I marvel that she did not know how much love was in that question.

Since Paul Kagame took power in 1994, Rwanda has had a stable political environment and an average of 8 percent annual growth of GDP. The poverty rate is down by nearly a quarter. Child mortality has been reduced by two-thirds, and enrollment in primary schools is almost universal. The World Bank ranked Rwanda as one of the easiest countries in the world for starting a business.

But Kagame’s regime is accused of assassinating opposition leaders and journalists, mass murder of civilians in Rwanda and abroad, invasion and exploitation of natural resources in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, and political suppression of the Rwandan people. Only Sudan and Syria have higher levels of political exclusion than Rwanda. The government has shuttered independent newspapers and barred opposition parties from registering for elections. An opinion leader in the New York Times has described it as a “country on lockdown.” In 2015, Kagame persuaded Rwanda’s high court and legislature to relax presidential term limits, ostensibly by “popular demand,” thus paving the way for a permanent presidency. The United States and other governments asked that he show an example for the region by relinquishing his post in 2017 after two seven-year terms. Kagame has expressed displeasure at such foreign interference, but has set up a referendum process on the question, which is almost certain to pass. Given the history of assassinations of those who have come out too strongly against Kagame, the Rwandan opposition said they could not find a lawyer in Rwanda who was willing to bring a suit against the president.

My friend Jacqueline Novogratz, who has worked in Rwanda since the 1980s with her Acumen foundation, described talking to a friend there who said, “This culture is about lying. We all lie, all the time, to everyone. It’s the only way to survive here.” Jacqueline said, “Do you lie to me?” Her friend said, “I don’t know. We lie so much that I can’t even tell when I’m lying anymore. I don’t know when I am lying to you; I don’t know when I am lying to myself.”

LIBYA

Circle of Fire: Letter from Libya

New Yorker, May 8, 2006

Qaddafi’s regime was extremely secretive, so while his terrorist foreign policy was deplored widely, the ludicrous humiliations of daily life in Libya went largely unchronicled. A month in Libya felt like a decade. Many other countries where I’d worked required complicity in Kafkaesque bureaucracy and some featured random violence, but in no other was so much public and personal energy devoted to such pointless enterprises.