Family relationships defined by rape

Helen Vesperini, Jenda

Following the 1994 genocide, Angelique was fortunate enough to find a husband willing not only to bring up a child who is not his own, but who went as far as telling his own family the child was his to ensure he would be accepted in the family.

“I love my husband because he has shown love towards my child. I’m thankful to him for that,” said Angelique, huddling under a length of yellow cotton fabric for warmth in the perpetual damp of this valley in the hills of northwestern Rwanda.

Despite the understanding shown by her husband, an attitude extraordinary in a culture where raped women are so often ostracised, Angelique admits that her relationship with her eldest son, Innocent, is still fraught with problems.

Physically, Innocent takes after his mother. And yet the mere sight of the boy can still sometimes bring back bad memories.

“If I see him for example hitting the other children I get mad at him thinking he’s just like his biological father (now deceased),” she said.

The relationship between Angelique’s family and Innocent is more complicated still.

“My elder brother knows that my oldest son is the child of a Hutu. Even when I was pregnant with him he wanted me to get rid of the child,” she explained.

“One day he came to the house and my son refused to kiss him saying ‘He doesn't love me and I don’t love him either’. He knows very well that his uncle has more feeling for my three other children.

“I wonder what I’ll do if the child grows up one day and learns who his real father was,” Angelique said.

“The man who raped me? He was someone I used to see in church. He was younger than I was. He was about 20.

“During the genocide he was the one who hid me. The first time he asked me to go with him I refused. I hadn’t known a man before that. He told me that if I kept on refusing he was going to throw me into the Nyabarongo. (a river into which Hutu extremists used to say Tutsis should be thrown with their throats cut so that they could float back to Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia from which they were supposed to have originated).

So Angelique submitted, for fear of dying like the others. “He was proud of having a Tutsi woman but his family refused to accept me because I was a Tutsi and after a week I ran away,” she recalled.

“After the birth I didn't feel any love for the baby but I'm no good with newborn babies generally because during the genocide I saw them kill Nishimwe, my sister’s newborn.

“With my son, it’s only once he started smiling that I felt sorry for him and I regretted not having loved him when he was tiny.”