THE STORY OF SYLVESTRE 

“To remember is to allow the past to move into the future and to shape its course”

Elie Wiessel

PROLOGUE

My name is Sylveste.

I am thirty eight years old.

I am a Rwandan.

I am a member of the Tutsi tribe; this tribe makes up about 15% of the Rwandan people, the rest of the population are either from the Hutu tribe, this group makes up 85% of the country, and the Twa, a very small pygmy group.

I am a survivor of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the massacre of Tutsi people by Hutu people.

Why do I want to tell this story?

I tell this story because, for me, it is the way I am identified; I am someone with a name, I am not just another survivor, another victim.

I believe that if my memories are taken away from me, then I will be no-one. This story is my memory; it will be there after I am dead.

But I also need to tell this story because for me to remember is to show that I care, and that I mourn for all of those who were killed in the genocide of 1994. If this story is not told the killings will happen again, and it cannot happen again. My children must know that it cannot happen again.

IN THE BEGINNING

‘Come inside Sylvestre, you are the man, the small man in this house, now come in, you do not have to attend to your coffee plants all the time’, my mother called to me.

I was twelve years old, or I think that I was twelve years old. I lived in a small rural village in the north of Rwanda which was destroyed in the 1994 genocide. There was no documentation left after this, the genocide took away anything that could tell who I was, how old I was, the genocide took away my life, and my father’s life, and my mother’s. All that I know is that I was born in 1980.

I had a young boy’s body, a young boy’s energy, the energy of a young man. My father used to call me ‘Kagabo’, this means small man in Kinyarwanda, the Rwandan language. I was proud then because my father, by calling me this, was praising me. It showed me that my father, although he was very strict with me and all my siblings, and even with my mother, that he trusted me. I was not old in years, but I was old enough to be trusted.

‘Come Kagabo, come. Here is a small piece of land, it is yours. I want you to grow coffee on it. I want you to grow it so that there are many berries that you can pick, many berries that we can then roast and then drink. It is yours. Show me what you can do with it’, my father told me.

Do you know the coffee bean? It grows on a small tree, or maybe it is called a bush. It starts off red and then when it is picked it becomes green. The green bean is then roasted, sometimes for a long time, this makes the coffee bitter and strong, and the bean will be very dark, other times for a shorter time, now you can taste the flavour of the bean. The coffee that grows in Rwanda is very well known. The coffee that we drink here today, the coffee that the café here at the Holocaust Centre prepares, it is Rwandan.

But yes, of course I had other tasks, but this task where I grew my own coffee on my own little piece of the land I never became tired of, it was mine.

We lived in a rural area of Rwanda in a village called Rugarama. It is a small village in the Kigongoro province in the district of Kabuha. I am not sure what these districts are called now, they may have changed the names. After the genocide many things were renamed, often from French to English, but also as something new had to grow, had to be built. But when I was growing up I knew only the village as Rugarama, this was the village of my father and his family. It is in the south of the country, far away from Kigali the capital. Kigali was a place that I would probably not travel to in my life. How could I know then that I would live in the capital, that I would be forced from my village? I could not.

Let me tell you about Rwanda. Before 1994 there was mostly French spoken, my mother told me, or maybe I learnt this in school, Rwanda was a trust territory of the United Nations under the rule of Belgium. French was the European language that we were first introduced to. Now most people in the country speak English, it is encouraged. I think, again, it is as if the past should be removed.

But let me go back to my family. In Rwanda, in the Tutsi tribe the family is the community. It is not a family as you will know it, a mother, father and children family, but it is made up of a few households. There is no-one who is independent unless you are a man whose parents are dead, or an older man. So I was not independent. Neither was my mother or any of my brothers or my sister.  My father was independent for only his mother was alive; his father had died a long time ago. He was responsible for all of our land and our animals. We did not exist outside the family. And for us the family is that which guarantees a person’s security. If you have no family you are worthless, you are nothing. My family, they were killed; I thought of myself as worthless, this is why I so badly wanted a family of my own after the genocide. I wanted security.