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Immaculée Ilibagiza is a latter-day Anne Frank. The daughter of two devout Catholic Tutsis, she was a prime target for the Hutu death squads who brought their genocidal terror to the African country in 1994. She survived, hidden for three months in the sweltering heat of a tiny bathroom. Now her remarkable story is being told on the Edinburgh stage.
By Jerome Taylor
Published,The Independent: 11 August 2007
Published,The Independent: 11 August 2007
The man who came closest to killing Immaculée Ilibagiza never knew how near he had got to his prey. He was a machete-wielding member of the Interahamwe, the Hutu death squads that prowled the length and breadth of Rwanda during the country's brutal genocide looking for what they called "cockroaches", those members of the Tutsi tribe they had sworn to destroy.
Ms Ilibagiza was in hiding. For 91 days she and seven other Tutsi women were crammed into a stiflingly hot bathroom as the orgy of looting, rape and murder that swept through the country in 1994 raged outside. Ms Ilibagiza, the daughter of two prominent Catholic Tutsi teachers, was a prized target. As they teetered on the edge of destruction the only thing stopping their would-be killers from finding the women was a single wardrobe that had been placed over the door to the toilet.
"I heard a guy saying he'd already killed 499 Tutsis and that he was determined to make me the 500th," says Ms Ilibagiza, now 37. She has since moved to New York and has two of her own children. "He was standing just behind the door when he said it. These people were our neighbours, people who just weeks earlier used to be our friends. "
Her story, simultaneously harrowing and uplifting, is the Rwandan equivalent of The Diary of Anne Frank - a remarkable account of how, against all odds, people can survive in the most inhumane conditions as the violence of man crashes down around them and how, through forgiveness, even the most horrendous experiences can lead to redemption.
But unlike the young German-Jewish author, who was eventually found by the Nazis and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just weeks before its liberation, Ms Ilibagiza lived to tell her tale. Her book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, has gone on to sell more than 250,000 copies around the world and she is feted by world leaders, church groups and charities as a highly inspirational speaker. But what makes Ms Ilibagiza's experience truly stand out, as terrifying and anguished as it is, is the way she has learnt to forgive the people that destroyed her family and country.
Now the story of her agonising three months in hiding has been turned into a one-woman play and this week it is showing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part of a world tour.
For 100 deadly days in the spring of 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide of near unimaginable savagery. Anyone who knew the country at the time said the outbreak of violence was predictable - Hutus and Tutsis had had a long history of enmity and warring - but very few were prepared for the sheer level of barbarity reached.
On 6 April 1994, three days after Immaculée and her family had celebrated Easter together in their ancestral village of Mataba, an aeroplane carrying Rwanda's Hutu President, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down. Habyarimana had incensed Hutu extremists by ending a long civil war with the Tutsis and his death gave them a pretext for starting a highly organised, systematic campaign to rid their country's minority Tutsis.
"Within 10 minutes [of Habyarimana's death] the whole country changed," recalls Ms Ilibagiza. "Everyone hid in their houses just listening to the radio."
The violence began almost immediately. The international community looked away as the 10 Belgian peacekeepers that had been assigned to watch over Rwanda were shot dead and then turned its back as more than one million Tutsis and pro-Tutsi Hutus were exterminated. Men were usually hacked to death with a machete. For women, the method was most often gang rape and then the machete.
A more brutal realisation of the evil that men do could hardly be imagined but, as with many of humanity's darkest chapters, the Rwandan genocide also produced extraordinary tales of individual heroism and survival.
It was not long before Mataba, an ethnically mixed village in the western district of Kiyube, found itself caught up in the maelstrom. Fearing that his daughter would be raped if caught by Hutu militiamen, Ms Ilibagiza's father sent her to hide in a nearby house owned by the Rev Simeon Nzabahimana who, despite being a Hutu, risked his life to hide her and seven other women.
So secret was the women's hiding place that the priest's family were not even told about it in case they were threatened or tempted into revealing its whereabouts.
"It was a room measuring three feet by four feet, a small bathroom really," says Ms Ilibagiza. "It didn't even have a sink, just a toilet sunk into the ground. There was a door on to the next room and at night we could sometimes go there to lie down. But only at night." For the next three months the women sat in terror as the Interahamwe went from house to house butchering Mataba's Tutsi population. They could hear the screams of their relatives as the men were cut down and the women raped before being butchered.
Ms Ilibagiza's father had already survived two civil wars and believed he could try and reason with the Interahamwe. Witnesses say he was shot dead by a man called Felicien before he could even open his mouth. The same man then went on to slaughter her mother, Rose, and her elder brother, Damascene. A second brother was also cut down sometime later. The only immediate relative of Ms Ilibagiza to survive the genocide other than herself was her third brother, Aimable, who fortunate enough to be studying in Senegal at the time of the genocide. He has chosen to remain in his country of birth and works as a vet.
Convinced they would never see their families again, waiting for the death squads to storm into the filthy white tiled room at any moment, the women sat for days on end in total silence, only daring to communicate by sign language. At 5ft 9in Ms Ilibagiza was one of the tallest and within days her body was covered in sores from being unable to move properly.
Privacy and cleanliness were forgotten. The toilet could only be flushed when the neighbour next door did so and there was rarely enough paper for the women's menstrual periods. After a week lice were crawling in their clothes and hair.
Despite the crippling pain of being largely unable to move, Ms Ilibagiza says the women stoically accepted their lot. "When you realise that someone is next door waiting to kill you, you can do anything," she remembers. "You can put up with any hardship. We never complained."
Initially, as the violence raged around her, so to did Ms Ilibagiza's heart. She admits that in the first few weeks of her captivity it was difficult to feel anything but hate for the people who had killed her family and destroyed her life. As desperation set in she turned to her rosary, the last thing her father had given her before she went into hiding, and prayed to God. Inside her prison, surrounded by squalor, misery and mourning, Ms Ilibagiza decided to forgive the people who had murdered her family.
"The day I truly understood what forgiveness meant was while I was hiding in that room," she says. "It was like a light turning on in my mind and I made a choice. If I gave up on humanity I would die inside. I'd no longer be able to trust anybody.
"I kept thinking of Christ on the cross and his words, 'Forgive them father they know not what they do'. I knew there was no way my family's killers could understand the magnitude of what they were doing."
By the time the women left their hiding place and made it to a refugee camp that was run by French peacekeepers, Ms Ilibagiza's weight had plummeted from 8 stone 3 pounds to just 4 stone 9 pounds. Mr Nzabahimana, the man who had hidden them, was killed during the dying days of the genocide for sheltering Tutsis.
By late summer the killing had finally died down and Ms Ilibagiza decided to test how far her forgiveness could go. She found her father's killer in a nearby prison. The tables had been turned. Now he was imprisoned, filthy and terrified but the first words he heard from the woman who had come to see him were: "I forgive you."
"He couldn't look at me, he looked down and was so ashamed," said Ms Ilibagiza. "Something changed in his heart. I hope it's made him realise the gravity of what he's done. Like me he had a beautiful family and home but one day he decided to go out and kill."
This ability to forgive such atrocities was what inspired Leslie Lewis Sword, an American actress who came to know Ms Ilibagiza after attending one of her lectures, to dramatise her life. "Her message is forgiveness," Sword said earlier this week. "She has found a way to move on after these unbearable hardships. It gives hope for Darfur, for Zimbabwe too. People are taking a look at these things too and asking what is happening there."
The play itself, Miracle in Rwanda, in which Sword plays all the parts including Ms Ilibagiza, her family and an Interahamwe leader, has received lavish praise in the US press and is currently making a world tour. Her performances at Edinburgh have sold out each night.
Ms Ilibagiza, meanwhile, hopes her fellow Rwandans will follow her approach and look towards reconciling their differences rather than look for retribution. "The happiness you get from being able to forgive someone is beyond any apology," she says. "I think Rwanda will recover. It could take hundreds of years but it will recover."
Ms Ilibagiza was in hiding. For 91 days she and seven other Tutsi women were crammed into a stiflingly hot bathroom as the orgy of looting, rape and murder that swept through the country in 1994 raged outside. Ms Ilibagiza, the daughter of two prominent Catholic Tutsi teachers, was a prized target. As they teetered on the edge of destruction the only thing stopping their would-be killers from finding the women was a single wardrobe that had been placed over the door to the toilet.
"I heard a guy saying he'd already killed 499 Tutsis and that he was determined to make me the 500th," says Ms Ilibagiza, now 37. She has since moved to New York and has two of her own children. "He was standing just behind the door when he said it. These people were our neighbours, people who just weeks earlier used to be our friends. "
Her story, simultaneously harrowing and uplifting, is the Rwandan equivalent of The Diary of Anne Frank - a remarkable account of how, against all odds, people can survive in the most inhumane conditions as the violence of man crashes down around them and how, through forgiveness, even the most horrendous experiences can lead to redemption.
But unlike the young German-Jewish author, who was eventually found by the Nazis and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just weeks before its liberation, Ms Ilibagiza lived to tell her tale. Her book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, has gone on to sell more than 250,000 copies around the world and she is feted by world leaders, church groups and charities as a highly inspirational speaker. But what makes Ms Ilibagiza's experience truly stand out, as terrifying and anguished as it is, is the way she has learnt to forgive the people that destroyed her family and country.
Now the story of her agonising three months in hiding has been turned into a one-woman play and this week it is showing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part of a world tour.
For 100 deadly days in the spring of 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide of near unimaginable savagery. Anyone who knew the country at the time said the outbreak of violence was predictable - Hutus and Tutsis had had a long history of enmity and warring - but very few were prepared for the sheer level of barbarity reached.
On 6 April 1994, three days after Immaculée and her family had celebrated Easter together in their ancestral village of Mataba, an aeroplane carrying Rwanda's Hutu President, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down. Habyarimana had incensed Hutu extremists by ending a long civil war with the Tutsis and his death gave them a pretext for starting a highly organised, systematic campaign to rid their country's minority Tutsis.
"Within 10 minutes [of Habyarimana's death] the whole country changed," recalls Ms Ilibagiza. "Everyone hid in their houses just listening to the radio."
The violence began almost immediately. The international community looked away as the 10 Belgian peacekeepers that had been assigned to watch over Rwanda were shot dead and then turned its back as more than one million Tutsis and pro-Tutsi Hutus were exterminated. Men were usually hacked to death with a machete. For women, the method was most often gang rape and then the machete.
A more brutal realisation of the evil that men do could hardly be imagined but, as with many of humanity's darkest chapters, the Rwandan genocide also produced extraordinary tales of individual heroism and survival.
It was not long before Mataba, an ethnically mixed village in the western district of Kiyube, found itself caught up in the maelstrom. Fearing that his daughter would be raped if caught by Hutu militiamen, Ms Ilibagiza's father sent her to hide in a nearby house owned by the Rev Simeon Nzabahimana who, despite being a Hutu, risked his life to hide her and seven other women.
So secret was the women's hiding place that the priest's family were not even told about it in case they were threatened or tempted into revealing its whereabouts.
"It was a room measuring three feet by four feet, a small bathroom really," says Ms Ilibagiza. "It didn't even have a sink, just a toilet sunk into the ground. There was a door on to the next room and at night we could sometimes go there to lie down. But only at night." For the next three months the women sat in terror as the Interahamwe went from house to house butchering Mataba's Tutsi population. They could hear the screams of their relatives as the men were cut down and the women raped before being butchered.
Ms Ilibagiza's father had already survived two civil wars and believed he could try and reason with the Interahamwe. Witnesses say he was shot dead by a man called Felicien before he could even open his mouth. The same man then went on to slaughter her mother, Rose, and her elder brother, Damascene. A second brother was also cut down sometime later. The only immediate relative of Ms Ilibagiza to survive the genocide other than herself was her third brother, Aimable, who fortunate enough to be studying in Senegal at the time of the genocide. He has chosen to remain in his country of birth and works as a vet.
Convinced they would never see their families again, waiting for the death squads to storm into the filthy white tiled room at any moment, the women sat for days on end in total silence, only daring to communicate by sign language. At 5ft 9in Ms Ilibagiza was one of the tallest and within days her body was covered in sores from being unable to move properly.
Privacy and cleanliness were forgotten. The toilet could only be flushed when the neighbour next door did so and there was rarely enough paper for the women's menstrual periods. After a week lice were crawling in their clothes and hair.
Despite the crippling pain of being largely unable to move, Ms Ilibagiza says the women stoically accepted their lot. "When you realise that someone is next door waiting to kill you, you can do anything," she remembers. "You can put up with any hardship. We never complained."
Initially, as the violence raged around her, so to did Ms Ilibagiza's heart. She admits that in the first few weeks of her captivity it was difficult to feel anything but hate for the people who had killed her family and destroyed her life. As desperation set in she turned to her rosary, the last thing her father had given her before she went into hiding, and prayed to God. Inside her prison, surrounded by squalor, misery and mourning, Ms Ilibagiza decided to forgive the people who had murdered her family.
"The day I truly understood what forgiveness meant was while I was hiding in that room," she says. "It was like a light turning on in my mind and I made a choice. If I gave up on humanity I would die inside. I'd no longer be able to trust anybody.
"I kept thinking of Christ on the cross and his words, 'Forgive them father they know not what they do'. I knew there was no way my family's killers could understand the magnitude of what they were doing."
By the time the women left their hiding place and made it to a refugee camp that was run by French peacekeepers, Ms Ilibagiza's weight had plummeted from 8 stone 3 pounds to just 4 stone 9 pounds. Mr Nzabahimana, the man who had hidden them, was killed during the dying days of the genocide for sheltering Tutsis.
By late summer the killing had finally died down and Ms Ilibagiza decided to test how far her forgiveness could go. She found her father's killer in a nearby prison. The tables had been turned. Now he was imprisoned, filthy and terrified but the first words he heard from the woman who had come to see him were: "I forgive you."
"He couldn't look at me, he looked down and was so ashamed," said Ms Ilibagiza. "Something changed in his heart. I hope it's made him realise the gravity of what he's done. Like me he had a beautiful family and home but one day he decided to go out and kill."
This ability to forgive such atrocities was what inspired Leslie Lewis Sword, an American actress who came to know Ms Ilibagiza after attending one of her lectures, to dramatise her life. "Her message is forgiveness," Sword said earlier this week. "She has found a way to move on after these unbearable hardships. It gives hope for Darfur, for Zimbabwe too. People are taking a look at these things too and asking what is happening there."
The play itself, Miracle in Rwanda, in which Sword plays all the parts including Ms Ilibagiza, her family and an Interahamwe leader, has received lavish praise in the US press and is currently making a world tour. Her performances at Edinburgh have sold out each night.
Ms Ilibagiza, meanwhile, hopes her fellow Rwandans will follow her approach and look towards reconciling their differences rather than look for retribution. "The happiness you get from being able to forgive someone is beyond any apology," she says. "I think Rwanda will recover. It could take hundreds of years but it will recover."
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