Men only: Here’s what happened 25 years ago

Twenty five years ago, the Rwanda genocide began on this day, and at the end of 100 days, a million men, women and children had been murdered, mostly by machete. Here is what happened:

Twagiramungu threw a forefinger with a missing top in the bathroom’s general direction, but the short temper cook was already heading to the balcony to remonstrate with the bhang-banging dindiliyimana.

The bathrooms and main bedrooms on every alternating floor of this building had been placed in direct opposite order, which is how Horton Mkimbizi, needing to pee, instead found himself in a room with a mattress on the floor; and a strange red light from a solitary bulb and pictures hanging from a clothesline, once he had shut the door behind him. In this room, the wooden floorboards seemed to tilt dramatically to the left, so that Horton held onto one wall for a second, like a new deck boy on a keeling ship, to steady himself.

He could faintly hear Bagasora Twagiramungu in a rage, yelling at Ntabakuze, catch that phrase, ‘Inyenzi-inkotanyi,’ but now that he was clearly in the wrong ‘ B’ room, some strange red-coloured Satan childe under the shade of the forbidden tree in Eden, waiting to be tempted, the urge to urinate had all but disappeared.

There were pictures hanging on a nylon wire clothes-line, like rows of condemned men after the sentence of mass hanging has happened, and there was a 20-year-old April Fool baby’s curiosity to be sated. He let go of the wall, the water from some upstairs apartment – maybe even theirs – giving it an odd convex bulge, like something just about to divulge some fearsome secrets in an informational deluge. Like a suspect confessing his sins.

At first, Horton thought the first picture, of a naked girl, was a porn epic, like the ones in the Playboy magazines complete with authentic black instead of Swedish white. Horton kept a hidden secret in his bedroom, one that he lived in mortal fear of discovery, under his mattress – a secret his mother had long uncovered, and then covered up again in maternal embarrassment, wondering what on earth had gone wrong with her children since their father died.

She had felt a flush of burning resentment at her MIA husband, who she was now sure had deliberately fled into death having lived a cowardly life full of pusillanimity. The villainy of being one of life’s general pussies. Why was he not here to tell his son: ‘Horton, boys who masturbate looking at dirty pictures such as these ones eventually go blind!’?

Where was he to put the fear of God into his only begotten son, Horton?

Then Horton saw that the naked girl, a stripling no older than 19, had wide open terrified eyes that stood out even in the black – and- white print of the photo graph that there was a powerful hand with a rubber bangle on the wrist with the inscription ‘ POWER’ on it round her neck.

The second photograph on the clothesline was of a baby on the ground. Not upright and vertical the way toddlers on the ground are supposed to be but flat and lying horizontal across that road.

A Safari boot with déjà vu all over it was raised over the infant’s head, and even the grainy blurred quality of the shot, as if this act had shocked the snapper slightly, could not hide the sheer horror of what was about to happen next.

 ‘Inyenze!’ That is what they called the Tutsis. Horton Mkimbizi had an audio–memory recall from BBC radio circa last April. 1994.

That word had become common in the days, then the weeks, then the months following his nineteenth birthday, terrifying words coming through the radio from next door. ‘Inyenze’ equals Roach.

The door of the bedroom darkroom was creaking open, and Horton Mkimbizi wanted to scream but instead snatched at the nearest large object on a small table just below the row (of condemned folks) which just so happened to be a FED – Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhihinsky – camera, built like a Soviet tank and solid as a rock.

Ndindiliyimana Ntabakuze walked into the darkroom (bedroom) with a long, looong machete raised over his head, poised to strike and Horton prepared to make his last stand against this mtu.

The full story Horton Eats a Hutu is available for free on www.yours2read.com.

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