Born in Rwanda in 1958, Esther Mujawayo is a sociologist. She works as a psychotherapist in Dusseldorf, principally with persons who suffer from psychic post-war trauma. She and her three children survived the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, where she lost her husband and many relatives. In July of that same year she founded a Non-Governmental Organisation of widows, Avega, with the purpose of helping women who survived the carnage, especially those who were victims of rape.
She wrote, SurVivantes: Rwanda, dix ans après le génocide in 2004, with the journalist Souâd Belhaddad, describing her life, from the happy childhood in a herdsmen's village in the Ruandan hills until her arrival in Germany, and in 2007 Stéphanie's Flower, La Fleur de Stéphanie: Rwanda entre réconciliation et déni, containing her own personal experience regarding the delicate process of national reconciliation, set in motion by the Ruandan government to ensure that those who were once victims (Tutsis) and murderers (Hutus) could live peacefully together.
Because it began with her own experience as a survivor of the genocide of the Tutsi people in Rwanda, Esther Mujawayo's mission is twofold. On the one hand, she works as a psychotherapist to really help the women who survived the carnage through Avega, to find the courage to survive, and on the other, she offers the whole world her testimony, as a chance to reflect on war crimes in the global era, where many conflicts attract world attention. Mass communication is a powerful means of bridging space and time, making each one of us a participant in atrocities even if they are committed in completely another part of the world. Yet at the same time, such events often end up quickly ignored by the very same media when another conflict shows up on the horizon, eclipsing the previous one, which is no longer attractive when the viewing figures drop. And this is exactly what happened in Rwanda, where besides the lack of interest of the media, there was also a lack of timely intervention by the international community.
Humanitarian organizations instituted a Commission of Inquiry and made every sort of appeal. Yet the UN did not manage to take a decision to stop the conflict, simply because it caused no alarm as it did not damage the strategic interests of its member states.
Today, the burden of the genocide's consequences falls chiefly on Ruandan women. Many of them were girls who were victims of sexual violence, fell pregnant and were infected with AIDS. One third of them are widows who have had to take on the difficult role of head of the family. On their shoulders rest jobs far more complex than those typical of the general imbalance of African societies, because it is not merely a question of rebuilding the country. It is also a question of assimilating the genocide and the war into the historic memory of future generations.
Fear, which is also the subject of this WSS debate, is a recurrent theme in Mujawayo's work. She speaks to conferences from one end of Europe to the other, this topic. Fear is the most prevalent feeling among the women who survived, condemned to live with the pain of the memory and the huge social void that was created. First of all, there is the fear of going mad. This madness can be caused especially a possible consequence of the inability to manage the enormous void of affection and thus also identity. Those who have been brought up in Ruandan culture and society where the extended family is important and is vital to revitalize and strengthen the sense of belonging and identity feel this especially strongly.
In the survivors' memory however, the fear of madness is amplified not only by the death of loved ones, but also by the constant thought of how they died, to the slow and agonizing suffering they bore before they died. And in this regard, in the book Stephanie's Flower, Esther Mujawayo tells of the moments without mercy, of exchanges between victims and murderers during the gacaca, traditional tribunals pressed into function after the genocide to handle the difficult problem of dealing with the great number of trials against the murderers. In exchange for a reduction of the sentence, the assassins were asked to reveal the truth about the last moments of their victims' lives as well as the places where their bodies were left. This was further violence which added to the survivors' widespread feeling of guilt, because they were still alive and because they had not been able to give their dead a proper burial, often resulting in the feeling that it was impossible to bring the mourning process, and thus the re-elaboration of the trauma, to an end .
No less important is the fear that comes from the terrible suspicion of neighbours, the suspicion that dominates daily relationships with the potential assassins of one's loved ones or ones' own rapists. In this sense, the stories we hear speak of women who have a hard time returning to their daily lives, ruled by the overwhelming terror of living close to those who murdered their loved ones, and who once they return to freedom, pay "courtesy" visits to their victims, allowing hints to drop that the time of impunity could return, or that simply with their presence they are a constant threat that torments their mind.
Esther Mujawayo brings to the attention of the public, especially in the West, the record of the terrible ruin of humanity offended in its dignity. But it is also an indictment of the perverse effects produced by the spread of racist ideologies like the ones that maintain the inferiority of the African peoples to justify colonialist domination. This danger exists even today, in our global and globalised society. Every time we fear the Other, the prototype of the unknown, who stands for what we are not or what, in one way or another, or is different from what we know (the Different One), there is the risk that it will become an occasion to reject, if not oppress, the foreigner, as someone whose habits, traditions, language, religion and perhaps skin are different from ours.
