Another week passed and I didn’t know whether mama and Immaculee were dead or alive. Then one morning, the door opened softly and the lady came in, without mama. My first thought was that they were killed. A mystic clock was ticking in my heart.

“Oh where is mama?” I shouted dreadfully.

“Don’t be frightened, Benjamin,” the lady said, “I’m taking you to her,”
I looked at her bewildered.

“Benjamin, don’t you believe me?” she said, laying her hand softly on my shoulder.
I followed, holding her hands not knowing where we were going.

As we went, I saw the bodies of people lying in the streets. My legs trembled. Most of the corpses on the path were kids my age that I knew. They looked brutalised, all cut up, disfigured and made unrecognisable by machetes. Everywhere was quiet, it was like I was in a movie. The Rwandans who used to walk the streets, laughing and enjoying life were gone. Fences were out of repair, gates hanged half off the hinges, window panes out, buildings blackened by fire and weeds colonising as much space as they could take. Cars still parked in front of houses were burnt to metal.

We reached the town hall where many people had taken refuge. Some were bleeding. People were screaming and shouting and babies were crying. It looked like a crowd in a stadium. A line curled around a convoy of trucks loaded with AU soldiers and humanitarian aid workers taking people to neighbouring Tanzania. I’m talking like thousands of people, a lot of children and a lot of mothers. There were Tutsi moms with babies, men, boys and girls waiting, hoping that they were next on the bus. Some of the mothers were breastfeeding their children and men were carrying their children on their backs.

All eyes fixed on the long line of buses as though they were Jesus. I looked through the crowd and found Immaculee and mama there; still alive.

The lady said, “Marty, see your son, Benjamin, see your mother,”

It is with this in mind that I say I’ll never call all Hutus killers. That’s the way I see it. The way you see people depends on where you are standing. As mama, my sister and I made way to find a place on the bus, I wondered if it would be able to move.

On the road out of Kigali, the dead were strewn along the roads and the black smudges of destroyed villages whizzed through the window as the bus passed towns. Houses had been abandoned. Their residents either fled or died leaving behind half-burnt walls and doors stained with blood. Valuable properties tossed about, stamped on, broken to pieces or butted with guns.

On doors and staircases of many houses. Blood narrated the fatalities, screams and human rights’ abuses that have taken place. Rotten humans becoming skeletons buzzed with flies, many of them in front doors and backyards.

I stared at the wickedness of this world, absentmindedly. We had to hold cloths over our faces to shut out the stench of decomposed flesh of humans. We were soon halted at a roadblock by local militias.

“All the females are to be separated from the rest males,” one militia officer explained, “They will be questioned,” Mama smiled and promised to come to Tanzania for me.

A blow hit me hard when the engine started and the bus began to pull away. Immaculee and mama waved at me and I waved back, my eyes brimming with tears.

Tell us: Why do you think is the reason for the males to be separated from the females?