What Came After: A Postscript
"There are no stangers in Rwanda." A journalist told me this late at night in a bar in Kigali, the capital of this tiny African nation. I had gone there in February 2006 to finish preparing The Overwhelming.
A play for me begins with a question I don't know how or am afraid to answer. I had wanted to write a play set against the events of the Rwandan genocide for twelve years because of such a question. In the spring and summer of 1994, as I watched and read about the killings that engulfed Rwanda, I kept asking myself the following: If you were there right now, what would you do to stay alive? What kind of person would you prove to be?
Ten years later, in the summer of 2004, I began work on my play. I set my story in Kigali in early 1994, on the eve of the genocide, when all the factors that led to the killings were in place but few understood the scope of what was about to happen: eight hundred thousand mostly Tutsi citizens slaughtered by their Hutu countrymen in a hundred days. Setting it then was a necessary constraint for the scope of my play But as I researched and wrote, I also learned about the Rwanda of the last decade. Gradually, it was what came after the genocide that began to haunt me as much as the killings themselves.
How do you move on from a nightmare of bloodshed when you are linked to those who perpetrated it? Those who died in the Rwandan genocide knew their murderers personally When a victim was killed, he or she was hacked or clubbed to death (as most were) by a neighbor, a colleague, a friend. Those who lived knew these killers just as intimately. They are the witnesses, connected to both the murdered and their murderers, a terrible connectedness that is almost impossible to move on from. This postscript is the story of just one such connection. It is the story of one man's death and all those linked to it, however desperately they wish they were not.
Before I wrote The Overwhelming, I did a year's worth of research. I read every book I could, learning the history and sequence of events surrounding the genocide. I memorized the layout of Kigali in 1994, studied the names of its streets, restaurants, bars; I taught myself simple words and rudimentary phrases in Kinyarwanda. But after I wrote a draft, I realized I couldn't go any further without having the play tested for authenticity I needed to know if what I had written would ring true to Rwandans—to those who had actually lived through the events I was writing about.
Just as I found my writing stalled, my wife, Rebecca, was at a party in Cape Cod in March 2005 when she overheard someone talking about a doctor named Louis Kayitalire, a Rwandan genocide victim who now lived in Indiana. She asked for his e-mail address and passed it on to me; I then wrote and introduced myself. Would he be willing to read what I had written? Would he be honest with his criticism, even tear my play apart if he felt it required that?
Louis wrote back. He had escaped the killings in 1994 because he was in France on a medical residency His father had written that things were getting dangerous at home and he was not to return. Louis stayed in Paris; his father and most of his mother's kin were murdered. "I would be honored," he wrote, "to help in any way to tell the story of what happened to my family and my country." I sent him the play and he quickly responded with scores of notes for me—a Tutsi surname attributed to a Hutu character, a misspelled street name, the subtle but key misuse of a saying in Kinyarwanda, and on and on. For months we wrote to each other and spoke on the phone as he critiqued my rewrites. We spoke for hours about the intricacies of Rwandan political and ethnic identity, about the hatred and fear that had engulfed his country. The talks were difficult for Louis. "I have worked very hard to put away these memories. To move forward with my life. It has been a struggle, but I am doing so."
Louis's dedication and expertise were a godsend, but how could I rely on the judgment and guidance of only one man? Just as I was stalled again, the PlayPenn new play workshop invited me to come to Philadelphia in July 2005 to work with a cast of actors and a director on The Overwhelming. They told me they'd learned of a Rwandan named Raymond Simba who taught Kinyarwanda part-time at the University of Pennsylvania. I wrote to Raymond asking if he too would read my play and, if it passed his muster, whether he would be willing to help me. He wrote back that he had been in Kigali when the genocide occurred and that he was eager to read what I had written. I sent it and he replied with reams of notes, translation and pronunciation corrections, and an offer to come to the workshop rehearsals and to teach the actors how to pronounce Kinyarwanda.
Raymond juggled his teaching and his job selling real estate to spend days with the cast and me. In a gentle voice barely above a whisper, he patiently taught the actors how to pronounce their lines. He graciously answered their questions about his country's history, the complexities of Hutu and Tutsi identity—and about the genocide itself. He told how his family had fled soon after the killings began, picking their way through the corpse-strewn streets. "It was a miracle," Raymond said. "Somehow, God knows, we were able to escape alive into Congo. From there I traveled to Senegal and then made my way here." Starting from nothing, he had taught himself English and begun his life anew in the United States. Repeatedly, Raymond thanked the actors for their hard work. "Doing this work, you will help prevent such horrors from ever taking place again. This is more important than you can know."
Quickly thereafter, in December 2005, the National Theatre in London agreed to mount the world premiere and to send me to Rwanda before rehearsals began. I called Louis to share the good news; he was overjoyed that I would get a chance to see his homeland. We made plans for me to visit him in his new house in Connecticut, where we would finally meet in person and celebrate our work together.
Then I called Raymond. Something in his voice was different, distant. "I am so sorry to have been out of touch, my friend. I have been traveling." He apologized for not returning my e-mail from a few weeks before with final, minute translation queries. I interrupted him. What was wrong? "I have been in Tanzania. At the genocide trials. My father has been accused."
Raymond had just returned from Arusha, Tanzania, where the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was being held. He told me his father was imprisoned there, falsely accused of perpetrating genocide in 1994. "He was not even in that part of the country then. He was in the Gitarama, with me and the rest of our family, not in Gikongoro." The Rwandan government, he said, paid their witnesses to go testify against his father. But his father's witnesses were not even allowed to go to Tanzania to testify "The government in Kigali is trying by all means to make him guilty."
Then, after all our months of conversation, Raymond spoke for the first time about his father. Aloys Simba was a retired soldier who had served in the army of the previous government. This was the same Hutu-dominated regime that planned and oversaw the genocide as part of its desperate fight against the RPF, a Tutsi-dominated guerrilla movement. But, his son said, Aloys Simba was simply a loyal soldier and a patriot. He had fought the RPF on the battlefield; that was all. But the RPF had won the war (which ended the genocide) and its leaders were now the backbone of the current Rwandan government. "The grudges," Raymond said, "even now they are still hard. My father has been framed. He has been found guilty of genocide. I do not know what I will do next."
Days later I drove up to Connecticut to meet Louis. He was as elegant and thoughtful in person as he was on the phone. We spent the afternoon looking at photos of his recent trip back to Rwanda and discussing whom he knew there that I should meet. As I got ready to leave, I asked him if I'd ever mentioned the other Rwandan who had been so helpful to me. I had not. I confided that this man had been in the back of my mind all day. "Sitting here talking with you," I said, "I keep thinking about what he and his family are going through right now, trying to come up with some way I can help." I began to tell Louis that the man's father was a military officer who had fought the RPF and had just been convicted of genocide in Arusha. Louis cut me off before I could continue.
"What was his name?" he asked sharply
"Aloys Simba," I said.
His entire body recoiled.
"I know that name very well. That man killed my father."
Louis told me that his father's name was Joseph Kayihigi. He had been a doctor too. Joseph Kayihigi and Aloys Simba were good friends who had grown up together in Gikongoro, in the south of Rwanda. They were so close that Joseph was even Aloys's physician for a time. Later they both moved to Kigali, where their sons Louis and Raymond grew up as neighbors. Both fathers were Hutu, but Joseph had married a Tutsi. When the killings of Tutsis started, Joseph Kayihigi took his wife and their family back to Gikongoro. "My father hoped that those who knew him would not kill him as easily as strangers would," Louis said.
At the same time, Aloys Simba came out of retirement and was put in charge of the army in Gikongoro, to oversee the slaughter of Tutsis in his home prefecture and to fight the advancing forces of the RPF, Louis told me. When it became clear that the government army would lose, Simba forced all local Hutus to evacuate to Congo. When Aloys Simba came to Joseph Kayihigi's house, Louis's father refused to evacuate on principle. "My father told Simba, ‘This is my home, this is my country. Your hands are covered in blood. You must pay for it.' "
"The next night, Simba's men came around the house." Louis's voice rose and he cut the air with his hands as he continued. "This was on a direct order from Simba. No one in Gikongoro was touched without his say-so." Louis's father, uncle, and brother were dragged out into the street, denounced as traitors, and shot. "People were there. Many people, who all told me this." The other two men were killed instantly, but Louis's father was still alive. "My mother came out of hiding and realized that he was still living and bleeding from his chest. She sat next to her bleeding husband—next to the body of my brother, her dead son—desperate for help. None came. It took five hours for my father to die."
As the RPF advanced, Aloys Simba fled to Congo with his family, including Raymond, Louis said. They eventually made it to Senegal. Then Aloys Simba disappeared. "And how was Aloys Simba flown from Congo to Senegal?" Louis asked me, his eyes flashing. "Almost every high-ranking Rwandais who fled the killings and made it to Senegal was a genocidaire. Those protected by Hutu Power militias and then flown to safety by the French. I know this because I tried to pursue Simba on my own." For years Louis struggled to bring a case against Aloys Simba from his home in Paris. "But everywhere I turned, it was a dead end." Finally he had to stop and move on with his life. Here, from me, was the first he'd heard of Aloys Simba's arrest and conviction. He had been talking for an hour nonstop and his body was shaking. "You tell Raymond that one of the men who advises you is the son of Kayi-higi. Man! You see what he says then."
All the next day I couldn't eat, couldn't work. I kept replaying the image of Louis's face as I said the name Aloys Simba and watched all color drain from it. I called him that evening and apologized for bringing such terrible memories back into his life.
"How could you know?" he asked. "The chance of this happening? Point zero, zero, zero one!" He spoke quickly, his voice pitched high, a torrent pouring out of him. "Since 1994, the time I have spent thinking about this man and how to get him! And then you would tell me this!" The memories had all flooded back. He could think of nothing else.
"I want to be very clear: I am not accusing Raymond of having anything to do with the genocide himself. The son is not guilty of the sins of the father." Still, he admitted, after I left, he had reread my play three times, rechecking all the Kinyarwanda in the script to make sure Raymond had not slipped in any secret Hutu Power words. "But, no. Your friend did an excellent job. He has served your work very well."
But what Louis could not forgive were what he called Raymond's lies. "That a man would stand by his father, this is expected. But that he would say that Aloys Simba is innocent. That his own escape to Congo—and beyond—was some ‘miracle.' That he would pretend that this was not proof of his protection by the same thugs who did the murdering! He knows. He knows the truth about his dad."
Louis fell silent for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. "There is one thing. It is too much for me to see my name and the name Simba written together. If you choose to thank Raymond in your book instead of me, that is fine. He has clearly done good work. As for me, it was an honor to help you. That is enough. All I ask is this one favor. My family, people throughout Rwanda, if they see the names Louis Kayitalire and Raymond Simba thanked on the same page . . ." There was a long pause.
"J.T., they are not going to understand."
I got hold of a copy of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's indictment against retired Lieutenant Colonel Aloys Simba.* I also tracked down a copy of the court's summary of judgment that found him guilty. I discovered that Raymond's father had been one of eleven military officers who orchestrated the coup on July 5, 1973, that installed Juvénal Habyarimana as dictator of Rwanda—a corrupt reign that ended when Habyarimana's plane was mysteriously shot down on April 6, 1994, igniting the fuse of genocide. Raymond never told me that his father had been one of Habyarimana's closest confidants and one of the richest men in Rwanda. Raymond never told me that as he grew up in Kigali, his father's name was in every school textbook: he was one of the Comrades of the Fifth of July, a national hero.
*The Prosecutor v. Aloys Simba, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Case No. ICTR-2001-76-1, Amended Indictment, May 10, 2.004.
The prosecution charged Aloys Simba with secretly helping to plan genocide and then coming out of retirement to lead the killings in Gikongoro and nearby Butare. He was accused of personally inciting genocide by rallying crowds to hunt and kill, and with overseeing the collecting and distributing of rifles and machetes with which to do so. Many witnesses backed up these charges. Over and over, they quoted Aloys Simba's own words. How he extolled his fellow Hutus to "get rid of the filth" that was their Tutsi neighbors. "The Tutsis have hatched a plot to kill the Hutus," he is said to have shouted as he urged his fellow citizens to butchery "Therefore the Hutus must start the killings first."
Raymond's father was charged with overseeing the massacre at Kaduha Parish by grenade, gun, machete, and club. The killing went on for twelve hours. According to the indictment: "During the attack, which lasted the whole day, Aloys Simba replenished the ammunition of the attackers on several occasions." As I read on and on, I underlined the following sentences: "As a result of the attack, thousands of men, women and children were massacred . . . Many of the dead were buried between 23 April and 26 April 1994 in and around Kaduha."
I tracked down day-by-day accounts of Aloys Simba's trial from different African newspapers. They reported that the lieutenant colonel and his family fled Rwanda during the killings for Bukavu, Congo, and that Simba was finally arrested in Senegal in 2001. Simba means lion, they reported, and he was known as "the fearsome lion," feared by all. The articles made clear that the hero of the former regime had many defenders, even one who was "a renowned human rights activist in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide," but that his key witnesses' testimonies fell apart under cross-examination.
Aloys Simba was the last defense witness. He himself rejected all charges, arguing that he had in fact saved many Tutsis from death at the hands of others. His final, and by all accounts climactic, day of testimony was July 8, 2005. On that same day, his son was translating passages of my play and schooling me in the finer points of Rwandan culture and nuance. On that same day, Raymond spoke to me at length about the importance of the work I was doing. How he dearly hoped that telling this story would help prevent such awful violence from happening again.
Weeks later when I went to Kigali, I asked Rwandans from all walks of life about both fathers. Many people I spoke to knew of Joseph Kayihigi, that he had taught medicine at the university. I met men and women who had trained under him and spoke his name with reverence. Everyone I spoke to knew the name Aloys Simba. Without prompting, they spoke about his deeds during the genocide: the lion; the butcher; the man who came out of retirement just so he could get in some killing.
Aloys Simba was found guilty on December 13, 2005, on one count of genocide and one of crimes against humanity He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. After all I've read and all those I've talked to, this seems to me to be a case of justice served. But the following facts from the summary of judgment must be acknowledged*:
The court ruled that the defense was hampered by not having enough time between the notice of the allegations and the trial.
Aloys Simba's sentence was reduced because he, unlike almost all other officials of the former government, acknowledged that a genocide had taken place and condemned it.
*The Prosecutor v. Aloys Simba, ICTR-2001-76-1, Summary of Judgment, December 13, 2.005.
3. The court displayed further leniency because "his participation in the massacres [may have] resulted from misguided notions of patriotism and government allegiance rather than extremism or ethnic hatred."
It must also be acknowledged that every person I spoke with, from Louis onward, was far from an impartial witness. And there is also this: only days ago, Aloys Simba was granted the right to appeal his sentence. However much I may have read or heard, whatever opinions I may have formed, the question of Aloys Simba's guilt or innocence is still being wrestled with.
Finally, it must be acknowledged that while Louis has read and approved of how I have told this story, Raymond has not. I have called and written Raymond many times over the last six months but he has not responded. I do not know where, or how, he is.
There was a time when I fantasized about confronting Raymond, of demanding he come clean and tell me the truth. But such a fantasy is founded on a very American idea of confession and redemption. Like so much about Rwanda, there is no such redemption in this story. Raymond is still fighting to prove his father's innocence; Louis is still trying to move beyond his father's murder. Neither man can see beyond his own truth.
I have honored Louis's request: I thanked him in the earlier British edition of my play; Raymond is thanked in this one. I remain grateful to them both, but it is not for me to link their names together through my gratitude.
A country the size of Rwanda binds its people together in a way unimaginable to those of us living in the United States. When I tell other Americans that here, in a country of 300 million people, a Rwandan I met by chance in Indiana and a Rwandan I met by chance in Pennsylvania turned out to have grown up on the same street in Kigali and that their lives and histories are inextricably linked by blood, they can hardly believe it. But when I told this story in Kigali, no one batted an eye.
Excerpted from The Overwhelming by J. T. Rogers.
Copyright 2007 by J. T. Rogers.
Published in First American edition, 2007 by Faber and Faber, Inc.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
