The experiences that brought Richard Nsanzabaganwa to Ottawa can only be told in what he describes as a very long story.
Nsanzabaganwa arrived in 1998 as a refugee, having escaped from the Rwandan genocide in the spring of 1994. During the genocide, it is estimated that militia representing the Hutu majority killed about 800,000 members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group and their sympathizers.
Ethnic violence in the tiny east African country, he explains, can be retraced through centuries of Rwandan history, from the Belgian colonial occupation to the end of the 20th century.
“Whenever people hated other people because of ethnicity, no one had been punished for that,” he says. “The Hutu majority organized mass killings of Tutsis inside Rwanda to intimidate those from outside . . . In 1994 they wanted to do this on a large scale. They believed no one would be punished, and that made it that much easier.”
The resulting violence uprooted Nsanzabaganwa and his family. “From April 7 to June 20 I was running – people were trying to kill me,” he says.
“I was arrested and beaten a couple of times . . . afterwards I had to run. In that situation, you don’t have any time to cry, you just run.”
After the violence calmed, Nsanzabaganwa wanted to get as far from his experiences as possible.
“I thought Canada was the best place to go,” he says. “It wasn’t hard because I already spoke French and some English."
He arrived in Ottawa at the height of the ice storm in January 1998.
“Adjusting was not complicated because the weather wasn’t something I had to experience alone,” he says. “The hardest part was waiting for my wife and son, but I was lucky because they joined me a month later.”
Nsanzabaganwa and his family joined a Rwandan-Canadian diaspora that he estimates included several hundred people, spread throughout Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and the West. In 2001, some members of the Ottawa-Rwandan community banded together to help other survivors living in Canada and Rwanda, and educate Canadians about the genocide.
“At the beginning we had about ten people; now we have hundreds,” Nsanzabaganwa says. The survivors called their association “Humura”‑ meaning have no fear in Kinyarwanda, a language shared by both Hutus and Tutsis.
“We [survivors] try to be together and ensure that no one is left alone,” he says. Humura organizes cultural events and commemorations to give survivors the opportunity to talk about loved ones who perished.
“When we had an evening of sharing stories and experiences, people testified about how they survived,” he says, “and they were stronger after having expressed themselves.”
Some survivors have volunteered to visit schools and talk to students about their experiences. A partnership with the Canadian Institute for Genocide Education has led to a program where survivors educate teachers about the Rwanda tragedy.
“New generations need to be informed about the past for the sake of the future,” Nsanzabaganwa says.
Survivors living in Rwanda face a far different set of daily challenges than those in Canada, he says.
“They lack everything,” says Nsanzabaganwa. “Many cannot afford food or the materials for school; there are some who go to school who have [no home] to go on school vacations.”
“We try to shelter them; if there is a Rwandan who needs medical treatment abroad we try to raise money for that, but we can’t solve all the problems.”
Nsanzabaganwa’s work with Rwandans has taken him back several times to his native country, where some of his relatives still live. When he returns, he finds “things moving as if nothing had happened.”
Outwardly, says Nsanzabaganwa, there is “nothing to compare” present-day Rwanda with the Rwanda of the genocide.
Every spring, as the anniversary of the genocide approaches, the survivors work to make sure the tragic events are not forgotten. In 2004 Humura put forward a motion to the Canadian government asking to make April 7 a day to commemorate annually; the motion passed in both the Senate and House of Commons.
Humura’s “day of hope”- an initiative to celebrate hope and keep on living – has been copied by other Rwandan organizations.
In the near future they hope to produce a documentary about their experiences. To commemorate the 15th year since the genocide, a series of conferences have been organized on the theme of memory.
“We are the memory keepers,” Nsanzabaganwa says. “The genocide began on the seventh of April, 1994. That was not very long ago. We need to make sure the legacy of this genocide is not lost, and that the world is prevented from experiencing another genocide.”