Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
In 100 days, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered—many by a friend or a neighbor—as the rest of the world sat watching. Marie-Christine Williams, a Rwandan, French, and Romanian 14-year-old, didn’t have that luxury. With her family gone and her home burned, she ran, on her own for months, hiding in the forest when she had to.
The massacre began April 7, 1994. Did you sense danger ahead of time? The night before, our president was killed. They shot his airplane down. The Hutu, who were a majority, blamed the Tutsi for killing the president. But six months before that, the government had been giving machetes to the Hutu and telling people that the Tutsis were not from Rwanda and didn’t deserve to live there.
What happened the night the president was killed? There was no electricity. They shut off the water. They told people to stay home and lock the doors. Then they came. They had a list of every person in every household. If you were Hutu, you would not be touched—unless you tried to stop it. When I woke up the next morning, my neighbors were screaming and the house in back was burning. I was a very curious young girl. We had a concrete fence. I climbed it, and when I saw my friend Arianna running and a man with a machete chasing her, I fell. I was trying to get up and go tell my family, but the killers were already there. Our house was next. So I hid in a hole where a tree used to be, and I heard my family begging to be forgiven. Then I smelled smoke, and I heard the killers laughing. They killed my youngest half-brother because he was crying too much. They hacked my grandmother to death.
You were alone, and only 14 years old. Where did you go? First I went to one of my neighbors. He was Hutu, and instead of helping me, he grabbed me by the neck and told me to leave. I took off toward the jungle. I was lost most of the time. April is the rainy season, so it was chilly. I started getting cuts on my feet, and they were like balloons. I could barely feel them. Sometimes during the night, I would climb trees to get away from the wild dogs and leopards and snakes. I had to cover my mixed-race skin with dark mud so I could hide better. The propaganda radio said, “If you see a white person, kill them too.” It must have been close to 100 days, but I was too disoriented to count. A minute to me was like an hour.
You managed to survive on your own for almost three months. What gave you strength? Remembering my childhood, and how my father told me I was worthless. I said, Give me strength to prove him wrong. Every morning when I woke up, I would see the sunshine and say, “I did it again. I did it one more time.” One time, a stranger came from nowhere. They had just killed his wife and children, and they were looking for him. He was so wounded, he couldn’t hold his head up. He said, “You survived this long by yourself? You are smarter than most people.” He gave me strength to survive longer when he told me I was smart. I never heard such a word in my entire life.
So you managed to elude the Hutu warriors? No, I was caught. They locked me in a school with other women and children, and every day, they would come and pick who they wanted to kill. When the Hutu started losing power, they marched all of us on the bridge—that’s why so many people died. They hit me with a machete and threw me off the bridge. But later these people dug me out and tried to help me. I was too weak, so they dumped me in an empty hospital—only dead bodies there. They pushed a dead person off a cot and gave me his bed.
How badly were you injured? I had a piece of machete in my head, shotgun wounds on my head and back, a broken hand. I couldn’t move my head, but I could talk to the lady who was next to me, crying. She was about to die. A month later, we got help. The other countries started coming over, the aid came back, the Red Cross came back, the electricity came back. They contacted my grandmother in France, then sent me to her.
And then you had to face the recovery. I lived in the hospital in France for four years. They almost amputated my left leg. I had so many infections, they didn’t know if I was going to survive. They operated on my head and gave me another scar. I was in a wheelchair for four years, and on top of it I was doing laser treatments and other surgeries. Every time the doctors walked in, I knew it would be bad news. Even today, when I am sick, I don’t want to go to the doctors: What are they going to tell me?
What did you do when you were finally released from the hospital? I went back to Rwanda to see what happened. I wanted closure. So there I was, still on crutches, no hair, scars all over me. This man sat next to me on the airplane and started talking to me, but I didn’t answer, because I didn’t trust people. I was angry. I didn’t believe anyone. When we got to Rwanda, though, he asked if someone was waiting for me, and I said no. So he drove me to my old neighborhood. As we drove, I didn’t recognize anything except the bridge. They marched people onto that bridge to kill them.
Nothing else was familiar? It was all gone. When the killers came to your home, if they didn’t find you, they’d surround your home and burn it, just in case you were hiding inside. Sometimes they would rob you first.
What was your house like before they burned it down? It was a nice, beautiful, middle-class home. Lots of different roses in the backyard. A tree had died, so my father pulled the roots out. That’s the place where I was able to hide. I used to go there to take time to myself, but I never knew that the place where I would sit when I was sad would actually be the place that saved my life.
You lived in Europe with your grandmother until you were 7. How did you get to Rwanda? My father sent for me. But then he took a new wife, and they had five sons. He’d tell me I was worthless. He was mad at our mother for having an affair and for abandoning all of us, two months after I was born.
Had they been in love at one time? They met in college; they were both architecture students. He was Catholic and from Rwanda, and she was Jewish, French, and Romanian. She got pregnant before they married, and she was much too young to be a mother. Two months after I was born, she abandoned us. She went to another city and started over, using her nickname. My grandmother didn’t even know where she was.
Did no one try to stop your father from hurting you? Our neighbors knew what was going on, and they tried to intervene, but it never worked. There was no child protective services. You would not go to the police and complain about your parents. If you did, you’d cause yourself more harm than you already had. I was just trying to survive my childhood, but I never thought that on top of that, I would be running around fighting for my life.
Did you grieve your father’s death? He’s the one person I have never cried for. I lost so many family members, so many friends. Whenever I grieve, I grieve for all of them. I feel guilty—why should I grieve for this one, and this one died worse?—so I try to shut the emotions off. The deaths still hurting the most are my husband’s and my older sister’s. She was at boarding school, and when the genocide began, they wrapped her up in a mattress and took her to Congo, so she never saw what I saw. But she died at 24, in a car crash.
Did you ever try to find your mother? Yes. After the genocide, my dream was to know her. I went to the police station—I had her full name and date of birth—and they gave me her address. When she opened the door and saw me, she passed out. I was on crutches, no hair, and you could see the scars from the machete. She had a good life, made lots of money, never married again. She didn’t want to hear what happened to me. I said, “We could just be friends. You don’t want me to call you Mom, that’s OK.” Now I tell people, “If you have to hunt for love and beg someone to love you, it’s not worth it.”
What was your grandmother like? She was a beautiful Jewish Holocaust survivor, the only one in her family who survived. She knew what love was. Because of her love, I am who I am.
Yet she had a life as hard as yours. Yes. And in the beginning, when she was telling me her story, I never understood the pain—not until I went through it, too. I have a shoebox with all her photographs, and I found a picture of when her father was hanged. It was April 13, 1945. Everything bad happens in April! After the war, her neighbors went to the camp and started collecting stuff, and they found all these negatives.
Your generation’s suffering repeated her generation’s suffering. I hope your son never has to suffer anything similar. No. I am very protective of him.
Did you feel any survivor’s guilt? The anger I had was not because I survived. It was because I heard the victims screaming and I couldn’t help them.
In your memoir, The Dark Side of Human Nature, there’s a clear sense that suffering made you a more sensitive person. Isn’t it hard to feel sympathy when Americans whine about petty inconveniences? This is a beautiful country. People live in freedom. They haven’t witnessed a genocide; they haven’t starved. They have 911. They are safer. When people try to destroy this beautiful country, they don’t realize what they have. In Rwanda, you couldn’t call 911. There was no safety. And all the people died.
Other than memory, what lingers from your ordeal? Some days, I feel like my childhood still hurts. When people talk about their families, it kind of reminds me of what I don’t have. I have chronic pain. I had tetanus. When the weather changes, I can feel the screws in my knees squeaking. I can’t feel my forehead—at least, not until someone touches it, and then it feels like they just touched my brain. Somebody asked me, “How can you live the life you live after everything you went through?” It’s how you overcame your past that actually guides your future.
Do you hate the Hutu? If one person hurts you, it doesn’t mean everyone is bad. A Hutu woman spied me in her garden, and she took me in. She hid me under her bed. She’d get me out, feed me, let me use the restroom, and clean my wounds. Many of the Hutu moderates tried to stop the genocide—and many of them died, too.
You testified at Rwanda’s gacaca (community justice) court. I did. It was a nightmare, because I never wanted to move back there. But the gacaca court actually opened more doors in me for forgiveness. Once I faced one of these guys who burned our home down, I was angry for five minutes. The court asked me, “How do you feel?” and I said, “I’m going to forgive this bad man so I can go ahead with my life. I am tired of being angry.”
And you married a St. Louisan… The man on the airplane! He begged me to accept his help, and he ended up giving me a place to live. He was 24 years older than me, and in him I found the father I’d always wanted. He was the best man that anyone could wish to have in their life. Three months after I met him, we got married. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but he had the power to help me. He just let me be who I wanted to be. And once I got tired of being angry, I found peace.
Did you tell him much about what you’d endured? No. It was a story I wanted to forget—wrap it up in the safe and throw away the key. He never forced me to talk about my past, but he already had a good idea—he was in the military, his parents were missionaries, and he volunteered for a relief organization.
After all you’d been through, was it difficult to be intimate with someone? I was never ready. And he was an angel; he understood. It’s not something you just—I’m still not ready today, and I’m going to be 40 in November! I’m scared to get hurt. But I wanted a baby, so we did in vitro. All it took was one time! I wanted more children—I froze some embryos—but I never went back for them.
How did your husband die? He was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer in October 2009, and by December he was gone. Our son was 4 years old.
What let you finally make peace with your past? It took me 22 years. After my son was born, I got a second chance to have something to live for. When you have a dream, you actually try harder to be happy. When you are happy, you want to be happy the next day. Also, after my husband passed away, in 2008, there was so much I’d never shared with him, and I felt guilty. He always told me that my past might help somebody else find peace.
What’s it like in Rwanda now? The Rwandan culture is forgiving. They have moved beyond the genocide. Today we don’t have Tutsi or Hutu on our IDs. We are all Rwandans. If Rwanda can do that, why can’t we do it here in Missouri? We live in this great beautiful country. People can learn to accept each other and forgive each other.
