Seven thousand miles from his home in Rwanda, Eric Kabera, 32, sits at a corner table at the Casablanca in Cambridge, sipping merlot and sifting his four vocabularies – Swahili, French, English, and Kinyarwanda – in search of words to describe a horror that defies description in any language.
He is one of 28 children born in exile to families who fled civil war in Rwanda, and lost 32 members of his family among at least 500,000 and possibly as many as 800,000 Rwandans who were massacred in the spring of 1994. Kabera is no longer sure who he is.
A trim man, dressed in a tan three-button suit and black sweater that is the backdrop to a gold pendant in the shape of Africa, Kabera was interviewed earlier this year during the final days of a two-month visit to North America to drum up interest in ”100 Days,” a 96-minute feature film he produced with British documentarian Nick Hughes, who wrote and directed.
Filmed in Rwanda, ”100 Days” is a fictional account of the 1994 genocide, based on eyewitness testimony, with a cast that is largely Rwandan. Although drama coaches were hired, many of the actors simply drew on their recollections because the script so closely resembled actual events.
”100 Days” will be shown tonight at 6 at the Museum of Fine Arts as part of the African Film Festival. Associate producer Jean Nganji will answer questions from the audience.
Although the film has been introduced at festivals around the world to favorable reviews, Kabera has returned to Rwanda without a commitment for ”100 Days” to be shown nationally in theaters or on television. During his tour, Kabera said he was stunned to find that the Rwandan atrocities barely seemed to register in western consciousness.
”You come to this part of the world and you gasp at the lack of interest,” he says. ”People have less interest to know more. It is like a deliberate policy of not caring. The West has little interest in Africa. It has to do with our lack of resources. Nevertheless, that shouldn’t stop our history from being included among other world histories, and that is the raison d’etre for the making of this film.
”Oh, Clinton can come and say, we’re sorry we didn’t call it by the right word, genocide,” he continues, referring to former President Bill Clinton’s regret in 1998 for not ordering US intervention. ”But how many times can people be betrayed, vis a vis all the people who have said to me, ` Well, no one’s interested in this.’ That’s the response, I’m sorry to say, from almost everybody.
”But people were massacred. Children were killed, and babies. Women were raped and old men slaughtered and no one seems to care. My grandfather was 100 years old. He could hardly walk. He was blind. He was deaf. He spent most of his time in bed, and they killed him. That’s the absurdity.”
How many of Kabera’s family were murdered?
”In the range of 32, 34.”
Close members?
”Well, grandfather, nephews, sisters – I lost two sisters. I lost cousins, my mother’s cousins, and my aunties and others. But I tend not to focus around it because so many lost so much more – fathers and mothers – and they have it tougher.”
Like some Holocaust survivors, Kabera struggles to explain why he’s alive, why some of his friends who returned to Rwanda before he did are dead. One moment he asserts that he has prevailed, and the next he reveals his anguish.
”It is strange, because when I look back at what I’ve done and what happened to my family and to other people’s families and to people still suffering, it’s all quite unbearable.
Nevertheless, I’ve managed to overcome all of that to be one of the storytellers of witnesses to the genocide, because from 1994 to today, I’ve been involved in talking to survivors about their experiences, which can be unbearable for them.”
Funded at $1 million by Rwandan businessmen and by Hughes, the director, ”100 Days” is the story of a local Hutu official who accepts the government’s order to initiate a campaign to wipe out the opposition party of Tutsi. Josette, a beautiful Tutsi, takes refuge with her family in a church supposedly protected by UN forces, but the local Roman Catholic priest, a Hutu, agrees to spare her life if she becomes his concubine. Reunited at last with her boyfriend, neither can accept the reality that she is about to give birth to the priest’s daughter, whom she abandons.
”100 Days” succeeds as drama, said a reviewer for National Public Radio, and succeeds to tell the truth.
Kabera graduated from college in Uganda with a degree in psychology and enrolled in law school in Gabon, but left after two years to return at age 24 to the home he’d never known, Rwanda.
”I had mixed feelings, but I had to go back,” he says, seeking to connect with his native country and to confront ”this evil imagery, by this evil explanation in front of your face, without your understanding exactly what was happening. Also, the entire town where I lived in Gabon was swamped by refugees, most of them killers who could not stand to see Tutsi faces like mine. On top of that, it was unimaginable because, before they came to town, we had bodies, hundreds of bodies, floating on the lake and along the shore – people who had been killed and thrown into the lake.”
Kabera went to work for Reuters as an escort and translator for journalists covering the genocide. Asked about news coverage, he shakes his head. ”What came out of Rwanda and into America was minute, almost nothing,” he said. ”I can tell by the lack of interest for `100 Days.’ I used to complain bitterly to reporters, and they would say, `It’s not our fault. It’s someone sitting at a desk back in New York or Paris or London.”’
Kabera pleads again that he not be portrayed as a victim.
He shows photographs of his wife and three children, two girls and a boy, and talks longingly about his return to Rwanda.
”I want to focus on a documentary about the Keepers of the Dead,” he says, about the people who look up details of the massacres and the history and the victims and who visit the memorials.
”For the past few weeks, as I have toured the country, I wonder why am I doing this?” he says. ”Why am I traveling so much, and then I end up thinking about those people, the Keepers of the Dead, and what they do because it’s their loved ones who are there, the Tutsis who cannot speak. How do the Keepers of the Dead do that? How do they lose so many loved ones and survive?”