He didn’t Die Easy; The Search for Hope Amid Poverty, War and Genocide

A collection of poetry and reflections by African Writer Mary Kimani

Inter Press Service Book Review

Tales of Survivors in Poetry And Prose

Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)
BOOK REVIEW
April 12, 2007
Posted to the web April 12, 2007

By Elizabeth Adekunle
New York
Kenyan-born journalist Mary Kimani’s intensely personal exploration of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and its aftermath is ultimately a book about our shared humanity, and how people manage to endure amid unimaginable tragedy.

Written in a mix of poetry and narrative, the first half of “He Didn’t Die Easy” focuses on Tutsi and Hutu survivors of the 100 days of unchecked violence, which finally ended with the deaths more than 800,000 people — mostly Hutus and moderate Tutsis.

In an interview with IPS, Kimani said that while the physical infrastructure of the country may now be more or less intact, emotionally it is still shattered.

There is a “contrast between how the place looks and the human reality,” she said.

Kimani reported on Rwanda between 1999 and 2005. She also covered the peace process in Burundi and the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Take my experiences and multiply it by a thousand, and that’s what these people [in Rwanda] experienced. I could not imagine a human being could have survived that,” she told IPS.

Born in 1976, Kimani has worked as regional communications coordinator in Nairobi, Kenya for Actionaid International, a non-governmental organisation that works with poor and marginalised people to eradicate poverty.

She told IPS that an estimated “100,000 to 250,000 Rwandan women were raped” during the genocide and “they are destitute”. She added that as the perpetrators were caught, they filled up the jails. Eventually, about 120,000 people ended up behind bars. However, because 90 percent of the nation’s lawyers and judges had been killed, many were released while awaiting prosecution.

Others remained in jail. “There’s a mixture of bitterness from the families of those in jail eight to 10 years before trial,” Kimani said.

Although not necessarily sympathetic toward the perpetrators, she does try to understand what led them to commit atrocities such as rape and murder.

“Many of them were [Hutu] people who were manipulated by politicians… The propaganda was that if they don’t kill the Tutsis, they [the Tutsis] would kill them and enslave them,” she said.

Many of these cold-blooded killers were mere youths. The title of the book refers to the story of a boy who killed his 39-year-old neighbour at the age of 15. He is now 24, and has been in jail since age 16.

“A lot of them were very young people — also victims in the sense that they were led astray by their leaders,” Kimani said.

Nonetheless, their release from prison has been painful for many survivors who have found themselves living next door to someone they know to be a murderer, according to Kimani. Since the country is so small, “most people knew who killed their family,” she added.

The second part of the book, “Ramblings of a Troubled Mind,” includes a more personal perspective, and is “reflective of my childhood,” said Kimani.

Born to a family of four, Kimani’s family was small by the standards of most African families that she grew up with. Her parents were teachers of English and Swahili literature in Kenyan secondary schools.

She has noted that her upbringing was “very liberal” and that she and her sisters were given choices “that many African children of that era, particularly girls, did not have.”

Much of the poetry in the book describes the physical and emotional impacts of the war. Kimani writes about the suffering of women infected with HIV/AIDS, who are poor and have no access to treatment.

While there is a fund for orphans, there are no reparations for women who were raped or children born of rape, even though many of these children and their mothers are utterly impoverished.

“Everyone is ashamed to look/ ashamed to admit/ the rituals that have been performed upon us. Peace has come, war is over. Nobody wants to hear/ about the terrible things of the past. Nobody wants to be reminded/ of the terrible things they did in the name of war. I am the reminder they cannot erase. I am the totem pole slowly crumbling,” she writes.

Kimani criticised a tendency among some Africans to wait for European intervention to solve their problems. The postwar rebuilding of Rwanda is something that must be done at the community level, she told IPS.

“It is not something you can do with soldiers. That’s the hard thing to do — what westerners cannot do for us,” she added.

Africans must take charge of their problems and stop relying on outside help, she declared. “There’s a place …where we ourselves have to take responsibility.” She urged leaders to focus on simpler things, like schools, medications, water, and electricity.

The book does not push for sympathy with the victims of the Rwandan genocide, or chronicle yet another harsh life of an African child. It is an attempt to rediscover humanity.

“Hatred, bigotry, poverty, disaster, and violence are not synonymous to Africa,” she notes. “They are synonymous to humanityà When you look at it from a human perspective, how can we do this to each other?” she writes.

Kimani, in this very personal book, writes at the end: “There have always been two parts to me, one terribly lost, lonely and frightened by what I have seen and experienced, and the other trying frantically to make sense of it all. The lost one has finally come home to the other.”

“He Didn’t Die Easy, The Search for Hope Amid Poverty, War, and Genocide” was published by IUniverse, based in Lincoln, Nebraska. Books can be ordered on its website: www.iuniverse.com.