In an elegant early Victorian building called the Organ Factory in London’s East End, Giles Duley, the photographer, presenter, chef and charity CEO, is addressing an event to mark his 53rd birthday and what should have been the visit of Olive Musetsamfura, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide.
“Olive is unable to be here because immigration decided to revoke her visa,” he explains to around 100 people, wryly observing that her rejection is “a story that is somewhat appropriate” to the times.
The positive news, he adds, is that she was able to secure a US visa and the following day he would fly to meet her in Las Vegas, where she was to speak to a convention of travel agents on what would be her first journey outside of Rwanda. “She’s going to have the time of her life,” he announces, “as am I.”
Two days earlier, Duley had been documenting life on the frontline in Ukraine, and, after Las Vegas, he and Musetsamfura were flying to New York, where she was to address UN Women. His is a schedule that would exhaust many able-bodied people half his age, but Duley, who lost both his legs, an arm and very nearly his life in an explosion in Afghanistan, says he is “invigorated” by the energy in the hall.
Like one of those hypothetical perpetual energy machines, he is himself the cause of the buzz in the room from which he draws energy. I’m sitting opposite the young photojournalist Emily Garthwaite, who spent six years living in Iraq, looking at humanitarian and environmental issues. She describes Duley as “inspirational” and her “mentor”.
A number of the people gathered are involved in Legacy of War, the charity Duley set up after suffering his injuries. Others, like Garthwaite, have experience of working in conflict zones. All of them listen to Duley with rapt attention, which is understandable, because he is an impressive speaker. He talks a little about the charity and a project called Land for Women that buys land for war-affected women to set up collectives that they then own and control themselves. Olive is one such beneficiary, but the key thing for Duley is that she is now able to determine her own direction. Self-empowerment is central to his philosophy.
“I don’t believe you can empower anyone else,” he tells the audience. “I learned that the hard way through my recovery in hospital. I was supported by the most amazing people, my family, doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and occupational therapists, but none of them empowered me. What they did is they broke down the barriers that stopped me from carrying myself.”
He tells a story about the first two people to help him directly after he was blown up. He was almost certain at the time that he was going to die, but he was still conscious and able to speak. He told the two medics who got him on to a helicopter and took him back to Kandahar that if by some miracle he survived, he would take them both out for a drink.
Eighteen months later, having come through a hellish recovery, he was just learning to walk with prosthetic legs, and he decided it was time to honour his promise. He flew to Chicago and went to the bar where he had arranged to meet the two men. He was racked with nerves, he tells the audience, because the medics were from the 101st Airborne and as tough as they come and he, after all, is an anti-war photographer. Plus the first time they met, he says, was “kind of hectic”.
But the men tearfully embraced one another like lost brothers and immediately embarked on an epic drinking session. At some point, one of the medics decided it would be a good idea for all three of them to get tattooed with the date of Duley’s rescue, as he’d never seen anyone as badly injured survive.
“I did say to them,” he deadpans, “that I didn’t actually need a visual reminder of that day.”
It feels a little odd to be laughing at the comic travails of a man with only one limb. But to Duley, it’s vital to locate the humanity in misfortune, no matter how raw, and in humanity there is almost always humour, which, after all, is a form of resilience.
“I believe resilience is life’s gift for the hard times we go through,” he says. “The more extreme our experience, the more resilience we have. And the most resilient woman I know is Olive.”
***
A few days later, Duley is sitting next to Musetsamfura in an Airbnb in New York. She is proud-looking, wearing a bright patterned dress with her hair pulled back in a tight top-knot. Although she has come from a modest suburb of Kigali, and arrived first in the casino capital of the world, then the city that never sleeps, she seems unaffected by any cultural dislocation.
They had driven past the Sphere, the giant $2.3bn immersive auditorium that is the latest addition to Las Vegas’s outlandish entertainment spots. Everyone drew Musetsamfura’s attention to this hi-tech marvel, and her underwhelmed response was: “Yes, it’s just like the Kigali conference centre.”
But then she has seen sights that most of us could not begin to imagine. She met Duley seven years ago when he was doing a project on survivors, a sector of society in whom he has an abiding fascination. The charity Humanity & Inclusion put the pair together and Duley interviewed Musetsamfura in what he describes as a “formal” manner.
Between 7 April and 19 July 1994, upwards of 500,000 Rwandans – by the Rwandan government’s own estimate, more than 1 million – were slaughtered when the majority Hutu ethnic group set about killing the minority Tutsis and their moderate Hutu defenders.
Musetsamfura barely survived the horror and her story was suitably harrowing, but Duley got the sense in that first interview that there was more to it. The following day, her birthday, he returned to her house with a birthday cake, and they cooked together and had a couple of beers.
A few years ago, Duley made a series for Vice, the US cable channel, in which he visited places blasted by war and cooked food with families he met. He believes that food is the antithesis of war, the means of bringing people together rather than breaking them apart.
As they cooked, Musetsamfura saw something in Duley that she recognised. “She told me she could see the sadness in my eyes,” he says. At the end of the evening, she told him that she would tell him her “real story now”.
It’s the same story, give or take a few details, that she recounted to the convention in Las Vegas and to UN Women, and the same story that she now shares with me.
On 6 April, 30 years ago, Musetsamfura was in hospital, giving birth to her third child, a son. A few miles away, a plane carrying Rwanda’s president, Juvénal Habyarimana, and neighbouring Burundi’s president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, was shot down. The identity of the culprits still remains the subject of dispute.
The ethnic distinctions between Hutus and Tutsis were largely the invention of Belgian colonisers, but that didn’t stop them from being exploited by those seeking to use Habyarimana’s assassination as the reason to target the minority Tutsis. Musetsamfura is Tutsi, but she had been accompanied to hospital by her best friend, Immaculée, a Hutu, and that night she lay in bed listening to the radio as Hutu leaders broadcast instructions to rise up and kill the “cockroaches”.
The following day the killing began, mostly by machete. Rape, too, was widespread. In hospital, Musetsamfura soon learned that her village had been attacked and her other two children killed, along with her husband and her parents, her siblings and her in-laws. As she tried to absorb this incomprehensible news, from beyond the hospital she could hear the Hutu gangs scraping their machetes on the ground and demanding that the Tutsis come out.
“I couldn’t understand why a person would kill someone just based on their ethnicity,” she says, recalling the shock she was in.
For a while, the nuns who ran the hospital held out against Hutu militias marauding around the city. But after a few days the militia stormed the hospital, separated the Tutsis – in Rwanda at that time everyone carried identity cards that specified whether they were Tutsi or Hutu – and dragged them out.
In the mayhem Musetsamfura had little choice but to leave her son, Jonathan, as she was manhandled to a market where other young Tutsi mothers and their children were taken, along with the sick and elderly. Before Musetsamfura’s eyes they were indiscriminately hacked to death. She feigned her own death as bodies fell on top of her, and lay beneath the corpses for three days. Of the 1,200 people gathered in the market, only 15 survived.
When she finally managed to free herself from this waking nightmare, she hid in a river during the day and on its banks at night. Constantly trying to avoid passing gangs, she was powerless to prevent insects from burrowing into her legs. After several days of this purgatory, she somehow made it back to her village, where she was saved from the mob by her uncle by marriage, a Hutu. She soon learned, however, that this uncle had also been instrumental in the murder of her family (a vital detail that, in their first interview, she held back from Duley). She stayed in hiding for several weeks under his precarious protection, witnessing more hideous crimes that he committed, before she once again took refuge in the woods.
Eventually she was rescued by the Rwandan Patriotic Front and taken to hospital. But her ordeal was far from over. Once the Hutu militias had been defeated by the RPF, she returned once more to her village and found six orphaned children who were either part of her extended family or were the children of friends who had been murdered. She decided to adopt them all and move to the capital, Kigali.
Lacking family support, she was forced to turn to sex work, where her clients seemed to her indistinguishable from the killers. She once described to Duley how she felt about herself at this time: “I was not human, I was a dustbin. Every man that slept with me felt like a perpetrator. But I didn’t care.”
The one bright piece of news in this bottomlessly dark period was that her old friend Immaculée managed to track her down, and brought her Jonathan, her then almost four-year-old son who survived the genocide thanks to lacking an identity card in hospital.
Through an interpreter, Musetsamfura recounts these details to me in a calm voice with an almost emotionless expression, but stops occasionally to wipe tears from her eyes. It’s the only sign that her story is not just a testament but a scar – psychological and physical (the insects that bore into her as she hid in the river had to be surgically removed) – that can never entirely heal. To revisit such searing trauma is undoubtedly an act of courage.
“It can feel like I’m back to the 7 April and it’s all happening again,” she says. “But what gives me strength is that I tell the story to inspire people, and that makes me feel safe each time I revisit it.”
I ask what it was like to speak to a convention room full of people in a strange city on her first trip abroad.
“I felt strong,” she says.
Perhaps more impressive still was the talk she gave to UN Women at the UN Headquarters, which was seen online around the world.
“It made me feel like an important person,” she says.
One aspect of Musetsamfura’s survival and recovery that she thinks is critical is the role of forgiveness. How was she able to come to any kind of reconciliation with her uncle, the man who oversaw the murder of her children, her husband and parents?
“I took it as a way to be able to forgive myself,” she says.
Although by all sane standards of justice, she had nothing to forgive herself for, she nevertheless carried around survivor’s guilt for many years, the belief that her children had been killed because she was not with them, and then the guilt for the sex work she was forced into to feed her adopted family, and for the alcohol she drank to numb the pain.
Forgiving the killers, she explains, enabled her to reach a kind of peace within herself. Her uncle served 15 years in prison and was then released under the terms of the national reconciliation process. Despite admitting his guilt, he has never fully apologised for his role in her family’s murder. Rather, says Duley, who has met him, the uncle thinks of himself as a victim, someone who was misled by those in authority.
Duley doesn’t buy that excuse, not least because the uncle, who was also a photographer, was relatively well educated, someone who prided himself on reading Nelson Mandela. Still, his self-exculpation is not really the point.
“I’ve discussed this before with Olive,” Duley says “and in many ways I think it was about releasing the power these men in her community held over her. I think she released herself to live her life.”
In Duley’s case, although he was mutilated by an anti-personnel mine, he never took it personally, as it were, so there were no identifiable culprits to forgive. And as for the device itself that robbed him of his limbs, he’s even photographed similar IEDs in the manner of found objects, transforming weapons of savage destruction into disturbingly beautiful artworks. Yet he still had to find a way to get through days that would crush most of us, including the 46 laid up in hospital during which he could only communicate by blinking his eyes.
“What is it,” he asks, “that keeps you wanting to survive? Why would you fight to stay alive when you’ve lost everything?”
He’s in a well-informed position to pose the question, but he’s not referring to himself. He’s speaking about survivors in general, everyone who has managed to endure the unendurable. Musetsamfura herself has told Duley that she didn’t want to live after her children were killed, and yet she remained perfectly still when she was trapped under the bodies, and held on in the river as insects feasted on her, when she could have just let go.
Duley, who experienced his own moments in which he would have welcomed nothingness, thinks survival is an instinct that transcends rational thought, but one that produces a greater understanding of what we’re capable of. At the same time, he emphasises that it doesn’t mean that survivors can cope with everything. Loneliness, despair and the memories of what they’ve been through can all crowd in at any point.
He had some low periods during Covid lockdowns. And he’s fully aware that not everyone will respond to catastrophic events by feeling stronger and more focused, as he does. Resilience, he says, is also about accepting what has happened, and that there will be bad days.
For Musetsamfura, these are now the good days. Her son recently graduated from university with a degree in cooperative management, and she regularly sees two of her adopted daughters. In Rwanda, she says, ethnicity is no longer to be found on identity cards and they are all Rwandans, not Tutsis or Hutus.
“I think about the events of 30 years ago every day,” she says, “but I have a life beyond the tragedy.”
She says she wants to travel to more countries, and to share her story with people from around the world. It’s an extraordinary tale, one that deserves to be heard, especially by other survivors, but also by everyone who could do with being reminded of the human potential to overcome the most devastating setbacks. Who knows, perhaps one day this amazing woman from the country to which the last government wanted to send asylum seekers may even be allowed to travel to this country.
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