The Girl Child and Genocide: Mapping Lived Experiences of Girls from Gitarama Prefecture who Survived the 1994 Rwandan Genocide

Abstract

The voice of girls who survived the 1994 genocide in Rwanda has, to a great degree, remained mute or has been drowned by other voices. A pervasive cultural sanction in many traditional African societies was that girls were only supposed to be seen and not to be heard. Rwanda was not an exception. This may partly explain why experiences that girls endured during the genocide have not been widely and strongly articulated as they ought to. Ironically, girls are the ones who bore the brunt of the genocide yet they were not party to its planning and execution. In late 1999 and early 2000, IBUKA, the umbrella association of other associations of survivors of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda organized a solidary camp, ingando, that brought together close to 1000 children who survived the genocide. IBUKA requested the children to document their own eye witness accounts detailing what they experienced from the time the mass killing started on the night of 6th April 1994 till the time they were rescued. Most of these testimonies were written by girls who survived the genocide. The purpose of this paper is to map and analyze testimonies of girls who survived the genocide and whose homes were in Masango, Nyamabuye, Ntongwe, and Mugina communes of Gitarama Prefecture that was a major killing field during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.