Daniel Uhagaze T’08escaped Rwanda’sgenocidal madness,fleeing to the safety ofa refugee camp. Butthat was before hewas branded a Tutsispy, stabbed and leftfor dead.BY JOHN T. WARD

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Now that, he says with a broad smile, was a sweet ride, an open-topped taste of theAmerican Dream. But the dream dies hardsometimes, and Ma Baby turned out to be a real heartbreaker, demanding one repairafter another before she became too costlyto hold onto. Anyway, his minivan suitedhim just fine, Uhagaze said, the windshieldreflecting the red-and-white stripes of arestaurant awning.Besides, what’s the relative luxury of

automobiles to a survivor of Rwanda’s1994 genocide? Uhagaze (pronounced“yoo-huh-GAH-zee”) had come to lunch to talk not about cars but the horrors thatwiped out nearly a tenth of that country’spopulation in just 100 days, his own motherand a sister among the 800,000 slaughtered.It’s a story that he would parcel out in hisFrench-marbled accent with no smallamount of reticence. But over a mesquite-smoked turkey and bacon sandwich in anoisy strip-mall restaurant, and continuingperiodically over the ensuing months, hewould also shed light on what can becomeof a refugee from unfathomable bloodlustwhen fate tosses him up onto America’sshore, soon leaving him with a master’sdegree in divinity studies, a car he can’tafford to fix and a bicycle to ride to his twominimum-wage jobs.Yet even as he sometimes longed for the

simplicity of his home village of Nyanza,where, he explains, “everyone always hadsomething to eat” because every familygrew its own crops, Uhagaze said he feltfortunate to be in the United States. Afterall, he was alive and pursuing ordination asa Methodist minister to fulfill a promise hemade to his creator in exchange for sparinghis life.

“I am not a victim,” Uhagaze says. “Thepeople who died, they were the victims. I am blessed.”

Bahati: His father had given him theSwahili word for “lucky” as a first name.But “lucky” is not the word Uhagaze, now33, uses to explain how he survived whenso many died. He attributes that to divineintervention and sees the genocide as thework of its opposite. “The devil was in us,”he says. “The devil planted its seed, and itgrew up and consumed the humanity.People became animals and savages.”Today, Uhagaze says, forgiveness is key

to preventing a return of rampages that torethrough the country in 1959, when long-oppressed Hutus seized power from thereigning Tutsis, and again in 1994, whenthe Hutu Power movement stoked fearsthat the Tutsis were bent on revenge andre-enslavement of the majority.Still, tribal tension had almost no presence

in Uhagaze’s boyhood, he says. Born of aHutu father and Tutsi mother and raised as a devout, Bible-carrying Seventh DayAdventist, he grew up in relative comfortwith six siblings in a small mud-and-brickhouse on “big land” covered with bananaand potato fields. His paternal grandfather,though a Hutu, had been a devoted employeeof the last Tutsi king, close enough to themonarch “to be able to insult his huntingskills,” Uhagaze says. His mother’s father, aTutsi, had managed to pass as a Hutu afterthe revolution and win respect as a mayor.At the government-run boarding schoolwhere Uhagaze was a 10th-grader excellingin biology and chemistry, there was littleevidence of inherited enmity among Tutsiand Hutu boys.

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Uhagaze’s mother wasTutsi, his father, Hutu.

The minivan that Bahati Daniel Uhagaze T’08 steered into a spotoutside a T.G.I. Friday’s one

afternoon last year was no ChryslerSebring convertible, the car he taggedon his Facebook page as “Ma Baby.”

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The abrupt start of the killing was thus all themore shocking. On April 6, 1994, a plane was shotdown as it prepared to land in Kigali, the capital.Among those killed was Rwanda President JuvénalHabyarimana, who was returning from signing apeace treaty with the Rwandan Patriotic Front(RPF), exiled Tutsis led by now-president PaulKagame. Who brought down the plane remains amystery, but what’s clear is that extremist Hutus,angry over the prospect of sharing power underthe treaty, had for months been stockpiling crudeweapons and fomenting rhetoric hateful towardnot just Tutsis but moderate Hutus. That night,electricity in Kigali was cut, and tens of thousandsof otherwise average Rwandans, armed withmachetes and nail-spiked clubs supplied by thegovernment and stoked by hateful propagandabroadcast over the nation’s most popular radio station, took to the streets after the “cockroaches.”“I remember a journalist screaming in French on

the radio, ‘People are cutting, killing in the streets.It’s like surgery without anesthesia,’” Uhagazesays. “We were in the village wondering, ‘Whatthe heck is going on there? How can people killeach other like that?’”Two weeks later, refugees from the massacre

began flooding outlying villages like Nyanza, thewave of rage close behind.The menace came barreling into town on four

wheels. Uhagaze tells of a carload of Hutu militia-men and government soldiers racing past

the sweet potato field where he andhis mother were working and ontothe property of a prominentTutsi family. Shots were fired,and the soldiers returned, tri-umphant. Local leaders whorefused to participate in thespreading slaughter weresummarily killed by the mili-tary, their bodies left in thestreet to let citizens knowwhat awaited them if they also

refused. Soon, mobs were goingfrom house to house. If even one

Tutsi was found among Hutus, all pres-ent would be killed. Uhagaze’s aunt and uncle

on his mother’s side were killed. A young Hutu uncle had a wife who was a

Tutsi; when the uncle banded a group together tocheck on his in-laws, 17-year-old Uhagaze wentalong. They found the family murdered—all but a 4-year-old daughter, who was “still breathing”despite savage machete cuts. She survived.“In my area, it swept,” he says of the violence.

“In two weeks, every Tutsi, now gone. Now peo-ple started hunting who else to kill.”

In mid-May, Uhagaze and “the entire town”left, heading toward a French-controlled zone inthe southwest. “Everybody was walking,” he says.“There were goats, cows, sheep being stepped onby cows. Children crying. It was like Exodus.”Along the way, he peeled off from his mother

and older sister, Katherine, heading with anothersister, Gemma, and her husband, Zacharia, forZaire, where Zacharia had friends. Theirs becamean epic journey. At a roadblock, Gemma, who hasthe long-nosed features of a Tutsi, was unable toproduce her official ID card, the type that since1935 had indicated whether one was Tutsi orHutu. The guards started shooting their AK-47sinto the air, saying, “We got some cockroacheshere.” When one lowered his weapon at Gemma’smidsection, Uhagaze pleaded for her life. “Youcan’t kill my sister. I followed her in my mother’swomb,” he says he cried, even as he was beingbeaten. “I am a Hutu. Here is my ID. Here is ourfather’s ID with all his children’s names here.” Itwas only the intercession of a passing school head-master that prevented their being killed on thespot, Uhagaze says.Later, on his own in a refugee camp in Zaire,

Uhagaze was accused of being a spy for the RPF,hauled off in the middle of the night, beaten,stabbed in the gut and left for dead. Passersbyfound him barely alive the next day and alertedthe Red Cross, which nursed him back to health.Later still, a reunited Uhagaze, Gemma and Zacharialanded in a Zambian prison as undocumented per-sons. After six weeks there, he was sure he woulddie of starvation. Writing in the French-languageBible that he had carried all along, he pledged onenight in September 1995 to devote his life to theAlmighty if he survived. United Nations aid workerssoon won the trio’s release, and Uhagaze spent thenext several years in a refugee camp, cultivatingrice and making clay roof tiles.

Uhagaze doesn’t know exactly where hismother, Zelpa, died, or who killed her. A “sweet,very Christian” woman who had endured wid-owhood, displacement and unfathomable loss, shewas slain as she headed home from the Frenchzone, thinking the senseless killing had ended. Asto how, and who might have done it—it’s notsomething that’s even discussed. Uhagaze believeshis sister Isabel witnessed the killing, but she hasremained silent about what she might have seen.“There are many things Rwandans do not like totalk about,” he says. “They just tell you, ‘this per-son is gone.’”He arrived in the United States in 2000 as part

of a refugee resettlement program and, impatientto get on with his life, earned his high-school

equivalency degree within months. He pushedhimself through a bachelor’s program at CentenaryCollege in just three years and segued into theM.Div. program at Drew, graduating in 2008.Though he, too, remains reluctant to discuss his

Rwandan nightmare, Uhagaze says he feels hisministry now compels him to do so. He once sat ona panel with Dith Pran, the late New York Timesphotographer who survived the Pol Pot genocide inCambodia, and has addressed criminal justice class-es at Centenary about the violence directed atwomen and children.“People want to know how it was to be in the

midst of genocide,” he says. “People want to knowhow it felt to see members of your family beingkilled. But I don’t find ways to express when youhear machetes crushing the bones, you hear peoplescreaming or somebody tells you, ‘your schoolfriend is lying dead. They just killed him.’”Of course, audiences also look for insight that

might help them comprehend the incomprehensi-ble, something he, too, wrestles with. “I still feelthat maybe there was supposed to be anotherway,” he says. “To hit each other in the face butnot to cut the neck. It was not supposed to go thatway—not to kill your neighbor.”Uhagaze favors the efforts of President Kagame,

whose RPF returned from 35-year exile to recap-ture the government and end the genocide, to bringabout a hybrid of justice and reconciliation. Kagameis overseeing a controversial experiment usinglocal, informal courts known as gacaca (pronounced“ga-CHA-cha”)—tribunals often held in the openair by local citizens, sometimes at the scene of killings,and without the help or hindrance of lawyers andjudges. In exchange for full confessions—includingdetails about who they murdered, where, whenand how—killers may win their freedom from thecountry’s teeming prisons and return to the commu-nities in which they committed their atrocities. It’san imperfect system, engendering no small amountof bitterness, but necessary and “something tobuild on,” Kagame told the New Yorker last year.Uhagaze is keenly aware of how divisive gacaca

has been. At the time of the T.G.I. Friday’s lunch,he was dating a Rwandan woman who was adamantthat the killers should be prosecuted and jailed. Theissue, Uhagaze said with regret, was increasingly a flash point in their relationship.

Several monthslater, Uhagaze re -laxed at a Dunkin’Donuts a couple ofblocks from thehouse he was shar-ing with two room- mates in Mad ison;he didn’t know it yet,but within weeks,he’d wind up work-ing at the doughnutshop, sup plement-ing his part-timejob in the producedepart ment of asupermarket. He’dshed 30 pounds. Heand his girlfriendhad split, he said,“because of dif fer-ences in our back-grounds.” Careerwise, Uhagaze found himself stalled, hop-

ing for an appointment as a pastor to a church, butthe near-term prospects didn’t look good. With the economy ailing, older ministers were delayingretirement, and other ordination candidates—natives without challenging accents, for starters—seemed better positioned than he was to get what-ever spots might open up, he says. So he was plan-ning a trip to Ohio, where there are clusters ofRwandan immigrants in Columbus and Dayton,and hoping to network his way into a church job,as soon as he could get together the cash necessaryfor the trip.Over coffee, Uhagaze returned to an earlier

topic: naming customs in Rwanda, where no twomembers of a family have the same last name.Inspiration, not patrimony, rules the day. His lastname, he says, translates from Kinyarwandan as“the one who is still alive,” though it’s less tri-umphant than it sounds. Instead, it’s more areminder, he says, always to be patient.Says Uhagaze, “It means, if you are still alive,

still breathing, you can find what you are look-ing for.”

John T. Ward is a Red Bank, N.J.–based freelance writer.

You can’t kill my sister. I followed her in mymother’s womb,” he says he cried, even as he was

being beaten. “I am a Hutu. Here is my ID.

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