Tuvugishukuri,
Je t'envoie un article du journal The Guardian sur les circonstances
de la mort de Rugamba Cyprien. A la lecture du texte, il semble que ce
n'est pas le FPR qui l'a tué mais bien les troupes gouvernementales.
Je doute qu'un homme d'une culture comme la tienne puisse faire une
telle confusion ou je me demande si tu le fais exprès.
Sibomana Jean Bosco.
'J.C. Tuvugishukuri' psj_survivors@yahoo.com [Democracy_Human_Rights] – 12:46
à rwanda_revolution, democracy_human_rights, fondationbanyarwanda,
rwanda-all...
Banyarwanda,
Bavandimwe,
Ndabasaba ko niba hali uzi uko Uuntu nakundaga Rugamba Sipriyani
yishwe n'inkotanyi n'uko byangenze yabingezaho abimbwira en privé
cyangwa se abishyize kuli murandasi ko byanshimisha.
Umugorba mwiza.
JC, Tuvugishukuri
Scar tissue
As Rwandans struggle with the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, one
theatre director is turning to a play about the Holocaust for answers.
Jon Henley meets him
Jon Henley
The Guardian, Tuesday 30 October 2007

'I simply could not count the number of friends, acquaintances, family
members I had lost' ... Dorcy Rugamba. Photograph: Martin Godwin
On the afternoon of April 6 1994, Dorcy Rugamba was in Butare visiting
a sick aunt when his father - 80 miles away in the Rwandan capital,
Kigali - phoned. "Don't come back," he said. "Stay where you are, for
the time being at least. It's not looking good." Early the next
morning, he called again. "It's looking bad," he said. "We're taking
shelter in the corridor. If the number in the living room doesn't
answer, try the one in the bedroom." The corridor between the bedrooms
was, Rugamba knew, the safest place in the house: to hit you, a bullet
would have to pass through at least two walls.
When Rugamba rang the phone in the living room a few hours later,
there was no answer. He tried the bedroom. No answer either. Later,
his younger brother rang. "Some soldiers came," he said. "They took us
into the garden and shot us. Everyone is dead."
On that morning, Rugamba's father, Cyprien - a respected writer,
researcher, teacher and artistic director of the Amasimbi n'Amakombe
traditional dance company - was killed. So were his mother and six of
his siblings. The only members of the 12-strong family left alive were
Rugamba himself, two sisters who were also away from home and their
16-year-old brother, who had somehow dragged himself unscathed from
the mound of still-warm corpses in the garden after the soldiers left.
This was the first day of Rwanda's genocide. Over the next 100 days or
so, at least 500,000 and possibly as many as 1 million Tutsis and more
moderate Hutus would die at the hands of extremist Hutu mobs and
militias, gunned down or, more often, hacked to death with machetes.
It was immediate, graphic, wholesale slaughter on an unimaginable
scale and, inevitably, it transformed the lives of all who lived
through it.
In Dorcy Rugamba's case, it has turned a modest, soft-spoken,
24-year-old pharmacy student and part-time dancer in his father's
troupe into an internationally acclaimed theatre director. Next week,
he brings his production of Peter Weiss's The Investigation - perhaps
the most powerful play yet written about an earlier, even deadlier
Holocaust - to London for its (and his) British premiere.
Performed by a Rwandan and Congolese cast, The Investigation - a
documentary drama based on transcripts of the 1963-65 Frankfurt
trials, which saw 22 German defendants tried under German law for
their actions at Auschwitz - has already played to impressive reviews
in Rwanda, in Belgium, and at Peter Brook's Bouffes du Nord theatre in
Paris.
"In many ways, it's exactly the right piece for us now," says Rugamba.
"It's a play about two versions of history: the victims' and the
executioners'. The Frankfurt trials were the first time that Germans
confronted and judged Germans in the aftermath of a national trauma;
Rwanda is now deep in the same process with our Gacaca village
tribunals. Across the country, juries elected by the people are
pitting those two versions of history against one another: the
eyewitnesses versus the accused."
The fact that Weiss's play is not directly concerned with Rwanda's
genocide makes it even more powerful, Rugamba believes, especially for
a Rwandan audience. "It doesn't talk about our story, the Hutu-Tutsi
story," he says. "It's a step removed from that whole context; it
takes the real hard issues out of all the confused and confusing stuff
that surrounds them. The Investigation takes a long hard look at
another genocide and asks: what exactly was going on here? So,
watching as a Rwandan, it doesn't matter if you're the son of a killer
or of a victim, because this play doesn't say: I accuse my neighbour's
father. The values are more universal."
Back to 1994. Two days after his family's massacre, Rugamba and his
aunt and cousins fled into the still-peaceful countryside. As the
violence and bloodshed spread south towards Butare, they slipped over
the border into Burundi. There the French consulate was, he says,
"extremely helpful", and concerned French friends of the family -
people they had met during the dance troupe's regular seasons in Paris
- sent the money for airfares and stood guarantee for visas.
"For a long time, we were ignorant of the sheer scale of what had
happened," says Rugamba. "For more than a year afterwards, I was in a
kind of limbo; I had completely lost my bearings. I stayed only a few
months in Paris before going to Belgium to finish my studies [the
Rwandan education system was based on that of the former colonial
power], but I didn't really know where I was or what I was doing. I
simply could not count the number of friends, acquaintances, family
members I had lost."
Chance encounters with other Rwandan refugees and a growing desire to
get to grips with his experience - "just to tell the story, I suppose"
- led him, after graduation, to the drama department of the Liège
conservatory of music, in Belgium. "I rediscovered a whole world, the
world I had known since early childhood," says Rugamba. "In Rwanda, I
grew up quite literally in a performing arts company. I was on stage
long before I was in primary school. For me, entering the conservatory
was like finding another family."
The result, in 1999, was Rwanda 94, an extraordinary, emotionally
exhausting six-hour creation about his country's 100 days of madness
that Rugamba co-authored and in which he played a range of parts.
Premiered at the Avignon festival in France, the play and its
40-strong cast were showered with awards, and the production toured
extensively for the next four years in France, Switzerland, Belgium,
Italy, Canada and the Caribbean. "It rebuilt me," says Rugamba. In
2004, a decade after the genocide, the troupe took Rwanda 94 home.
"It was an extraordinary thing," says Rugamba. "For genocide
survivors, it was something far, far stronger than theatre. Everywhere
we performed, people - especially women, who had undergone
unimaginable tortures - were howling, passing out where they sat. The
authorities had to station ambulances outside each venue to carry them
away. Rwandans have trouble expressing their emotions, you see. They
don't like the raw and the crude, and this play was both. It was very
real. It was like bursting a boil."
Between Rwanda 94 and Rugamba's latest production came a handful of
other projects, including a formative spell with Peter Brook acting in
the director's acclaimed Tierno Bokar, based on the life of the
African sage and mystic. "That taught me such a lot," says Rugamba.
"He manages to see things so simply, Brook. Above all, he doesn't have
this tortured relationship with drama, where it has to be about
suffering. It took Brook to teach me that the theatre can also be
about pleasure."
So, 13 years after that April morning in 1994, how does Rugamba feel
about what happened? "I am ... pacified," he says, searching for the
word. "But I'm pacified because I'm doing something. I may not be a
judge or a politician or a soldier, but I am doing something in the
aftermath of this. I'm battling with that whole period. I haven't
abdicated. So I'm not bitter about it. It hasn't sullied me. I do not
hate life."
He still does not really understand the magnitude of what happened,
though: "No matter how hard you work on it, there remains an element
of mystery in every human being. It wasn't just killing, you see - it
was killing with a sadism, a cruelty you simply cannot credit. And
these were people of my age, some of them people I knew well. They
were the ones who did it. That's something I'm still struggling to
understand. It frightens me."
For the future of his country, he is "more optimistic than not. What
happened was just so terrible that everyone knows it can't ever be
allowed to happen again. It will need a lot of hard work. There needs
to be a great deal of education, a healthy economy, plenty of jobs.
"And you just have to trust that the killers will not raise their
children in hate, and that those children will succeed in inventing
their own future, and not follow in their fathers' ways. Because
people are not predestined to be bad, you know. You have to believe
that or you'd be lost."
The Investigation opens at the Young Vic, London, tonight and runs
until November 10. Box office: 020-7922 2922
http://www.google.ca/gwt/x?gl=CA&hl=en-CA&u=http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/31/rwanda.theatre&source=s&q=rugamba+cyprien&sa=X&ei=g_R4U8uwKseBqgb9xoDoBg&ved=0CDQQFjAIOAo
--
SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
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