Iain and Umutesi Stewart on Iona

'We Must Learn From It'

Wednesday January 24 2018

With Holocaust Memorial Day approaching, Jackie Macadam interviews a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who now lives in Scotland

Umutesi Stewart smiles broadly as she remembers her early life, in a mountain village in Rwanda.

“My grandmother was a retired teacher and my grandfather was a retired senior charge nurse. My mother was secretary at a tea making factory. So our grandparents were really the ones who raised us as my mum was working far from home.

“My grandparents were very involved in the Church and they were very kind and they helped many struggling families in the village. I grew up wanting to be like my grandfather who was a kind man and well respected in the village.”

Sadly, memories are almost all she has of her childhood idyll.

“The start of the Rwandan genocide was gradual, as I recall,” she says.

“Tensions grew between Tutsi and Hutu neighbours. People started to organise protests against the Tutsi in the village. I was 12 years old at the time. I used to love school but it became a hard place for me as it was hard to say which tribe I belonged to as I came from mixed parents.

“The Tutsi children would be isolated, sometimes the teachers would refuse to teach them and the other children would call them names such as ‘cockroach’. They would be badly bullied.

“Then, like a growing wave, we started to hear rumours of Tutsi people being attacked in other towns and villages and soon we heard rumours of Tutsi neighbours in our village being attacked by their Hutu neighbours.

“One afternoon, my mother took me aside and said to me that soon it would not be safe for me to go to school and that we would need to make plans to leave Rwanda.

“She told me that I would need to take responsibility for my two younger sisters, one aged five, the other just a baby, and my brother aged seven.

“I remember like it was only yesterday. I was returning home from school only to be stopped by our Congolese neighbor, who told me that our home had been set on fire and burnt to the ground and my mother had died in the fire. He offered to help take my family and I to take refuge in Congo.

“I was devastated and terrified.

“We followed my neighbour into the jungle. Often we would have to hide silently in the bushes as we heard the soldiers gaining on us.

“It was hard going and my little brother just could not keep up. He became badly malnourished after several months of walking. I lost track of him as I was watching my other siblings and he fell behind us. When I came back to find him I found that he had been found and beaten to death by the militia. I was heartbroken and almost wanted to give up.”

Umutesi and her sisters scavenged a living from the jungle for ‘several years’. Finally, she could take no more and decided to return to Rwanda, to find that the genocide was over but 40 relatives had been killed and the family home destroyed.

Umutesi used her education to get a part time job to support her sisters, and later worked for the charity Compassion International in Kigali. She also worked for a German researcher, who sponsored her to complete a nursing degree.

It was round about then that life took an unexpected turn for Umutesi, and set her on course for a new life in Scotland.

“I used to love the music of two musicians, Iain Stewart and Jean Paul Samputu. Jean Paul is one of the best known, most decorated musicians in Rwandan history. Iain had joined with Jean Paul to record songs to raise money to help those affected by the genocide.

“I had never heard songs like Iain had recorded. His songs were like prayers, they offered a message of hope and spoke to so many people in Rwanda.

“I managed to find him on Facebook and we started chatting. We were talking for a long time when one day he came to visit a school where I was working, giving inoculations to the young children there, so naturally I jumped at the chance to finally meet.

“It became clear that we had developed strong feelings towards each other, and I knew I was falling in love. Luckily, Iain was too.

“Our communication grew more regular and after over a year of skyping and messaging every hour of the day we decided to get married in September 2014.

“Our wedding captured the news in Rwanda not only because Iain was a well-known musician, but because he was wearing a ‘skirt’. No one had seen a man in a kilt before! It made all the newspapers and I remember the night afterwards being interviewed, and Iain’s music on a live entertainment show the next evening. It was all surreal.”

“Shortly after coming to Scotland in May 2015 Iain [who is executive director of Edinburgh Inter Faith Association] asked if I was comfortable to share my story of what had happened to me. I had not done it before but I felt it was something I needed to do, not only to help others but I felt it could help me to come to terms with had happened to me.

“I feel my story and the stories of other survivors has much to teach other countries and peoples. I always say: ‘We must not become slaves of our past.’ We must learn from it and teach others. Young people are the hope for the world yet in Rwanda they were used as tools to kill others. It was easy to convince them to take part in the genocide. So it is really important to teach others from our experience in Rwanda so that they can recognise the dangers of hate and prejudice and be encouraged to stand against it.”

Umutesi and Iain's daughter, Iona, was born on January 18.

Holocaust Memorial Day, which remembers victims of the holocaust and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan and Bosnia, is this Saturday, January 27. For resources and a list of events visit the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

This is an abridged version of the feature from January's Life and Work. Download or subscribe here.