Excerpt: 100 Days, 100 Stories edited by Jo Ingabire Moys

May 22, 2025

Foreword by Jo Ingabire Moys

When I was twenty-five years old, my friends and I had a quarter-life crisis. However, unlike my friends who were grappling with millennial angst, I was haunted by a question I couldn’t answer: How would I explain my family’s past to my future children?

I could hardly explain my family to my friends. I couldn’t imagine how my own children would cope with their complicated history. When asked where they were really from, would they lie to their friends, like I did, and say they were from Burundi? It’s certainly easier than telling the truth and saying ‘Rwanda’ because nearly everyone always asks, ‘Are you Hutu or Tutsi?’ Whatever answer I give doesn’t stop the questions. When I was growing up in London, saying that I was Rwandan was an invitation to a line of enquiry that no young person is equipped for.

‘So, your family were killers? How did you survive? Is your family still alive? What do you think of the current government?’ And so on.

The only way out of my identity crisis was to find answers. I told my mother that I was ready to come out of my self-imposed exile from the Rwandan community and reconnect with my people. My mother called an old friend, Eric Murangwa Eugene who lived in London, and asked him if he could help a young woman to rediscover her Rwandan roots.

Luckily for me, Eric and his colleague, Sean Obedih, were thinking of launching an initiative for Rwandans to tell their own stories of living through the genocide. The stories would then be used as a resource for educators in the UK when teaching about the genocide against the Tutsi. When nearly ten years ago, I agreed to help collect these stories, I couldn’t have imagined how the process would change my life.

For many years, I travelled to Rwanda for a week or so annually, meeting survivors and their families to collect stories. Although I was profoundly moved, I admit I felt very much like a tourist. I spoke the language and, unlike in London, I could lose myself in the crowds of people whose faces looked very much like my own, but still I felt like an imposter. To me, the stories of the people I met existed in the past; a time and place my mind would not allow me to travel to because it seemed so otherworldly. And the people who shared their stories appeared reconciled with the past and its traumas. On the plane back home, I always wondered if living in Rwanda would help me make sense of or, at the very least, make peace with my past. Perhaps it was what I needed to find contentment in my now.

For the twenty-fifth commemoration of the genocide, I invited survivor speakers from the Ishami Foundation in the UK to attend creative workshops where they could experiment with art as a tool for expressing trauma. For many it was the first time they learned how to write creatively in English, their second or third language. Poignantly, the first day of the workshops was on the 6th of April, 2019. To start the sessions, the group shared memories of where they were on that day, exactly twenty-five years earlier. It was the first time I had been in a room of survivors as an adult. The conversations and tears flowed freely. Most of us were happy to be in a space where we could speak without self-editing because we knew that every single person in the room could relate. Moments like that are unique for survivors. The population of survivors in Rwanda is only 3 per cent and it’s even smaller in the diaspora. To share a safe space with strangers who in a matter of minutes know you better than your closest friends is a rare privilege. This is especially so in a country like the UK where survivors who share their testimonies publicly must account for a level of hostility in the audience due to the rise of genocide revisionist propaganda.

In those workshops, survivors wrote their own stories, most of which are part of this collection. I didn’t appreciate how significant this was until I discovered how few works about Rwanda are authored by the Rwandans themselves. The workshops were essential in shaping the collection as they were the safe space I had to ask difficult questions of my community. Perhaps the hardest and most controversial question was whether we should include perpetrator stories. In one of the more heated workshops (and there were a few), survivors walked out of the room and chose to leave the project as they couldn’t imagine their story next to a perpetrator’s. If most of the participants hadn’t insisted that perpetrator voices were essential to the narrative of the Tutsi genocide, I would have almost certainly abandoned this book. What those voices provide is context that is crucial for understanding what happened in Rwanda. The genocide did not take place in a vacuum. It took decades of propaganda, meticulous planning by an extremist government, and millions of financial investment into hate media, combat training and the purchase of weapons for extermination. What makes this campaign of murder stand out is the intimacy it required. Hacking your neighbour and his family to death with a machete is exhausting and takes time. How could the people who did it do it?

This was another question we wrangled with. I was surprised to learn that I was not the only survivor who longed to understand why people abandoned all moral and cultural restraint to commit the most horrendous acts, sometimes to their own family. Madness, demonic possession, peer pressure all seemed too simple a motivation. I had to meet individuals to find out. After meeting a dozen perpetrators, however, I realized there was no great mystery to uncover. There wasn’t a unique personality trait, education level, gender or background that determined who became a perpetrator. These were ordinary people who made terrible decisions that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives.

Witnessing the banality of evil personified is as humbling as it is depressing.

I am very grateful that I did not have to find and collect the stories alone. The diversity of the perspectives shared in the book are its great strength as are its authors. The award-winning writer Adam Usden volunteered his time and flew over to Rwanda to listen to the stories of survivors and their families. As an Englishman of Jewish heritage, his insight and skill produced some of the most beautiful poetic pieces of the collection.

Dr Zoë Norridge could not have done more to bring the book to life. She collected and edited stories and undertook the enormous task of finding a suitable publisher for this unique collection. Without her expertise as a scholar of literature inspired by the genocide and her deep commitment to the process of memory-keeping that places survivors at the centre of their own narratives, there would be no ‘100 Stories’. It was her gentle nudging that emboldened me to connect with the deepest parts of my fragmented soul.

In 2022, I took the plunge. I moved my family to Rwanda and for a year and a half I travelled the length and breadth of the country, meeting survivors and perpetrators from all walks of life. I sat and ate with them; I went to their homes, met their children, and laid flowers on the graves of their loved ones.

Meeting women, especially mothers, who were raped and remained crippled by physical and emotional disabilities while living in bitter poverty was heartbreaking. And yet they cooed over my nursing baby, and thanked God that my father’s line had not been wiped out.

I met children of perpetrators who, to my surprise, understood my teenage double identity.

The survivors, many of whom had lost everyone and everything they loved, were still proud of their roots. They spoke in detail of their family lineages; after all, in Rwandan culture, your family is your wealth. Children of perpetrators understood why I pretended to be anything but Rwandan for a long time. Grappling with a difficult legacy is a struggle that unites Rwandans across the world.

I met survivors married to children of perpetrators who had prepared speeches to explain their family history to their children because off-the-cuff remarks won’t do.

I met a twenty-four-year-old woman in London who could barely look me in the eye because she had been raised to believe that survivors like me were pawns in a grand political game to victimize Hutus and give Tutsis unparalleled rule in Rwanda. We lived only a few miles from each other and yet our experiences of being Rwandan were oceans apart. If that’s what her parents had taught her, what would she teach her own children? Would they hate my children too? Would my children hate her children, thus repeating a decades-long cycle of hate and violence, but this time played out in gentrified East London?

It must end. ‘Never again’ can’t just be a catchy slogan repeated once a year in April on social media or posters. The Gacaca trials were essential as they demonstrated a cultural and national need for healing that could only come after a public acknowledgement of the wrongs done as expressed by perpetrators. Survivors received a degree of closure, and perpetrators began a lifelong process of repentance and unlearning hate ingrained since they were children.

Sharing these stories is essential for memory-keeping. The pain endured and cruelty demonstrated must be documented so that it is never forgotten.

This collection is written to honour the memory of those who perished. We remember you; we miss you terribly. This book is a testament to the courage of those who live on with dignity and grace. It acknowledges the accused, who imagine a different future for their children. It hopes with the remarkable youth of Rwanda who look to the future with love, truth, bravery; a people reconciled.

—

Buy a copy here!