Nyange’s heroes inspire us all

As we celebrate national heroes this February, the courage and outstanding heroism of the students of Nyange Secondary School, in western Rwanda in 1997, should inspire us all for generations to come.

Let’s recall what happened to better understand why these students decided to stand together despite the grave danger of losing their lives in not obeying orders from the threatening armed Hutu militiamen who sought to divide them along ethnic lines.

Rwanda had just emerged from the worst genocide of the last century. More than one million Tutsi were massacred because of their ethnicity. The Tutsi were singled out at roadblocks and hacked to death. The militiamen wanted to repeat the same despicable act  as they had done during the genocide.

At the time, there was high infiltration in the western part of the country by armed militia comprising the defeated genocidal army which had established bases in refugee camps in the former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, along the border with Rwanda. These were dangerous times. The infiltrators targeted local leaders, major infrastructure, and the population to make the country ungovernable.

These insurgents later launched a full-blown war against the then Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), between 1996 and 2000, from the refugee camps in Zaire in a bid to seize power and finish their genocidal agenda. But they were defeated and the whole country was pacified.

On the fateful night of the attack on the remote Nyange Secondary School, a dozen militiamen had attacked the school in the night of March 18, 1997. The militia that infiltrated the country targeted that school seeking to kill Tutsi students. They stormed one of the school’s dormitories and asked students to separate along ethnic lines.

The heroic students refused to obey and told the assailants that they were all Rwandans. This was surprising, given the fact that three years earlier, Rwanda had also experienced the worst ethnic killings. It was unusual courage that these students showed in the face of extreme danger.

The infiltrators, estimated to be 20 or so gunmen, donned the uniforms of the former Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) and intended to kill all the school’s Tutsi. However, the 5th and 6th grade students who were studying in two of the school’s classrooms that night refused to partake in this hideous exercise of self-identifying as Hutu or Tutsi. They point blankly told the attackers that they cannot obey their orders because, they told them: “We are all Rwandans.”

“When they attacked us during the evening, they asked us to separate ourselves as Hutu and Tutsi but because we already knew the history and effects of the Genocide, we stood our ground and told them that we were all Rwandans,” one of the survivors recently pointed out.

Take a minute and think about how this ought to have infuriated these marauding militiamen. This is the kind of defiance they hated to see, because they were still imbued with the same Hutu Power ideology which led to the atrocities Rwanda had just witnessed.

On the grounds of Nyange Secondary School, in the former Kibuye prefecture—now Rwanda’s Western Province—a memorial in pristine condition recalls a recent spree of genocidal crimes. The events that this single-person tomb commemorates took place not in 1994, but on a single day in 1997—three years after the genocide.

On March 18, 1997, a band of Hutu insurgents attacked this hilltop boarding school under the cover of darkness, killing six students and a night-watchman, and injuring 20 others.

Among them was Chantal Mujawamahoro, the sole victim interred in the tomb. She is the only victim whose remains were not claimed by relatives and thus is safely kept here. Her life is also honoured, together with that of two of her classmates, in Kigali’s Heroes Memorial near Amahoro Stadium.