his mind.
Charles said he enjoyed spending time with me, and he hoped we could be friends. In fact, he said, he hoped we might marry someday.
That was going too far for me. I was only twenty and had come to Bugarama in search of work. “What would my mother and father say,” I asked, “if I turned up with a husband instead of a job?”
I became more reserved after this conversation. Love comes slowly. Rwanda was unfamiliar territory, and I felt far from home. I had always envisioned a marriage like my parents’, so I was troubled that Charles lacked a sure belief. On the other hand, I hoped I might help restore him to faith … So I prayed, and I watched my admirer from a distance. Much later, Charles told me that he never gave up; he had believed I would someday say yes.
My first attempt to get work at Cimerwa failed, because an influential Hutu official – who resented Charles and knew of our friendship – forced me to leave Rwanda. As I crossed back into the Congo, he shook his fist. Several others joined him as he shouted insults behind me.
“You, Tutsi,” he yelled, “you will never, never, never find work in Rwanda!”
I spent the next bleak months with an aunt in Burundi. Frustration over my failure to get my dream job – and over my humiliating ejection from Bugarama – smoldered into anger. Deciding I hated the place and all the interfering Hutu there, I refused to even listen to Rwandan news anymore. I found employment as an elementary school teacher and tried to start building a future in Burundi. But life seemed empty, and I cried a lot.
In December 1986, I decided to visit my family in the Congo. I was homesick; my birthday was approaching, and so was Christmas.
When I arrived in Bwegera, my parents had astonishing news: Charles had looked them up. They had liked him. My heart leapt. If Charles had made that effort to meet my father and mother, he was obviously still thinking seriously about me. Also, he had told them that the Hutu official who expelled me from Rwanda had moved away.
Gathering my courage, I returned to Bugarama in the first weeks of 1987. Priscilla and Alphonse welcomed me back into their home. Charles welcomed me, too. When Cimerwa’s Chinese engineers threw a party, he brought me along, introducing me to everyone as his special friend.
Since I was eleven years younger than Charles, I felt shy around his fellow workers, who teased him about how young and beautiful I was. But when he and I were alone, I felt as comfortable as I did with my own brothers. Our friendship was spontaneous and natural, and we laughed a lot.
We resumed our walks, never forgetting to dip our hands into the hot spring. Once or twice a week, Charles took me out for grilled squash or banana. Sundays we often went for a drive in a Cimerwa car, occasionally making the ninety-minute trip to his childhood home. Here Charles introduced me to his parents, brothers, and sisters. Their compound was the largest in their village.
I loved Mukoma immediately and didn’t mind its unpaved roads or its lack of electricity and running water. Children’s voices, mingled with the lowing of cattle, made a fitting soundtrack for the pastoral scene of thatched huts scattered over grassy slopes, with Lake Kivu a shimmering backdrop.
If possible, it was even more beautiful at night. After the sun set over Congo’s distant mountains, a chorus of frogs and insects tuned their evening concert, fireflies flickered across the hillsides, and the sky filled with stars. The first evening, I noticed twinkling lights filling the valley as well.
“Charles!” I exclaimed. “Is there a town down there?”
“No, Denise,” he laughed. “You’ve forgotten Lake Kivu! That’s the fishing fleet. Every boat has its lamp, to attract the fish.”
As in my mother’s home area, further north along Kivu’s coast, most of Mukoma’s population was Tutsi. The few Hutu families here were entwined with Tutsi through marriage. The prejudice Charles had experienced in elementary school seemed to have evaporated. Neighbors supported each other, and everyone made their living from agriculture, with fishing on the side. Children helped adults in the fields. Mukoma’s red soil was fertile, yielding corn, sorghum, millet, beans, peanuts, onions, celery, and eggplant. Most families had sheep and goats as well as cows. Though not prosperous, theirs was a comfortable, harmonious existence.
As Charles and I walked or drove together, we discussed our hopes, dreams, strengths, and weaknesses. We became convinced that we were meant for each other, and we promised to stick together through good days and bad. After some months, he drove me to Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, to get the working visa I needed in order to stay and work in Rwanda.
We set our wedding date for December 26, 1987.
Charles had planned for us to be married in the Catholic Church, in keeping with his background. But as soon as he appeared at my parents’ home on Christmas Day, I knew something was wrong.
My levelheaded fiancé looked distraught. When I hurried to meet him, he said that the Hutu priest of Shangi Parish, to which Mukoma belonged, was refusing to marry us. The priest said it was because Charles was marrying a Protestant, yet he had known our intention for months and could have raised his objections before the last day.
“I bet it’s because we’re Tutsi,” Charles said. We never learned the priest’s reason, but he later went to prison for his part in the genocide against our people.
When Charles told my parents our predicament, they went straight to their own pastor. He assured us that everything would work out. After spending some hours talking with Charles, he baptized him. And the next day he married us.
Tateh Damaris, Tateh Ephraim, and many other relatives and friends from Rwanda and Burundi came to the Congo to attend our wedding. After the ceremony at my parents’ church, we all drove to Rwanda to celebrate at my in-laws’ compound in Mukoma. We had invited many more acquaintances to meet us there.
Frequently, Tutsi entering Rwanda from the Congo or Burundi would be refused entry; so I was apprehensive as our cortege approached the crossing into Rwanda – especially as some of our guests had no travel documents. Amazingly, none of us was detained. No one was even asked to display ID.
This was the same border at which I had been thrown out of Rwanda the previous year, so I felt like a queen when guards flung the barriers wide for my wedding party. This welcome seemed a Christmas wedding miracle, along with the sun that shone so brightly in usually wet December.
Mukoma villagers built a wedding canopy overlooking Lake Kivu, and my sisters-in-law cooked huge pots of rice over outdoor fires and prepared the traditional mixed grill of beef, lamb, and goat served with vegetables and onions. This was no small task. Since Charles and I both came from large families and had numerous friends, over four hundred wedding guests were pulling into Mukoma.
My bridegroom’s coworkers arrived, including the Chinese engineers he knew so well. Even Cimerwa’s three directors, who later became deadly enemies, joined our festivities that day. Everyone took part in the singing, and our guests drank as much banana beer and Fanta as they wished.
Blooming acacia and lemon trees and plantations of banana, avocado, coffee, and eucalyptus flowed down to the shore. There could be no lovelier setting for our wedding celebration, I was certain. The blue water sparkled below us, backed by Congo’s green mountains fading into misty distance. Charles and I were perfectly happy.
Fortunately we had no inkling that our marriage would last only seven years – or that we would live together for less than three.
IN
