The journey of a rwnadan woman with the person who killed her husband and child in the genocide that had occured in the year 1994. The story explains us how a woman named Jeannette is leading her life with coffee plantations, and employed people who have killed her family. She says that the uneasy partnership is paying off, and the coffee beans they produce are sold both in the country and in US. Jeannette’s explanation of how she can stand to work alongside such men is utterly pragmatic. When asked she says “The only solution was to go together with my countrymen, there was no alternative”.
The story goes as below:
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It started Sunday, April 10, 1994, when her husband ran to find her and declared, “The killings have started.” The two of them, together with their 4-month-old baby, eventually fled into the courtyard of a medical clinic in town. Trapped with about 300 others, they came under attack, she says, by extremist Hutus who lobbed grenades into the courtyard. The trio survived. But they slept atop dead bodies for several days.
When a rainstorm came, the killers finally left. Her family ran. As they fled through town, Hutu women and children would shout and point, she says, “as if there was an animal.” They were calling for killers to catch her family.
After hiding with a sympathetic Hutu relative for a few days, she and her husband decided to split up to try to avoid detection. Jeannette headed back to town with her baby. But a Hutu gang intercepted her, beat her and raped her. She fell unconscious. Waking up after a few hours, she says, “I found the child next to me, dead.”
When she later discovered her husband’s body, she says, it was being eaten by dogs.
Finally, she gave up: “I waited for someone to come and kill me.” But when a gang of Hutus found her, the leader declared, “It’s bad luck to kill someone who’s almost dead. She has no husband and no child. She’s not going to survive.” They left her.
But for weeks she did survive, scrounging for roots and fruits in a ravine near her family’s coffee farm. Finally, in July, now-President Paul Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated rebels arrived and saved her and others. She soon discovered that only a handful of her family members had made it: “All of a sudden, everything was gone.”
In retelling the horrific story today, Jeannette seems, outwardly at least, calm. She doesn’t shed any tears. But that, she explains, is a choice. “When you are crying, the killers are feeling proud,” she says in a low, defiant tone. Besides, with most of her family gone, “I have no one to cry with.”
For five years after the genocide, Jeannette rarely spoke. She had few people to talk to and little to say. She avoided the killers, who still lived in town. Afraid of reprisals, they avoided her, too.
But by 1999, a group of neighbors had decided to start a coffee cooperative. For decades, local coffee farmers had sold raw beans to middlemen at low prices. Now the cooperative wanted to help farmers keep more of the profits.
Jeannette decided the time was right to join the Abahuzamugambi cooperative. She had inherited her dead relatives’ coffee farms, and she was looking for help in making the fields productive and profitable. Yet her decision was based on more than money. After five years of isolation, “I thought that coffee-growing could connect me to other people,” she says. It was also a way of honoring her family, which had grown coffee for generations: “Coffee can help me remember the relatives.”
Some Tutsis wouldn’t join the cooperative — whose name roughly means “growing together” — because it included Hutu killers. But for Jeannette, it was a lifesaver. If it hadn’t come along, she says, “I would have gone mad.”
Soon she had business relationships with people who killed her family members. Then, to her surprise, in cooperative meetings, bits of truth would emerge about what had happened in 1994. Jeannette says several people — both Hutus and Tutsis — told her Anastaz was part of a group that had killed her husband. At first, “If I had a gun, yes, I would have killed him,” she says. But, living on her own, she feared reprisals: “I had no one to protect me.”
As years passed, the cooperative prospered — linking into the $20 billion global “specialty coffee” market, which includes roasters like Starbucks. The cooperative now even sells its own brand — “Maraba Bourbon” — at retail stores in Britain.
Over the years, Jeannette began to separate killers’ past deeds from their current contributions. “This doesn’t change the emotions,” she explains, “but it does help me interact” with them. Through the cooperative, she says: “We’ve been building a relationship that changed our lives. We ended up reconciling in a way we didn’t know.”
A simple handshake says volumes.
Jeannette is standing outside Anastaz’s house on a rutted dirt road. Before leaving, she walks over to say goodbye, extending her hand. But she doesn’t face him directly — or look him in the eyes.
He, however, faces her and carefully takes her hand in both of his. Expressions of regret and pain flash across his face. After an awkward moment, she manages a smile and steps away.
Because of what he did, she says later, “I feel so bad to shake hands with that man.” Yet, even she says his murderous acts weren’t entirely his fault.
“I have to shake hands with this man, because such people were innocent. It wasn’t their will,” she says. “It was an ideology raised by the government.”
Despite the government’s promises of wealth, she observes, he’s still mired in poverty: “He looted many properties, but he’s still poor.” With a tone of indignation, she adds, “I mean, can you imagine? He lives with rabbits.”
Jeannette, meanwhile, has become increasingly prosperous. She lives in a tidy three-room house in a wealthier area.
In the end, the proximity of victims and killers in this crowded country — along with the strong hand of government preventing further mass violence — has forced a grudging, practical reconciliation. On certain hillsides, coffee has become an enabler for this fragile unity.
And, for Jeannette, the initial economic pragmatism has evolved into a budding empathy she might have once thought impossible. Still referring to his poverty, she says simply, “I have to employ him. I know how he lives.”