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Out of Madness, A Matriarchy
First, let me say-- the title is misleading and drives me nuts. Rwanda is not a "Matriarchy"
But what these women endured to rise again and fight for their culture is a story worth telling. I've seen a couple of documentaries, but this is well worth the read
The 1994 genocide, one of the worst mass slaughters in recorded history, was triggered by the assassination of Rwanda's Hutu president, after a lengthy civil war between the Hutu-led government and the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front. It was a deliberate effort to eliminate the country's Tutsi "problem"; books about Hitler and the Holocaust, and lists of potential victims, were later discovered in the offices of top government officials. In all, at least 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus died.
But it isn't just numbers that set the genocide apart from other horrors of the late 20th century. The ferocity and concentration of the killing were unprecedented, as was its intimate methodology. The murderers were neighbors, relatives, teachers, doctors, even nuns and priests, and they killed not with machine guns or gas chambers, but with machetes, clubs, knives, and their bare hands. So many men were killed that Rwanda was left overwhelmingly female and became a nation of traumatized widows, orphans, and mothers of murdered children. Even today, the population remains 60 percent female.
Among the most nefarious tools of the genocide was a planned mass sexual assault on Tutsi women, with Hutu officials encouraging HIV-positive soldiers to take part in gang rapes. The United Nations has estimated that at least 250,000 women were raped, most of them repeatedly and over the course of weeks or months. (Some women we met remember being raped up to five times every day for 10 weeks.) Most of those women were killed afterward, but others were purposely kept alive to give birth to a population of fatherless "un-Tutsi." According to one study by AVEGA, an association of genocide widows, 70 percent of women who survived the rapes -- and many of their children -- now have AIDS.
The genocide lasted three months, from April to June of 1994. It left Rwanda in physical ruins, completely destroying the country's political, economic, and social structures. In a culture that historically prohibited its female population from performing the most rudimentary chores -- from climbing on roofs to milking cows -- women were now forced to take on tasks that had previously been out of reach. The result has been an unplanned -- if not inadvertent -- movement of female empowerment driven by national necessity. Traveling in Rwanda for three months last year, we found women heading households and businesses, serving as mayors and assuming cabinet positions. Rwanda's Parliament is now 25 percent female, by far the highest proportion of women in national leadership in the world outside Scandinavia and nearly double the share of women in the U.S. Congress. "Men think this is a revolution," says Angelique Kanyange, a student leader at Rwanda's national university. "It's not a revolution; it's a development strategy."
But it isn't just numbers that set the genocide apart from other horrors of the late 20th century. The ferocity and concentration of the killing were unprecedented, as was its intimate methodology. The murderers were neighbors, relatives, teachers, doctors, even nuns and priests, and they killed not with machine guns or gas chambers, but with machetes, clubs, knives, and their bare hands. So many men were killed that Rwanda was left overwhelmingly female and became a nation of traumatized widows, orphans, and mothers of murdered children. Even today, the population remains 60 percent female.
Among the most nefarious tools of the genocide was a planned mass sexual assault on Tutsi women, with Hutu officials encouraging HIV-positive soldiers to take part in gang rapes. The United Nations has estimated that at least 250,000 women were raped, most of them repeatedly and over the course of weeks or months. (Some women we met remember being raped up to five times every day for 10 weeks.) Most of those women were killed afterward, but others were purposely kept alive to give birth to a population of fatherless "un-Tutsi." According to one study by AVEGA, an association of genocide widows, 70 percent of women who survived the rapes -- and many of their children -- now have AIDS.
The genocide lasted three months, from April to June of 1994. It left Rwanda in physical ruins, completely destroying the country's political, economic, and social structures. In a culture that historically prohibited its female population from performing the most rudimentary chores -- from climbing on roofs to milking cows -- women were now forced to take on tasks that had previously been out of reach. The result has been an unplanned -- if not inadvertent -- movement of female empowerment driven by national necessity. Traveling in Rwanda for three months last year, we found women heading households and businesses, serving as mayors and assuming cabinet positions. Rwanda's Parliament is now 25 percent female, by far the highest proportion of women in national leadership in the world outside Scandinavia and nearly double the share of women in the U.S. Congress. "Men think this is a revolution," says Angelique Kanyange, a student leader at Rwanda's national university. "It's not a revolution; it's a development strategy."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/01/out-madness-matriarchy